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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.

This article provides a queer theoretical reflection on the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer (LGQ) youth as subjects of policy attention in Australia in the late twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific forms of social, bureaucratic, and organizational recognition have given shape to LGQ youth as categorical policy objects. To this end, this article critically interrogates social policy related to the provision of funding for LGQ youth support during the 1980s and 1990s in two Australian states: New South Wales and Western Australia. More specifically, it focuses on some of the ways in which LGQ youth have been discursively shaped and materially supported in three different organizations, two of which continue to be strongly associated with support of LGQ youth in Australia. This study of the emergence of these organizations, resourced by three different sectors-the state, the church, and the LGQ community itself-necessarily draws on ephemeral resources, reflecting the conditions of possibility in which this work was being enacted. We conclude with an analysis of the necessity for situating policy recognitions within specific contexts to examine the implications for LGQ youth as the subjects such recognitions simultaneously seek to constitute and serve.

Large-scale population studies surveying young people in relation to their worldviews have tended to frame their identities in a fixed and limited capacity while also treating the topics of religio...

Drawing on findings from a study of two social generations of gender and sexuality diverse Australians, this paper offers a critical analysis of expectations and experiences of inclusive health car...

Young men are underrepresented in Australian research on family formation, especially young men who are nonmarital fathers, and are not university educated. In this pilot project, an interdisciplinary research team (demography, sociology, and gender studies) based in Australia set out to design an approach that would engage this particular group of young men on the topic of family formation. We decided to employ a nontraditional research method (which we call scripts) in order to engage young men indirectly on this sensitive issue. This article does not report on what we found; rather, our focus is on gender dynamics involving the research team’s imaginings of masculinity in the research process. We highlight and interrogate the gendered and heteronormative assumptions we made in the research design, anticipating that our experience can inform future research on masculinity and family formation.

Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approa...

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...

Non-normative genders and sexualities are often framed in research and popular discourse in terms of difference. This descriptor not only signals their departure from social norms, it also promotes the assumption that people who do not identify with traditional binary categories perceive themselves as different, and that their gender or sexuality is the core reason for this. This notion of difference seems particularly ripe for interrogation at a time when traditional categories of gender and sexuality are being disrupted by a burgeoning catalogue of non-binary and hyper-specific identity labels among young people on social network sites and elsewhere. What are we to make of difference in this emergent landscape? We explore this question, drawing on findings from a recent qualitative study of two social generations of Australians who do not identify heteronormatively. Our analysis suggests that the notion of sexuality and gender difference as a coherent basis for identity was far from straightforward in either generation, even though difference figured in notably divergent ways in the two groups. We consider what these tensions around difference might mean for the contemporary politics of gender and sexual identity categories.

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.

In Australia, school uniforms are prevalent in both government and private schools. Uniforms as measurements of power are hotly contested, and gendered uniforms are of educational interest and concern. School-dress wearing materializes meanings in things, making itself intelligible to other parts of the world. Entanglements, despite appearances, are not sedimentary, and the people are “attentive to and responsive/responsible to, the specificity of material entanglements in their agential becoming”. The school-dress has been popularly viewed and critiqued as a cause of a simple material precariousness that limits the body of the wearer within a physical boundary. The dress is infused with unspoken power relations that evoke shame/interest and in/exclusion—as inequity or bodies that do matter. However, the people think that teachers’ and schools’ orientations to dresses, codes of dress-wearing, and their enforcement of policies related to those codes matter a lot.

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...

This article provides a queer theoretical reflection on the emergence of lesbian, gay, and queer (LGQ) youth as subjects of policy attention in Australia in the late twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which specific forms of social, bureaucratic, and organizational recognition have given shape to LGQ youth as categorical policy objects. To this end, this article critically interrogates social policy related to the provision of funding for LGQ youth support during the 1980s and 1990s in two Australian states: New South Wales and Western Australia. More specifically, it focuses on some of the ways in which LGQ youth have been discursively shaped and materially supported in three different organizations, two of which continue to be strongly associated with support of LGQ youth in Australia. This study of the emergence of these organizations, resourced by three different sectors-the state, the church, and the LGQ community itself-necessarily draws on ephemeral resources, reflecting the conditions of possibility in which this work was being enacted. We conclude with an analysis of the necessity for situating policy recognitions within specific contexts to examine the implications for LGQ youth as the subjects such recognitions simultaneously seek to constitute and serve.

