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SEXUALITY
EDUCATION AND
NEW MATERIALISM
Queer Things
Louisa Allen
Series Editors
William F. Pinar
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexual Studies
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, NJ, USA
Sexuality Education
and New Materialism
Queer Things
Louisa Allen
Faculty of Education and Social Work
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Nature America,
Inc. part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For Ken, and all that mattered to him ….
family, friends, generosity, kindness, music, Texas and the All Blacks!
Acknowledgements
Writing this book has been on my mind for some time and I am so very
grateful to finally have gotten to do it. This opportunity has been made
possible with the granting of Research and Study Leave from the Faculty
of Education and Social Work. For this, I wish to thank my Head of
School, Carol Mutch, and the Dean, Graeme Aitken, for allowing this pre-
cious time to read, think, and write.
Thinking with concepts like intra-action in this book, it has become even
more apparent to me that nothing is ever achieved in isolation. This book
is not and never was mine to write. It is an event that has been inaugurated
by a myriad of relations involving funding from the University of Auckland;
an Early Career Research Excellence Award and the Australian Research
Council; school principals’ support of the research, participating students,
and teachers in schools from Aotearoa-NZ and Australia; project time with
colleagues in Australia and Aotearoa-NZ; and iPads, computers, planes,
conversations at conferences, books, home and work offices, and non-
humans like Coco (our family dog), who has spent many hours by my side
as this book was written. There are also of course things that are not repre-
sentable in language or known to me which have contributed to this work.
Of other entities I know, this book could not have happened without
the unfailing support of its publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, and commis-
sioning editors, Andrew James and Mara Berkoff, who has succeeded him.
Neither could this book have come to fruition without the copy-editing
prowess of Dr Connie Chai, who whips the chaotic manuscripts I send her
into examples of order and precision.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Index 149
ix
List of Figures
xi
CHAPTER 1
Sexuality education has always been a queer proposition for schools. Its
queerness lies in the disruption it poses to the traditional academic land-
scape of schooling otherwise peppered with ‘intellectual’ subjects like
maths and science. The Cartesian dualism that structures education ren-
ders schooling the province of the mind (Paechter, 2004), with student
bodies and the messiness of their sexuality an excess to be managed. As a
subject which invokes the body, sexuality education sits low in the aca-
demic hierarchy of important educational knowledge. What makes sexual-
ity education queerer still is that its focus—sexuality—is socially constituted
as private, embarrassing, dangerous, sinful, and potentially pleasurable
(Hawkes, 2004). These associations have shrouded it in longstanding
debates about whether it should be taught, when, by whom, and what its
content should be (Irvine, 2002). Sexuality education’s queerness also lies
in the disruptive potential of these debates to highlight and question con-
ventional binaries between child/adult, innocence/knowledge, danger/
pleasure, homosexual/heterosexual, and cisgender/gender diverse. For
instance, when the appropriateness of content around sex and masturba-
tion is queried for 10-year-olds, an array of dualisms surface, including
child/adult, appropriate/inappropriate, and pleasure/danger. Such con-
tentions render sexuality education a controversial subject which many
parents, teachers, and students prefer to avoid. Like the reception that can
haunt humans who identify as queer, sexuality education endures
Feminists, for instance (and I count myself one), have critiqued the gender
bias of sexuality curricular and its failure to recognise and support diverse
subjects like LGBTQ, students with disabilities, and those from minority
ethnic and religious backgrounds. We have also critiqued missing discourses
of desire and pleasure in sexuality education (Allen, Rasmussen, & Quinlivan,
2014), sometimes implying that their secular inclusion is ‘progressive’
against ‘conservative’ and ‘backward’ religious dogma (for a critique of this
approach see Rasmussen, 2016). In an interview with Dolphijn and Van der
Tuin (2012), feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad outlined what
she deemed problematic about certain mobilisations of critique.
Critique is all too often not a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of
reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without,
but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or
something down—another scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an
approach, etc. So, this is a practice of negativity that I think is about subtrac-
tion, distancing and othering. (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 49)
Within such a project, the relation between knowledge and being is under-
stood as a profoundly ethical issue.
This book’s ethics are multi-dimensional. They inhere at the level of
engaging with unsolved issues of social justice in sexuality education and
at the level of theory in terms of its ethico-onto-epistemological concep-
tualisation of the curriculum. Research which takes onto-epistemological
concerns as its focus has been termed post-qualitative (St. Pierre, 2011).
The theoretical foundations of post-qualitative research necessitate a dif-
ferent conceptualisation of ethics from previous qualitative approaches
(Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). Referring to the work of Cixous, Davies (2016)
characterises this as an openness to step into the unknown where the
researcher relinquishes a concern for mastering the field through acquisi-
tion of knowledge (see Chap. 7 as an example of this).
