blogging beginning: a rusty, rambly response to class conversation

There is a resolute link between militarization, sexuality, and health dating way back to when the world began to war. The health of United State’s soldiers alerted a specific type of terror- venereal disease, or a weakening of  the front line of defense. In such, a distinct terror alert level on sexuality and health manifested, arming a culture of defense, fear, protection, violence, and an us/them ideology. “War fostered respectability for sex education...” (moran 76). I think this is a history that we must reckon with. i worry that we are not. For rhetoric surrounding sex and disease persists with protection, warning, disease, fear, self-defense, predation, and so on. 

In addition to militaristic nationalism and sex education, a liberal benevolent sense persists in sex education and I felt it most present in our classroom conversation. “How can we help them?” I easily slip into this paradigm of knowing that I have access to privilege and wanting to share such through education or volunteerism. However, I do feel that pause must ensue and i must ensure that i am not replicating systems of power so long at play in colonial, neocolonial, liberal, neoliberal, and so on (and on) agendas. Education, I believe, must be about empowerment. further, I do not believe that i can really help anyone. I can not change people. Rather, I hope to enact  or fight for change that is systemic, serves to dismantle systems of power, and allow people the opportunity to help themselves. In such, education must be, in my mind, an exchange of information, taking on and sharing with a critical mind frame, addressing inequities and being very mindful not to replicate systems of power in thinking that my access to information and my privilege makes me a saving force.   

I think this concept of solidarity rather than charity ties in with the concept that there are particular identities or groups that require help. Classroom conversation included examples of youth, black women, and gay men. It is a common trend to isolate identities an formulate campaigns for advocacy, education, and outreach. This plight participates, I fear, in the separation of identity from class, thus skirting the conversation of class inequity. Further, this model of outreach isolates identity which not only stigmatizes populations by making them subjects of study, but also fails to reckon with the intersectionality of class, race, gender, nationality, and sex as they are formed within the power systems of capitalism and natationalism.      

So, I suppose this loops back around to the nation’s interest in sex and sexuality. Remembering again that education on such found force through war and militaristic interest- sex became a public forum, a regulated activity, a national interest. If it is to remain a topic of public interest, I caution at replicating the tropes that render certain identities isolated, stigmatized, and in need of saving. I do not lay claim to the precise solutions, though I am certain that in our confrontation with inequity, which certainly pans out in access to health and agency, the struggle will not be well fought on the backs of individualized identity signifiers. Instead, i hope our language will address the issues, the systems, and that the oppressive powers will be confronted through a multi-coalitional approach.