Venue: Larry Saha Room (HA2175)

Prophylactic sexuality education, “young people” and sexual futures

Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen

The principal focus of sexuality education continues to be prophylactic – designed to prevent harm or disease. Adults and young people associate sexuality education with prevention – prevention of unintended pregnancy; gender based violence; child abuse; homophobia; HIV, and, sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This prophylactic focus has a long history which is reinforced by chrononormative understandings of young people and sexuality. These temporal norms, reinforced by the state, profess that young people need to follow certain scripts in relation to sex, sexuality and gender. In this discussion of young people and sexuality education the focus is on different ways of imagining young people’s sexual futures. How can sexuality education work with young people to imagine sexual futures outside the constraints of this emphasis on prophylactics? How can sexuality education work with young people to imagine different types of sexual futures? Inspired by Elisabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, (2010: xv) my focus is on futurities which are ‘out of synch with state-sponsored narratives of belonging and becoming’…and ‘speculating futures’ in ways that counter the common sense of the ‘present tense’ of young people and sexuality education.

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