In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and inclusivity in educational settings. The paper discusses the relationship between progress and temporality in its historical setting within Australian LGBTQ political history. We investigate three angles in which progress has been articulated in the Safe Schools debates: (1) disruptions to support as political setback to progress; (2) the view that safe support is necessary for the progress of LGBTQ ‘vulnerable’ youth within ‘developmental stages’; (c) the framing by conservative commentators that LGBTQ support curricula is a form of ‘progressive politics’ ...

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

In this chapter we outline the emerging, in process structuring, of a doctoral study focusing on girls’ negotiation of the experience of schooling in Australian secondary schools. This study incorporated a re/active documentary film (Wolfe 2017a) and interview clips as data creation with a written thesis. It applied Karen Barad’s new materialist theory, agential realism, as a ontoepistemological framework.

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.

Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: The No Outsiders Project is a book that reflects on a research project based in primary schools and funded by The Economic and Social Research Council of the UK. This text is accompanied by another practice-focused work: Undoing Homophobia in Primary Schools. The project was led by Elizabeth Atkinson and Renee DePalma in collaboration with researchers at the University of Exeter and the Institute of Education (University of London) and school and community based educators. Together, the team developed strategies and resources to address lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality in their primary education settings. An overarching aim of the project, according to an associated website (www.nooutsiders.sunderland.ac.uk), is “to create school environments and communities where no-one is marginalized because of their sexual orientation or gender expression.”

This article engages contemporary debates about the notion of secularism, outside of the field of education. I draw on these debates to consider how ‘progressives’ in sex education in the USA draw on and reinscribe religious/secular divides. I will consider the affinities, prejudices and attachments of scholars who advocate a secular worldview, in the context of sex education, and I will consider some of the consequences that ensue from this way of seeing. My aim is to demonstrate how the notion of secularism works to frame debates within the field of sex education.

There is a common impulse within academic research on sexuality education to draw on the notion of moral panic in order to better understand ‘unreasonable’ and emotional opposition to the implementation of sexuality education programs. The aim of this article is to interrogate this tendency to classify religious opposition to the sexuality education curriculum as suggestive of a ‘moral panic’. I begin with a brief discussion of how the notion of ‘moral panic’ is commonly used in academic and popular discourse, and proceed to a discussion of ‘moral panic’ in the field of sexuality education, specifically focusing on the work of US researcher Janice Irvine. I also consider some research on recent South Australian controversies related to sexuality education in schools. Finally, I consider the attribution of ‘moral panic’ in accounting for religious opposition to sexuality education as a secular formation.

This paper pursues issues of pedagogy, place and queer phenomenology in the context of what might be meant by the term ‘after‐queer’ or ‘what falls outside queer’ as we currently theorise, practice and locate queer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s account of how bodies become oriented by the ways in which they take up time and space, this paper investigates how bodies become oriented within and around the field of a television series that centres Indigenous terms and orientations and thereby, still further, problematises the directions and orientations of desire. The paper explores the narrative and queer and other couplings of an Australian tele‐series, The Circuit. It raises issues of audience, public pedagogy and we refer to guestbook discussion as we strive to foreground a methodology for working with sexuality and race that recognises and disturbs in order to read sexual and racial orientations as mixed and unfixed orientations.

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers’ visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.

Rasmussen, Cover, Aggleton and Marshall provide a critical examination of sexual citizenship, by exploring key conceptual ideas that often underpin commonplace understandings of sexuality, citizenship and social justice, and trying to unsettle them. The chapter then explores how curriculum reform intersects with debates about sexual citizenship and social justice in education. The authors then turn to some of the critiques of educational reforms associated with citizenship discourses in the area of disability, religion and what Quinn and Meiners term ‘gay wins’. The chapter concludes with some provocations for future research related to sexuality education, education and belonging that purposefully eschews ‘citizenship’.