Rights and Privilege

This week I’ve been thinking about alternative models for sexuality education and I started wondering about how models of education might change if we reconceived of sexuality as a fundamental human right, rather than, or in addition to ideas of sexuality as ‘natural’ or ‘constructed’. Sexuality rights discourse for me places the conversation in a social science context and shifts the focus to include issues of pleasure, birth control, and access. If sexuality and sexuality education are rights, social institutions have a responsibility to people to provide for them.

After more conversations with folks, I started pushing at those ideas, thinking about the tension between rights and privileges. If we think about sexuality and sexuality education as a right, something that all people are entitled to by virtue of their existence, where are those rights placed within the current state of social inequalities? Who are able to exercise those rights, who are unable to? How do the various intersections of identities turn rights into privileges that are given and taken away by the state or other agencies?

Thinking about privilege then, and how sexuality education can be understood as a privilege, how does that change a model of sexuality education? I think the emphasis could focus on social justice and anti-racist and anti-sexist pedagogies for example, and create knowledge between educators and learners, generating common understandings in an effort to create social change. I’m particularly interested in ways that sexuality education can exist outside of the K-12 classroom, in assisted living facilities, seminaries, and prisons to name a few.

So rather than an either/or approach in modeling alternatives for sexuality education, I think that it could be useful to explore tensions and collaborations between different methods and figure out what works and what doesn’t for different communities.