Mobilizing Femme Pedagogy in Sexuality Education in New Brunswick, Canada

What might femme pedagogy offer to sexuality education? Inspired by Jessica Fields's (2023) observation that femme pedagogies create intellectual, powerful, and intimate possibilities marked by love and care, we theorize how a femme pedagogy might be used to disrupt the cis-heteronormative, deficit spaces of conventional sexuality education. Centrally, we expand this pedagogy through four key concepts that routinely appear in our own sexuality research and teaching as two queer femmes: bodies, desire, joy, and love and care. In our analysis, we incorporate visual data we created alongside pre-service teachers who we taught in the course Comprehensive Sexuality Education Methods at a university in New Brunswick, Canada in 2023. We describe how art production informs what femme pedagogy looks like in our own sexuality education practice. We suggest that femme pedagogy can be used to mobilize and highlight queer sexualities in sensuous, imaginative, and creative ways--calling upon us to reconsider what sexuality education could be otherwise.