Conference Agenda

In similarity to other working organisations are schools complicit in institutionalising age, gender, and sexuality in various ways. Instead of being neutral arenas of work (Acker, 1990), Mills (2004) argues schools to mimic the traditional gender roles of the nuclear family where women engage in emotional labour while men “engage in the supposedly more difficult aspects of the job, for instance, the disciplining of students and taking care of the fiscal responsibilities of planning and managing the school” (p. 35). Through the “straight face” of schooling, discourses of family traditions emphasise heterosexuality and binary gender identities as “truth regimes” to promote schools and its teachers as safe and normalised (Davis & Hay, 2018, p. 290). While the “truth regimes” of schools and education underlines teachers’ practices has the school-based sexuality education (SE) developed into a critical practice of examining norms and values. When teachers practice SE, they also operationalise democratic values (Venegas, 2022) by relating it with “feminist and LGBTQI+ struggles for equality, diversity, human rights, citizenship and democracy” (p. 491). The development of SE can take on different paths due to a country socio-political history (Sherlock, 2012).

When it comes to SE, Sweden tends to pride itself for being the first country in the world to make it a compulsory part of schooling. In Sweden, SE became a trademark of Swedish politics to promote sexual and reproductive rights world-wide (Irwin, 2019; Martinsson et al., 2016). In the national curriculum SE is inscribed in an overarching level from K-12 and expected to be a reoccurring, subject-integrated, and cross-disciplinary knowledge area (Skolverket, 2022a, 2022b). For the teaching practice this means that each and every one working in Swedish schools are obliged to engage with SE and address issues of sexuality, consent, and relationships with students. However, talking sex with children and adolescents is not always easy.

The paper presents data from a larger thesis project that aims to explore how SE take shape by interviewing teachers about their experiences of working with SE and observing a working group assigned to develop teachers’ practices concerning SE. In the teacher interviews I was surprised that some teachers began to talk about their own embodiments of age, gender, and sexuality to describe how they were able to teach and talk about sexuality and relationships with their students while others found it more difficult for the same reason. In this paper I ask, how do intersections of age, gender, and sexuality interfere teachers practises in teaching SE?

To understand how teachers’ embodiment create possibilities and limitations in discussing issues of sexuality and relationships with students, I departing from Joan Ackers (1990, 2006) notion on gendered organisations and Clary Krekula’s (2021) view on age as relation to analyse open interview with 18 teachers.

What is the role of relationships in sexuality education? To begin, it is at times part of the terminology. In the UK, Relationships and Sex Education is a statutory subject in primary school. Sweden recently updated the name of the knowledge area to Sexuality, Consent and Relationships (Skolverket 2023-01-31). Relationships is mentioned as the seventh (out of seven) central components of Comprehensive Sexuality Education according to the organization International Planned Parenthood Federation. When working with the concept of ‘family’, a teaching resource developed for the Health and Wellbeing division in Ireland (2023-01-31) discusses the importance of including non-traditional examples of what family means. They use critical approaches to gender and sexuality and argue that these are relevant for understanding family relationships – however, critical approaches to relationships are limited to inclusion.

There has been a thorough debate in international sexuality education scholarship around critical approaches to aspects of gender and sexuality drawing on theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) and Kevin Kumashiro (2002). Such studies have introduced critical and norm aware ways of teaching sexuality education and contributed to keeping the area alert on societal changes (Jones 2011; Lundin 2014; Bengtsson & Bolander 2020). A corresponding critical discourse on the topic of relationships is emerging lately in academia; however, it is rarely or never seen in the sexuality education practice.

What does it mean then to pursue a critique of normative assumptions on relationships? Relationships need to be placed into a context. Sociologist Eva Illouz (2012) argues that since the beginning of the 20th century, the marriage market has slowly been deregulated in the Western world in tandem with societal changes such as secularization, industrialization, and individualization. This means that today, there is a new cultural pattern where people can organize their close relationships more freely. However, it does not mean that individuals are free from norms, opinions from family members, or from implicit socio-economical structures.

Sociologist Catrine Andersson (2015) shows how the Swedish state regulates intimate relationships through sanctioning marriages and divorces. The former idea of monogamy is today more realistically termed “serial monogamy”: being with a partner, until you are with a new one. If you stick to one partner at the time, your intimate relationships are sanctioned by the state. However, many adults are engaged in consensual non-monogamy in different ways (not to be mistaken for infidelity). Andersson (2022) maps out a multitude of practices in her informants’ non-monogamous lives, such as open relationships, polyamory, swinging, and relationship anarchy. Research has shown how individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy are stigmatized and suffer from minority stress (Mahar et al. 2022). This is thought to be a result of the normative assumptions on relationship structures society bears today.

Two other aspects of relationships which are highly politicized are the variety of ways of how to start a family (IVF, adoption, surrogacy) and organizing domestic life (collective living, intergenerational living arrangements, the increase of single households). Less politicized – but equally relevant for people’s lives – are aspects such as friendship, online communities, and loneliness (Ceder & Gunnarsson, 2021).

Sexuality education is a knowledge area where societal topics are raised; for the knowledge aspect of them, and for the importance this knowledge might have in students’ lives. This paper aims to explore how relationships as a topic can be taught with an awareness of critical approaches. The research questions are: What aspects on relationships appear in sexuality education in Swedish secondary school? How can these aspects be understood through literature on critical approaches to relationships? How can the topic of relationships be developed as a part of the knowledge area of sexuality education?