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Teaching It Straight: Sexuality Education Across Post-State-Socialist Contexts

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Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies

Abstract

This chapter explores how sex education is navigated in post-socialist sites in relation to discourses of purity, childhood innocence, and nation-building. We examine how the politics of sexuality education render students sexual subjects through official, evaded, and hidden curricula, in a municipal secondary school in Yekaterinburg, Russia and a Polish diasporic immersion school in Alberta, Canada. We argue that education and sex education are involved in what we describe as “teaching it straight”—the continued insistence on (and frequent failure of) straightening students into heteronormative life paths and desires. Drawing on the works of queer theorists and our own autobiographical voices, we develop an oppositional method of “telling it slantwise”—looking at contradictions, silent moments, and queer possibilities within normatively ordered school life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The school and city will remain unnamed out of consideration for the community.

  2. 2.

    An example would be a teacher using an outdated and degrading term “fallen woman” when referring to Sonia, a prostitute, from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment novel.

  3. 3.

    For the other waves of immigration, see Baker, 1989; Burrell, 2009; Drozdzewski, 2007; Mlynarz, 2008.

  4. 4.

    At the time Adam Mickiewicz published the national epic poem in 1834, Lithuania and Poland were linked nationalities under Poland-Lithuania. The story is set in 1811–1812, a time when Poland was under the partitions, and its territory was occupied by Russia, Prussia, and Austria so that it “disappeared off the map.” To recite this poem is thus an exercise in Polish émigré nostalgia: a longing for a homeland stolen.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Ela Przybylo

  2. Toronto, ON, Canada

    Polina Ivleva

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  1. Ela Przybylo
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  2. Polina Ivleva
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Iveta Silova

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Nelli Piattoeva

  3. Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Zsuzsa Millei

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Przybylo, E., Ivleva, P. (2018). Teaching It Straight: Sexuality Education Across Post-State-Socialist Contexts. In: Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., Millei, Z. (eds) Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_10

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62790-8

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