The Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education

Pleasure Bound

Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Kathleen Quinlivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135085629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

Pleasure and desire have been important components of the vision for sexuality education for over 20 years. This book argues that there has been a lack of scrutiny over the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. In this volume, key researchers in the field consider how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally. They argue that sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, and examine how these contexts have shaped the development of pleasure's inclusion in such programs. Via such discussions, this volume incites a re-configuration of thought regarding sexuality education's approach to pleasure and desire.

1 Introduction

Putting Pleasure Under Pressure

Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen, and Kathleen Quinlivan

This is a book about pleasure. It is concerned with how pleasure has been conceptualised as part of a progressive vision for sexuality education over the last twenty years in countries like the US, England, Australia, and New Zealand. This trend was inspired by Michelle Fine’s (1988) seminal article in Harvard Educational Review entitled, ‘Sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire’. Fine demonstrated that silences around pleasure and desire at school formed part of an assemblage of officially sanctioned discourses that denied female sexuality. Within the realms of sexuality education research, this work opened spaces to consider what possibilities might be engendered by including desire and pleasure officially in the curriculum.

As the chapters in this collection attest, this has been a long conversation, voiced predominately by feminist scholars who, at certain moments, have taken stock of its developments. One such moment was a special feature of Feminism & Psychology in 2005, marking the fifteenth anniversary of Fine’s publication (Tolman, 2005). Drawing on writing around adolescent female sexuality largely from psychology, it canvassed current avenues of research, theory, and practice. Contributors considered, “In what arenas do we still encounter a roaring silence about female adolescent girls’ sexual desire?” (Tolman, 2005, p. 6). The conclusion was perhaps less optimistic than some in the field had hoped. Adolescent female desire was identified as remaining largely missing from ‘sex education’ and in those spaces where it was present, like the media, conceptualised as ‘distorted’ via commodification and neo-liberal individualism (Fine, 2005; Harris, 2005).

This book signifies a pause in this on-going conversation. This time, the site of refl ection is ‘sexuality education’ and those engaging in the conversation are drawn from diverse disciplinary areas including education, psychology, public health, sociology, and political studies. As a point of continuity with the 2005 special feature, the current book considers how discourses related to pleasure and desire have been taken up internationally by researchers sympathetic to Fine’s original observations. There is also, however, a discernible change in the tenor of this collection’s discussion. It was nascent in 2005, when many of our colleagues lamented the real gains the pursuit of desire and pleasure has afforded possibilities for young women’s sexualities. Experiencing a sense of futility with answers to questions about how far we have advanced with this discussion, this collection orients us towards a different question. It is a question which implies an unravelling of our aims in the pursuit of pleasure and desire themselves (Talburt, 2009). This question is not future focused (Edelman, 2004) but manifests a pause that opens space to consider the premises upon which we have pursued pleasure and desire in sexuality education. In the current collection, the aim is to interrogate the politics of pleasure in sexuality programmes. Some might interpret this task as inviting a turn to a new direction.

The idea for this collection emerges from our location as three critical sexualities scholars who have excitedly borne witness to the birth of ‘a missing discourse of desire’ and, through our own research, joined this conversation. We argue that the value of researching and talking about pleasure and desire has become increasingly accepted as ‘a good’ within sexuality research. In taking up the gauntlet of Fine’s seminal work, emphasis has been placed on the value of creating more space in the curriculum to talk about pleasure and desire in ways that are meaningful and relevant to young people (Bay-Cheng & Robinson, 2009; Beasley, 2008; Harrison, Hillier, & Walsh, 1996; Kiely, 2005; Philpott, Knerr, & Boydell, 2006; Tolman, 2002). Our own previous writings have contributed to this discussion (Allen, 2001; Quinlivan, 2004; Rasmussen, 2004). Each of the chapters in the current collection also in some way continues this line of thought. For example, Hirst, Ingham, Quinlivan, and Sankadjar’s chapters specifically grapple with how discussions of pleasure might be configured within sexuality programmes. An additional dimension of analysis is to illuminate, rather than obscure, the politics that informs such inclusions. In this vein, the collection is premised on the idea that pleasure and desire is always political within the context of sexuality education. However, with the previous exception of Halstead and Reiss (2003), there has been a lack of scrutiny of the political motivations that underpin research supportive of pleasure and desire within comprehensive sexuality education. This collection aims to acknowledge and interrogate the politics which underpin pleasure’s inclusion.

THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE

Advocates of pleasure’s inclusion in sexuality education have come to realise that simply making space in the curriculum is not enough. While this insertion might be a political act, until now there has only been limited scrutiny of how it is political. Sexuality education is clearly shaped by specific cultural and political contexts, all of which have implications for how pleasure is ‘put to work’ (Talburt, 2009). This book examines how these contexts have shaped our thinking about pleasure and sexuality education with a view to considering how this field of research has developed in different socio-political contexts. Each of the contributing chapters implicitly and explicitly exhibits particular disciplinary and political investments in pleasure and desire. By excavating the politics of our arguments about desire and pleasure, this book attempts to expand dialogue about pleasure with a view to provoking different sorts of conversations about it in sexuality education. The idea is to remove our thinking from the confines of ‘should pleasure be included and how can it be included’, to ‘how does the politics of pleasure’s incorporation in sexuality education have implications for what we believe it can do’?

