Centering Young People’s Voices and Agency: Re-Thinking Sexuality Education

In South African contexts as elsewhere, children continue to be considered ‘sexually innocent’ and assumed asexual. In this respect, sexuality education, now part of the core curriculum, remains a ‘queer proposition’ for schools, and it is intensely contested in South Africa and other global contexts. Discourse around the challenges of teaching and learning sexuality abound, and closely linked to these are critiques and suggestions from scholars on how best to approach sexuality education. Some even question whether it should be taught at all at schools and by adults within the recalcitrant idea that young people are and should remain ‘innocent’. In this paper, we apply a decolonial feminist lens to rethink possibilities of sexuality education in South African contexts, with relevance globally. We specifically foreground the sexuality education classroom as a potential productive space for promoting gender and sexual justice, but also for thinking about how gender intersects with other inequalities, power and privilege. We review current critiques of sexuality education, in South Africa and elsewhere, which flag the negative and regulatory role that it often plays. The chapter raises a number of key propositions to ignite alternative imaginaries of sexuality education, including: the importance of acknowledging young people as knowledgeable agents; challenging adult authority and centredness; promote sexual literacy and agency in relation to online sexual material; and advocating embodiment and affect in teaching and learning, through, for example, creative, participatory and arts-based engagements.