To dare to go where one is blind, where thought has not yet happened,
where the unknown is yet to emerge and multiply, is, for Cixous, ethical
writing (Williams, 2012). Ethics in this sense is an act of courage not to fol-
low the lines laid down by neoliberalism, or any other habituated discourses
and practices, but to sink into the act of writing through the materiality of
one’s body and to allow that writing to take you to the as-yet-thought,
opening up the possibility of acting differently in the world in ways that
matter. (p. 7)
However, this book makes no promises about solving issues which con-
tinue to plague sexuality education. Within a feminist new materialist
framework, such promises are not within the control of discrete entities
(i.e., a book or person). In fact, it is important to clarify early on that a
failure to resolve such issues is inevitable. As discussion in the chapters
unfolds, it becomes clear that resolution and determinacy are antithetical
to the potential of feminist new materialist thought. They constitute a form
of representational seduction which this book gives up on2 (MacLure,
2013). This is not an abandonment of ethical responsibility as this book’s
author, or a strong desire to attend to issues of social-sexual justice in sexu-
ality education. Quite the contrary, it is in their pursuit that I engage in this
experimentation with feminist new materialist thought. The pursuit of
social justice is deemed a deeply humanist endeavour and therefore sits in
tension with feminist new materialism (see Chap. 8). What this book
attempts is perhaps more accurately expressed as riding the wave of femi-
nist new materialism to see where it takes me. What is ethical within post-
qualitative research paradigms is to try to respond to the challenge of
feminist new materialist theory, knowing I will not be successful, and being
open to the vulnerability such failure exposes me to as a researcher. Instead
of attempting to solve the conundrums of sexuality education, thought
contained in the ensuing chapters attempts to shift its terms of reference.
In a bid to find a new approach to sexuality education, this book is instead
playful, experimental, hopeful (yet hopeless), and thus decidedly queer.
period. Once cameras had been collected and films developed, an indi-
vidual interview was undertaken in which photos that participants deemed
important were discussed. Photo-elicitation provided a literal picture of
the sexual cultures of schooling through young people’s eyes, and it is
moments from this method which appear throughout this book.
The second study was funded by an Australian Research Discovery
Project Grant and involved a six-person research team from Australia and
Aotearoa-New Zealand. Our aim was to explore how to address cultural
and religious diversity in sexuality education in response to polarising cul-
tural, religious, and secular disputes inhibiting delivery of programmes.
Rather than consolidate these debates, which, for example, pit those who
are religious against those who are non-religious, we sought to disrupt
them (Rasmussen, 2016). As one example, to elicit students’ thoughts
about sexuality in interviews, we designed scenarios that troubled gen-
dered, religious, and cultural stereotypes. In our team composition, we
also endeavoured to reflect queer theory’s ‘uber-inclusivity’ and ‘unknow-
ability’ (Giffney & Hird, 2008, p. 4) by bringing together Australian,
Maori, Pakeha, Muslim, non-religious, and lapsed Catholic researchers
whose identities covered a wide spectrum of sexual diversities (i.e., lesbian,
gay, polysexual, and straight). These sexual and gender non-normativities
made us queer, both as individuals and as a collectivity (Allen et al., 2013).
Focusing on Year 9 and 10 students, aged 13–14 years, we undertook
fieldwork in Melbourne, Auckland, and Christchurch with each researcher
responsible for collecting data in one school in their regional locality.
Using an ethnographic approach, our methods included classroom obser-
vation of sexuality education and individual and focus group interviews.
Classroom observation undertaken in one Auckland-based school forms
the focus of Chap. 6.
the human self in research is no easy task, even when ‘beginning’ in what
Springgay and Truman (2017) call ‘the speculative middle’, where “prob-
lematizing is a mode of defamiliarization that ruptures taken-for-granted
habits, tropes, and common assumptions about how methods perform”
(Springgay & Truman, 2017, p. 6). Methods in this vein push us to ask
questions differently, to problematise problems, rather than collect data or
seek solutions (Springgay & Truman, 2017). This reorientation to meth-
ods involves viewing them as an event of becoming, that ‘emphasises
doing’ rather than meaning-making. Even viewed from this perspective I
am sceptical of our ability as human researchers to be ‘with’ our research
in this way. Because inevitably we offer such engagement with method
ultimately in academic outputs which involve words (written/spoken or
some other form of text), which constitutes a representation of our
thinking-making-doing.
As I type these words on this page, for instance, I engage unavoidably
in representationalism and a centring of the researcher (notice the number
of times I use ‘I’ in this sentence to communicate ideas to you) and sub-
sequent separation between knower and known. If the researcher cannot,
as yet, truly intra-act with their object of investigation in a dissolving of
the Cartesian ontological divide, then why abandon the energy and effort
of previously collected qualitative ‘data’ (as generated by the two projects
outlined in this book)? How ethical is it to do this, given the resources
(financial, human, temporal) previously expended by all those involved in
research? It is our approach to these methods and to what ends we put
them that must ultimately matter. As Koro-Ljungberg (2016) writes,
“Researchers are always constituted within a tradition, and they continue
to be a part of tradition at-the-same-time that they might be capable of
rupturing and changing traditions by not responding to its call for duty or
not following rules” (p. 131). This is the line I take with new materialism
in this book. I attempt to unsettle humanist qualitative research at the
same time as I describe my enactment of it.
