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Learning About Sexuality ‘Between’ Home and School

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Sexuality Education and New Materialism

Part of the book series: Queer Studies and Education ((QSTED))

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with understanding how young people live religion, culture, and sexuality between home and school. It describes how Chana, a 16-year-old Muslim woman, makes sense of meanings about sexuality from her African family and school-based sexuality education. The chapter rethinks dominant framings of this experience, where youth from religious and cultural minorities are caught between conflicting sexual ideologies from home and school. Instead of reinscribing this scene, its terms of reference are shifted by drawing on Barad’s (Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, 2007) notion of intra-activity to understand it in an ontologically different way. In an attempt at ‘exorbitant deconstruction’ (Lenz Taguchi, Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 1(1), 41–53, 2010), the idea that meanings from home and school are necessarily oppositional and something Chana must reconcile/negotiate is unravelled, opening space for new ways of thinking.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That these ideas from new materialist thought are ‘new’ is contested. As Taylor and Ivinson (2013, p. 666) not e, Hoskins and Jones (2013) ar gu e that perceptions of the world as an entangled continuity of the human-natural have always been part of traditional Maori thought in Aotearoa-NZ .

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Allen, L. (2018). Learning About Sexuality ‘Between’ Home and School. In: Sexuality Education and New Materialism. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95300-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95300-4_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95299-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95300-4

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