Search

When we began to conceptualise the introduction to this themed symposium in Sex Education journal our initial instinct was fairly defensive. This came from, upon discussion and reflection, a bit of...

In this article, we outline why it is so important to include comprehensive gender and sexual identity questions in the census as well as several considerations that ought to be addressed in the course of including such questions.

In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms’ responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which the complexities of sexuality and desire are obscured in order to cultivate notions of a ‘good’ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer sexual citizen. However, despite normative work of classification seeking to distinguish between sexuality and sex, we argue that the high-profile failures of these classification systems create the conditions for users to draw attention to, rather than firm, these messy boundaries.

Australia is a culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse country, however, learning about the religious dimensions of this superdiversity is inadequately reflected in the national school c...

Gender- and sexually diverse youth are often represented in popular discourses through concepts of movement and mobility. Conceptual stories of LGBTQ youth transitions to adulthood in particular are marked by narratives of movement from regional (rural and/or small towns) to major urban areas. Although not wholly outside lived experience, a cultural myth that portrays the experience of gender- and sexually diverse young people entering into 'adulthood' via such mobility continues to circulate in scholarship, popular media, personal accounts of coming out, support resources and self-help guidance documents. This paper draws on a recent study of gender and sexual diversity, support and belonging to examine instances of LGBTQ youth mobility in relation to participant interviews and focus groups undertaken in an Australian project examining two generations of sexually diverse subjects' views on growing up, support and belonging. Participants differed generationally in how they experienced mobility from regional to urban settings, demonstrating that contemporary real-world accounts of such mobility are complex, nuanced and diverse and that the felt 'expectation' that one should migrate to a city in order to live a full gender- or sexually diverse life has waned among young people in the more recent generation.

Background Comprehensive data on gender and sexual identity is critical for the planning and delivery of health, education, and social support services. This paper examines ways in which sexual and gender diverse populations are being counted in research, with a view to informing discussions about how to represent these populations in future research. Aims To examine approaches used for the collection of data from sexual and gender diverse populations in Australia. Data and methods We reviewed nine examples of large national surveys conducted in Australia over the past ten years and compared the approaches used for collecting data on gender and sexual identity. Results A diversity of approaches and a range of limitations were identified in how these diverse populations are counted. The proportions of survey respondents across sex, gender and sexual identity categories, and the types of categories, were also found to vary across studies. Conclusions There is currently no consistent approach for collecting data involving sexual and gender diverse populations in Australia despite the need for large-scale surveys that reflect sexual and gender diversity. This paper identifies conceptual and methodological questions for consideration when planning how to capture diversity related to gender and sexual identity.

This article reflects on the concept of ‘queer generations’ as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts ‘queer’ and ‘generations’ in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main theoretical tension that lies at the heart of this article is how to take seriously the shared experience of growing up LGBT without insisting on a uniform narrative that is inherent to it. Drawing on an archival fragment from an HIV campaign produced in Australia and distributed in the 1990s and targeted at young gay and bisexual men, we consider the shifting conditions through which visibility has featured as a key problem for the deployment of sexual citizenship. This archival fragment is valuable because of the way that it problematizes the in/out, visible/invisible, gay/straight binaries that have dogged attempts to grapple with the at once individual and collective experience of growing up LGBT. The concept of ‘queer generations’ suggests critical insights into the limits and affordances of the production of generations as containers for generalized experience.

This article argues that race and class are central aspects of sexual citizenship in a Australia. It does so by investigating representations of heterosexuality that were produced and circulated du...

peer-reviewed Ireland is a majority-Catholic country that has, in recent times, been held up as a model of sexual progress internationally. We employ the term Marriage Equality Time (MET) to signify the tensions related to temporality, sexuality and children that emerged as Marriage Equality (ME) was introduced in Ireland. Drawing on a study with six primary schools during the ME referendum, this article captures MET in its emergent state, exploring how parents, teachers and principals were processing what ME might mean for children and schools. This analysis of MET illustrates how it mediates imaginaries of childhood innocence, sexuality and the nation-state. peer-reviewed

The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education draws together a vibrant collection of writings from around the globe that highlight key debates and signal new developments in the field of critical sexuality education studies (Plummer 2008). A volume of over 900 pages and 32 contributions, involving 56 sexuality researchers, it is one of the first handbooks to attempt such an international overview focused specifically on sexuality education. Our aim has been to assemble contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, across a wide breadth of regional, national, and transnational contexts. We have sought to offer diverse and compelling accounts of how sexuality education is conceptualised, practised, politicised, regulated, struggled over, reconfigured, and hoped for. Imperative to this delineation of the field has been capturing the pulsating richness of the landscape of sexuality education research internationally.The handbook is structured into four parts, curated by leading scholars in the field of critical sexualities studies. The handbook is structured into four parts, curated by leading scholars in the field of critical sexualities studies; Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education (Part I), Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media and Communication Technologies (Part II), Sexualities Education in Schools (Part II) and Re-animating what else sexuality education research can do, be and become (Part IV). Importantly, this handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education; such an approach narrows the scope of the field. Instead, this text critically delineates the field to date, while sketching innovative conceptual and pedagogical possibilities for the future.

The Reverend Debra Haffner, a former CEO of SIECUS, and the Director of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing objects to the The National Sexuality Education Standards for US Public Schools (2012) published by The Guttmacher Institute in the United States. Haffner questions these standards because they fail to account for values and religious influences on sexuality education and religion. The absence of explicit references to religion and values in such standards reflect longstanding debates about the place of religion within secular states, and about the privatisation of religion and belief. These debates also impact perceptions about the role of religion in sexuality education and shape debates about the place of reason and science in sexuality education. Haffner’s theological commitment to comprehensive sexuality education is accompanied by an expressed desire for a values-based framework for sexuality education. Unlike Haffner, I have no theological commitments in relation to sexuality education provision. However, I have come to question progressive sexuality education standards that do not explicitly engage with questions of faith, belief and their relationship to values. What are the grounds for this separation? Are there ways in which religion and values can be usefully incorporated in progressive sexuality education? Should such topics be left behind in the production of a progressive sexuality education?