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Open conversations regarding sexuality education and gender and sexual diversity with young children in early childhood education settings are still highly constrained. Educators report lacking professional training and fearing parental and community pushback when explicitly addressing these topics in their professional practices. As such, gender and sexual diversity and conversations of bodily development are left silenced and, when addressed, filtered through heteronormative and cisnormative frameworks. Through a Foucauldian post-structural lens, this article analyses data from open-ended qualitative questions in a previous research study regarding early childhood educators' perceptions on discussing the development of sexuality in early learning settings in an Ontario, Canada context. Through this Foucauldian post-structural analysis, the authors discuss forms of surveillance and regulation that early childhood educators experience in early learning settings regarding the open discussion of gender and sexuality. The authors explore how both the lack of explicit curricula addressing gender and sexuality in the early years in Ontario and taken-for-granted notions of developmentally appropriate practice, childhood innocence, and the gender binary – employed in discourses of sexuality education in the early years – regulate early childhood educators' professional practices. The authors provide recommendations which critique the developmentalist logics – specifically, normative development – that are used to silence non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identities in the early years, while articulating the need for explicit curricula for educators in the early years regarding gender and sexuality in young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the gendered division of household work in western political economies often neglects its emotional dimensions. This conceptual paper draws on concepts of emotion work and feminist care ethics to explore gendered and intersecting divisions of emotions and emotional work in couple relationships and their implications for couple therapy. Although emotion work has been studied in workplace settings, less attention has been paid to inequalities in the privatized realm of interpersonal relationships, including romantic and filial ones. Women and feminine partners' culturally presumed expertise in emotions typically positions them as carrying primary responsibility for managing emotions in intimate relationships. Couple therapy is an important site of interaction that can both support and, potentially, disrupt the invisibility and gendering of emotion work in intimate relationships, thus shedding light on recurring patterns of women's subordination and exploitation. We conclude by advancing suggestions for addressing gendered and intersectional dimensions of emotion work in therapy practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the regulation of both femininity and fatness, dominant norms in queer communities construct fatness and femininity as excessive, desexualised/hypersexualised, and undeserving of sexual desire, pleasure, and care. Care, as a feminine ethical stance emphasising relationality and interdependency, is not typically associated with fucking, yet is critical in sex therapeutic work and interventions. In this article, we contend that fat scholarship, femme theory, and care ethics offer productive intersections in terms of crafting an ethic of care in sex therapy practice and activism for fat bodies of all genders. Using the example of the Fat Fuckers workshop developed in Ontario, Canada, offered internationally and online, this article describes how sex therapeutic work that combines fat activism, care, community building and relationality works at the intersections of femme theory, fat studies, and care ethics. This article combines theory with praxis by describing the Fat Fuckers workshop as a form of fat activism that simultaneously promotes fat identification and care for fat bodies in sex therapy while illustrating a nuanced form of feminine relationality for fat subjects and sexualities. Through this, practical tips are described for practitioners (e.g. sex therapists, activists and sex workers) with theoretical implications for sexuality scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home economics is a diverse helping field that includes the areas of child development and education, nutrition, cooking, and the dietetics profession. Historically, these fields have been the domain of heterosexual cisgender women, with research and discussions of queerness limited. In this article, using queer methodologies and a queer autobiographical writing approach, we explore our experiences as two queer individuals who teach in disciplines within home economics, with the intent of cultivating more space for queerness within the fields of early childhood education and dietetics. We created common themes of queer subjectivities and queer knowledges from our autobiographical writing. In the queer subjectivities theme, we analyze the regulation and surveillance of masculinities and queer subjectivities. In the queer knowledges theme, we explore issues of queer pedagogies and practices within teaching. Recommendations for creating queer potentialities that disrupt normative notions of care that silence queer subjectivities and knowledges within home economics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With no standardized approach to sexuality education among Canada's 13 provinces and territories and the various curricula focusing on neurotypical and non-disabled children, educators have insufficient instruction and lack appropriate training on how to address sexuality education for children and youth with disabilities, particularly children and youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This article provides the current context of sexuality education for children and youth with ASD in Canadian schools and guidance for more inclusive approaches with attention to three important areas: puberty, relationships, and gender and sexual diversity. Recommendations are offered to support more inclusive approaches to sexuality education, acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach is insufficient for children and youth with ASD. The recommendations focus on three goals: (a) moving beyond simple knowledge-based approaches to include skill-building; (b) including parents, autistic voices, and advocates in planning and ongoing conversations; and (c) providing supports for educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the depiction of autism in The Boy on the Bridge, a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, horror, fiction novel to critically deconstruct the representation of autism specifically related to 15-year-old science prodigy Stephen Greaves. Using a critical content analysis approach, three relevant constructs were identified with depictions including savant/super-crip, non-human othering, and psycho-emotional disablism. Each of these areas is discussed related to the current literature on disability, generally, and autism, more specifically. This analysis demonstrates that cultural understandings of disability are dominated by the medical model, and continue to stigmatize and pathologize while excluding positive social identities. Consideration of the potential damaging aspects of literature portrayals of autism in fictional works is needed to move the autism genre forward in a humanizing and inclusive manner. This study brings awareness to some assumptions around disability by pulling apart one way that autism is presented for public understanding. Even fictional stories can play a role in awareness and understanding of disability such as knowing that autistic people can also be gifted. Notions such as savantism are presented and discussed to help readers understand the various layers in disability. Disability can be presented positively and/or negatively in popular media in both obvious and subtle ways. It is up to readers and viewers to carefully consider how information on disability from popular media might be biased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examines the experiences of gay, bisexual, two-spirit and other men who have sex with men (GB2M) who use networking applications and their engagements with online sexual health outreach workers disseminating healthcare information through these digital spaces. The iCruise study was a longitudinal mixed-methods study across Ontario, Canada which collected data on online sexual health information seeking behaviors. Results offer insight into differences in information seeking behaviors among diverse groups of queer men. Implications for the dissemination of health information based on the results of information seeking patterns is discussed as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]