Sexuality education,populism,and the promise of critical health education studies

Abstract

Across disciplines, discourses, and borders, there is agreement among scholars that populism poses a serious threat to efforts to preserve and promote the humanity, legitimacy, and safety of individuals and populations who transgress traditional, Western, European, and patriarchal norms about sex, gender, and sexuality. Unsurprisingly, these contentions are often reflected and reproduced in debates about sex and sexuality education. This paper is concerned with the function of ambiguity in populist discourses, ultimately identifying it as a key feature not just of populist discourse but of sex education debates in general. I use a queer of colour critique as a framework for exploring how ambiguous and vague claims about ‘the people’ act as spaces for circulating sexist, racist, and xenophobic politics by focusing on how that ambiguity attempts to erase its politics. Queer of colour critique also illuminates liberalism’s own tendency towards depoliticisation. This suggests that sex education scholars would benefit from better understanding right-wing populist appeals to ‘the people’ as an attempt to depoliticise the political, by shifting discourse to questions of morality. However, I argue it is also necessary to reflect upon the use of this strategy within liberal spaces and question its ability to offer resistance to right-wing populism as a result. The paper ends by discussing the potential value of insisting, as researchers and activists, that sex and sexuality education be studied, imagined, and implemented as an explicitly political project, a project that might find inspiration in critical scholarship responding to the limits of traditional health education studies.