It seems particularly important to consider the politics of pleasure given its implication in debates around ‘sexualisation’ (Attwood & Smith, 2011) and ‘pornification’ (Paasonen, Nikunen, & Saarenmaa, 2007) presently enjoying currency. These debates cohere around what some have conceptualised as a series of “international governmental and media moral panics over the commodification of the ‘prematurely’ sexualised girl (Albury & Lumby, 2010) and a contemporary culture in which a ‘porno-aesthetic’ has become mainstream (Gill, 2009)” (cited in Renold & Ringrose, 2011, pp. 389–390). Pleasure and desire are implicated here, in that, girls are no longer seen as ‘missing’ them but their display in public forums is now both ‘loud’ and ‘caricatured’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2011). Examples of such display are equated with ‘tween’ girls wearing padded bras, g-string underwear, and playboy bunny-branded clothing (Levy, 2005). In these instances, girls have been designated as prematurely sexual with pleasures and desires understood as commodified by corporate capitalism. This has led to a paradoxical situation where girls’ desire and pleasure are seen to be both everywhere and nowhere (Harris, 2005). Such a conceptualisation implies that there is somehow a pure, unadulterated (maybe even morally superior) desire and pleasure for girls, which are still almost nowhere (see Harris, 2005 for exceptions) and pornified and commodified versions, which exist everywhere (Allen, 2013).

Any consideration of pleasure in sexuality education cannot escape the current reach of discourses of sexualisation and pornification. For those who believe pleasure has no place in programmes, such discourses may be mobilised as argument against its inclusion. Conceptualising pleasure and desire as part of sexuality education may, for instance, be seen as of ering further evidence of girls’ premature ‘sexualisation’ and ‘pornification’. This is a contemporary reconfiguration of an enduring argument against school-based sexuality education itself. This argument maintains that sexuality education encourages young people to engage in sexual activity earlier than they would have, had they not been exposed to it (Kirby, 1999). The interrogation of pleasure in this collection, in terms of questioning its inclusion as an inherent ‘good’, may look like an argument not to include it in programmes. Contributors such as Lamb, Macleod and Vincent, Rasmussen, Allen, and McClelland and Fine, not only acknowledge the inclusion of pleasure is political, but interrogate these politics. The intention is not to question pleasure’s politics so as to simply dismiss its inclusion, but to deconstruct it in order to understand what pleasure might really ‘do’, and how that ‘doing’ is also regulatory. Quinlivan, in Chapter 5, represents the collection’s point of articulation with discourses of sexualisation and pornification. She deconstructs these discourses’ relationship to pleasure through a juxtaposition of pleasure’s depiction in the paintings of artist, Linda James. In this way, the collection maintains a critical stance in relation to the constitution of pleasure within discourses of sexualisation and pornification.

MEETING AT THE CROSSROADS

The metaphor for the structure of this book is Sharon Todd’s (2011) notion of ‘meeting at the crossroads’. Todd describes the crossroads as a space in the present that represents an end and the possibility of new beginnings. Following Luce Irigaray (1993), the crossroads is not so much a site where we select the next road to follow. Rather, the crossroads is a place in which we become present to each other and is ripe with possibilities for the unforeseen to occur. Describing the crossroads during a symposium in Finland, Todd (2011) said, “it is the encounter, the meeting point of different ways of life, where we become present to each other, a space of relationality where we become present to each other, a space of transformation that raises ethical issue s of facing otherness and political openings for new beginnings”. The process of coming to the crossroads was initiated via the editors approaching each contributor to gage their interest in writing about pleasure in sexuality education. Chapters by Rasmussen and Allen were circulated in order to begin the conversation and make space for different contributions to it. Our remit was explicit. We were not interested in reminiscing about the development of the field, but rather seeking to provoke a reconfiguration of thought regarding sexuality education’s approach to pleasure and desire.

This book represents a metaphorical ‘crossroads’, its pages are the material point at which each of the chapter contributors meets in a discussion of pleasure and sexuality education. Each contributor is an experienced sexualities researcher, yet the roads they take to this crossroads are diverse. We share a history of working in the area of thinking about pleasure and/ or sexuality education and come to the space of this book, eager to be present to each other (Todd, 2011). When Todd speaks of the crossroads as a place of ‘becoming present to each other’, she is referring to the constitution of subjectivity and way in which subjects (humans) become known to one another. Typically, this occurs in relation to ‘what’ we are and a set of identity markers such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, religious affiliation, etc. In this book, it is not different identities we wish to foreground in this meeting at the crossroads, but rather, sets of ideas which each chapter contribution brings to this space. In bringing different perspectives about pleasure in sexuality education together, we seek to show how they ‘become present’ (or can be thought about) in new ways. Only when brought into a narrative relation with the other, within a specific context such as this book, can discussions of pleasure in sexuality education be thought anew.

