Rethinking Aotearoa-New Zealand sexuality education policy through new materialism

Abstract

This research project uses feminist, new materialism (Barad, 2007) to query and re-think sexuality education policy in Aotearoa-New Zealand and offer a contribution to the development of education for social justice. Firstly, the theoretical groundings of the research project are introduced, followed by a description of the diffractive method used to analyse sexuality education policy. The body of the thesis then offers three arguments for how a feminist, new materialist rethinking of sexuality education might offer new ethical responses to and creative reworkings of issues identified in the literature. The first argues for the traversing of the mind/body dualism in sexuality education so that what one thinks or knows about sexuality is inseparable from what one does. It is argued that adopting new materialist knowing-in-being in relation to learning about sexuality makes space for embodied knowledges and provides an alternative to simplistic instrumental models of individual behaviour change that fail to account for materiality, discourse or the posthuman. Secondly, the notion of affirmative difference (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) is drawn on to think differently about including diverse students often overlooked in sexuality education. New material thinking is used to build on poststructural critiques in which the biases and exclusions of sexuality education curricula are made visible. Instead of relying on a binary ‘other’ to mark and strengthen the norm, it is suggested that difference be reimagined as a fluid, posthuman relation that has the potential to be done differently. Finally, Barad’s (2003) posthuman performativity is used to reimagine sexuality education policy without the individual human at its centre. It is argued that this might allow sexuality education to escape the perpetuation of narratives of personal responsibility and foster attunement to the making of ethical sexual relations. Posthuman pedagogy offers a domain where knowledge is not separable from knowers, and neither are able to be prescribed or known in advance. This thesis contends that a new materialist sexuality education offers the rethinking of sexual knowledge and sexual responsibility in ways that “help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly” in the world (Barad, 2007, p. x).