Sex Education

Troubled Times for Sexuality Education?

Anti-feminist, anti-gender, and anti-LGBTQI+ narratives are on the rise all over the world with important implications for sex and sexuality education. These narratives are historically rooted and deployed through a range of socio-cultural, religious and political institutions. Schools and other educational sites have increasingly become key battlegrounds in which competing visions of gender, sexuality and childhood are fought over. Moral panics surrounding the protection of children, safeguarding the family, and defending the nation are mobilised to discredit sexuality education and to stall and reverse progress towards gender and sexual justice. These dynamics are unfolding across the globe and in settings marked by colonial legacies, religious conservatisms, authoritarian populisms, neoliberal austerity and growing inequalities.

Anti-gender, homophobic and transphobic narratives continue to circulate through social media, religious broadcasting, news outlets and influencer cultures. These carefully crafted and coordinated attacks seek to challenge the progress hitherto made with gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights, squeezing out new possibilities for expanding education about gender, sex and sexuality. In these contested spaces, teachers, learners and communities are frequently caught between progressive commitments and intensifying pressures to conform to more conservative norms. The result is a complex landscape in which sex and sexuality education are targeted as symbols of broader anxieties about sex, gender, sexuality and social change.

This special issue of Sex Education journal is located within this crucible and serves as a rallying point in troubling times. It seeks to examine how anti-gender, and homophobic and transphobic discourses and politics, seek to constrain sexuality education in diverse contexts, and how teachers, learners and others resist, rework and contest them in pursuit of gender and sexual justice. Understanding these negotiations and forms of resistance demands a historically and contextually attuned approach recognising intersectionality, situated experience, and temporality in social change to support recognition, inclusion and human rights.

We invite contributions that engage critically with anti-gender and anti LGBTQI+ backlash and attacks on sexuality education. We are especially interested in how sexuality education both anticipates and responds to hostile conditions, and how it can act as a counterforce in anti-gender and anti LGBTQI+ times.

The special issue seeks to:

• Situate current anti-gender and anti-sexuality education campaigns within longer historical trajectories, global shifts and regional specificities
• Analyse how backlash is organised and circulated across borders and platforms, including through the use of digital media
• Explore how teachers, learners, parents, activists and policymakers navigate, resist, accommodate or rework conservative pressures around sexuality education
• Re-assert the importance of sexuality education as central to gender and sexual justice, rather than as an optional or secondary concern

Contributions that examine intersectionality and the ways that race, class, age, religion, disability, migration, geopolitical location and colonial histories shape anti-gender backlash and responses to it are especially welcome.

Scholarly papers advancing new perspectives on resisting anti-genderism and anti LGBTQI+ backlash, and advancing sexuality education, are especially welcome.