To illustrate how this becoming present occurs, it is possible to see each contributing chapter drawing from different disciplinary frameworks. This does not negate the fact that they also draw on overlapping ideas, but these discussions bear certain conceptual emphases. For instance, Chapters 3 (Hirst) and 4 (Ingham) draw from beyond sexual and public health perspectives, but also distinctly from them in their concern with ‘sexual health’. Chapter 6 (Sanjakdar) centres religious and cultural ideas in ways that throw light on existing approaches to pleasure as ethnocentric and dismissive of religious perspectives. Still other chapters reveal particular disciplinary inflections, which are psychological, queer and/or feminist, and these delineate their own edges to meaning about pleasure and its possibilities. It is in the process of becoming present to each other where these ideas meet at the site of this book, that their political underpinnings and investments can be discerned. This kind of relationality illuminates the borders of any mode of thinking at the same time as it destabilises them. It is out of such moments of relationality that new possibilities for thinking about pleasure and sexuality education emerge.

Our interest in bringing these contributors together in one site is to consider what possibilities are generated when people working from different perspectives talk about pleasure. In relation to the process of becoming present, Todd (2011) explains that you cannot know beforehand ‘who’ you are until you engage in a relational process with the other. The ‘who’ (in the subjectivity sense) is exposed in an encounter with others. It might be argued that a similar process occurs in terms of understanding the politics of our ideas. It is only when different perspectives and meanings about pleasure become present to each other in a space of relationality such as this book, that their politics is exposed. Our aim with this collection is not to resolve differences regarding how we think about pleasure in sexuality education. This book is not about generating a consensus of ideas (a template) about future ways to include pleasure in sexuality education. As editors, we recognise that these chapters would not co-exist seamlessly in terms of ideas about pleasure. There is, for instance, no strong agreement about how pleasure might form part of the curriculum or the implications of this insertion for students. What we have wanted is to keep these tensions alive by placing different ideas beside each other, in order to think about what can be productive about their differences. In her discussion of transformative education, Todd (2011) explains this means enabling different narratives to live alongside each other without diminishing each other. It is not a case of eliminating differences in ideas, but bringing them together with the purpose of revealing difference so that a ‘newness’ (Cavarero, 2005) may come into being.

ABOUT THE CHAPTERS

Given the formative role Fine and McClelland (2006) have played in the development of the idea of the missing discourse of desire, the collection opens appropriately with their discussion. This chapter provides an entry point for the consideration of the politics of pleasure in sexuality education by summarising their writings “so readers can see the tapestry” (p. 17) of this work in one place for the first time. This is not a simple description however, but a critical reflection aimed at ‘growing’ these ideas in what the authors characterise as a contemporary climate of securitisation, criminalisation, and surveillance. Echoing Lamb (see Chapter 8), they make the important point that feminists’ rapid uptake of desire and pleasure has often led to these being equated with “evidence of freedom, agency, health, and happiness” (p. 29). McClelland and Fine’s response to this problematic is to rearticulate the potential of ‘thick desire’ by tethering the personally intimate to larger social and structural shifts. Recognising the ‘porous’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘fragile’ membranes of where ‘the person stops’ and ‘the social starts’ and accessing these insights via critical methodologies is integral to avoiding fl at conceptualisations of pleasure and desire. It is in the thickness of desire that they see its possibilities lie.

Chapter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Putting Pleasure Under Pressure
• 2 Over-Sexed and Under Surveillance: Adolescent Sexualities, Cultural Anxieties, and Thick Desire
• 3 ‘Get Some Rhythm Round the Clitoris’: Addressing Sexual Pleasure in Sexuality Education in Schools and other Youth Settings
• 4 A Well-Kept Secret: Sex Education, Masturbation, and Public Health
• 5 ‘What's Wrong with Porn?’ Engaging with Contemporary Painting to Explore the Commodifi cation of Pleasure in Sexuality Education
• 6 Sacred Pleasure: Exploring Dimensions of Sexual Pleasure and Desire from an Islamic Perspective
• 7 Introducing a Critical Pedagogy of Sexual and Reproductive Citizenship: Extending the ‘Framework of Thick Desire’
• 8 The Hard Work of Pleasure
• 9 Pleasure/Desire, Sexularism, and Sexuality Education
• 10 Pleasure's Perils? Critically Refl ecting on Pleasure's Inclusion in Sexuality Education
• 11 After-Word(s)–Engaging with the Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education: Aff ordances and Provocations
• Contributors
• Index