My gesture to the field of post-qualitative research is to work intra-
actively with an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and
being from feminist new materialism (i.e., ethic-onto-epistem-ology,
Barad, 2007, p. 185) and qualitative methodologies steeped within a
humanist tradition. I do not conceptualise this re-making in any conven-
tional sense though. Data from the qualitative projects are not understood
as being able to be reinterpreted through a new materialist frame. What
they offer is a point of entry for accessing the conceptual shifts new mate-
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Maint de blanc, et point du bis.’
Millin, loc. cit. 344, cites a MS. dissertation of one Père Laire,
which ascribes these lines to one Lubin, an official at
Chartres. The last eight pages of the MS. contain epistles
for the feasts of St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, and
the Innocents.
[995] Chérest, 14; Millin, op. cit. ii. 336 (plates), and Voyage
dans le Midi, i. 60 (plates); Clément, 122, 162; Bourquelot,
op. cit. vi. 79 (plates); A. de Montaiglon, in Gazette des
Beaux-arts (1880), i. 24 (plates); E. Molinier, Hist. générale
des Arts appliqués, i; Les Ivoires (1896), 47 (plate); A. M.
Cust, Ivory Workers of the Middle Ages (1902), 34. This
last writer says that the diptych is now in the Bibl.
Nationale. The leaves of the diptych represent a Triumph of
Bacchus, and a Triumph of Artemis or Aphrodite. It has
nothing to do with the Feast of Fools, and is of sixth-
century workmanship.
[996] Dreves, 575, thinks the MS. was ‘für eine
Geckenbruderschaft,’ as the chants are not in the
contemporary Missals, Breviaries, Graduais, and
Antiphonals of the church. But if they were, a separate
Officium book would be superfluous. Such special festorum
libri were in use elsewhere, e.g. at Amiens. Nisard, op. cit.,
thinks the Officium was an imitation one written by
‘notaires’ to amuse the choir-boys, and cites a paper of M.
Carlier, canon of Sens, before the Historic Congress held
at Sens in 1850 in support of this view. Doubtless the
goliardi wrote such imitations (cf. the missa lusorum in
Schmeller, Carmina Burana, 248; the missa de potatoribus
in Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, ii. 208; and the
missa potatorum in F. Novati, La Parodia sacra nelle
Letterature moderne (Studi critici e letterari, 289)); but this
is too long to be one, and is not a burlesque at all.
[997] Cf. the chapter decree of 1524 ‘festum Circumcisionis a
defuncto Corbolio institutum,’ which is doubtless the
authority for the statements of Taveau, Hist. archiep.
Senonen. (1608), 94; Saint-Marthe, Gallia Christiana
(1770), xii. 60; Baluze, note in B. N. Cod. Parisin. 1351 C.
(quoted Nisard, op. cit.).
[998] Dreves, 575; Chérest, 15, who quotes an elaborate
opinion of M. Quantin, ‘archiviste de l’Yonne.’ M. Quantin
believes that the hand is that of a charter of Pierre de
Corbeil, dated 1201, in the Yonne archives. On the other
hand Nisard, op. cit., and Danjou, Revue de musique
religieuse (1847), 287, think that the MS. is of the
fourteenth century.
[999] Chérest, 35; Dreves, 576.
[1000] Liturgically a conductus is a form of Cantio, that is, an
interpolation in the mass or office, which stands as an
independent unit, and not, like the Tropes, Proses and
Sequences, as an extension of the proper liturgical texts.
The Cantiones are, however, only a further step in the
process which began with Tropes (Nisard, op. cit. 191;
Dreves, Anal. Hymn. xx. 6). From the point of view of
musical science H. E. Wooldridge, Oxford Hist. of Music, i.
308, defines a conductus as ‘a composition of equally free
and flowing melodies in all the parts, in which the words
are metrical and given to the lower voice only.’ The term is
several times used in the Officium. Clément, 163, falls foul
of Dulaure for taking it as an adjective throughout, with
asinus understood.
[1001] Wordsworth, Mediaeval Services, 289; Clément, 126,
163. Dulaure seems to have taken the tabula for the altar.
The English name for the tabula was wax-brede. An
example ( † 1500) is printed by H. E. Reynolds, Use of
Exeter Cathedral, 73.
[1002] Appendix L; where the various versions of the ‘Prose’
are collated.
[1003] There are many hymns beginning Salve, festa dies.
The model is a couplet of Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina,
iii. 9, Ad Felicem episcopum de Pascha, 39 (M. G. H. Auct.
Antiquiss. iv. 1. 60):