Photo: Ingmarie Andersson

Feeling generational: schooling in sexuality and gender and becoming a sexual citizen

In order to ‘see’ LGBTQ youth sexual citizenship, we explore how our participants (LGBTQIA+ identified people who were born in the 70s and the 90s and grew up in Australia) feel about education, generations and coming of age.  

Rather than focusing on the content of what was learned (as well as many perceived absences in sexuality education curriculum), or other features that are the common areas of discussion in debates about sexual citizenship and schooling, our attention turns to a selection of affective encounters with education to explore their significance.

Our participants often articulate their experiences of LGBTQ youth sexual citizenship via registers of affect because it is through feelings that they are schooled. Lauren Berlant talks about affect as structures of relationality which are "as extremely varied as the contexts of life in which they emerge.” (Berlant, 2011: 13).  

We explore how LGBTQ subjects experience ‘schooling’ – from each other and the world around them, formally and informally - in generationally appropriate identity language as a way of generating shared understandings of LGBTQ youth sexual citizenship. We explore the significance of feelings in education about gender and sexuality to deepen our understanding of generational LGBTQ youth sexual citizenship, including reflecting on how feelings play a role in the labels people choose and reject and how these feelings connect to their understandings of themselves as being LGBTQ in a present time and place – in other words, as a generational subject.

Bio

Mary Lou Rasmussen is Professor, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University. Their research focuses on building transdisciplinary understandings of reproduction, sexuality, and gender across diverse lifeworlds.

Rasmussen is associate editor of the journal Sex Education. She/they is co-editor, with Louisa Allen, of the Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education and the Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education (Palgrave) and has co/authored/edited Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis: Making Bushfire Babies (Bristol, 2023); Queer Generations: sexual citizenship and LGBTQ youth in Australia (forthcoming); Faiths, Freedoms and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity (2021) Bloomsbury; Progressive Sexuality Education: The Conceits of Secularism, (2016) Routledge, and Becoming Subjects: A Study of Sexualities and Secondary Schooling, (2006) Routledge.

Contact

Associate Professor Karin Gunnarsson