This is for the youth, who deserve the truth.
Local Problem: Tennessee doesn't require medically-accurate sex education in public schools.
National Problem: The sex education curriculums in the US tend to focus on singular issues of reproduction or pleasure, without interpolating the sites of control that sex is.
Sexuality Education needs to adopt the pedagogy of sexual liberation.
We need a curriculum that integrates prevention with power, centering both structure and agency, choice and context, and demands that all bodies are afforded this education as an natural right.
Sex Educators of the World UNITE! You have nothing to lose but your grants.... ✪
Primary Assumptions:
- Sexual health is inseparable from liberation struggles. Public health can be a tool of state violence.
- The goal is not only to protect bodies but to dismantle systems that control them. Resistance must be collective, creative, and unapologetically political.
Core Principles:
- Sexual knowledge is constructed, not discovered.
- Binaries simplify; complexity liberates.
- What’s absent is as powerful as what’s spoken.
- Desire is collective, productive, and unfinished.
- Sex ed must be an invitation, not a prescription.
Purpose
We were thrown into a sexual world we never chose. From birth, what we can know, say, and even imagine about sex is decided for us—by the position we’re given in society and by how close we come to being branded as “other.” Our desires, our sense of identity, our ideas about the body, the womb, and reproduction are not our own. They are the product of systems that have trained us to police ourselves without ever having to be told.
School, religion, media, and social rules are not neutral. They are tools of control. They dictate which kinds of love are “normal,” which bodies are worthy, which pleasures are safe to admit—and they bury everything else in shame or silence. Your private thoughts about sex? They’ve been scripted for you by the state, the church, and the market long before you could think for yourself.
If you think you’re free inside this system, you’re not. Freedom begins the moment you see your “normal” for what it is: a cage built to look like home. And that moment often comes when you step outside your world and confront the ways others live and love. Compare your culture to theirs, and the truth is obvious—your norms are not natural; they are enforced.
Language is the weapon here. The words and images we have for sex don’t just describe it—they make it real. Create new language, and you tear holes in the system. Those cracks are where freedom begins.
The work is simple but ruthless: question every rule, every limit, every so-called truth about sex, desire, and identity. If it can’t be defended, destroy it. Learning from others is not charity—it’s survival. It’s how you reclaim yourself.
Do this, and the systems that feed on your compliance start to crumble. That’s when a real sexual revolution becomes possible—one that doesn’t erase difference in the name of unity, but builds freedom out of the raw, irreducible fact that we are not all the same
Examples:
ReIntegrating HIV in Sexuality Education
How we talk about HIV shapes how we think about it; and how we treat people living with it.
We don't need to use the language models of the state as the standard for how we talk about issues in our own communities. I mean, since when has CDC or the health department been on the progressive side of community health? So, let's switch it up and think abut what our people need, instead of what is readily accessible to the state and federal Epi team. HIV is an STI, period- full stop.
By distinguishing HIV from other STIs in sexuality education, we unintentionally reinforce stigma. This separation implies that HIV is somehow fundamentally different or more identifiable than other STIs—an idea that is both medically inaccurate and socially harmful. It fosters a conceptual and cultural divide, influencing how we think about prevention and how we treat people living with HIV.
Language doesn't just describe reality—it shapes it. The words and images we use in sexuality education form the foundation of cultural norms and cognitive frameworks. These become both a model of the world (how we interpret it) and a model for the world (how we behave within it). When we label HIV as "other," we reinforce a framework that stigmatizes individuals and distorts understanding.
To combat this, we need a semantically critical and imaginally conscious approach to sexuality education—one that recognizes the deep influence of language on thought and interaction. Curriculum isn’t just a set of lessons; it’s a blueprint for how we conceptualize everything related to sexuality.
If the goal is to reduce HIV stigma, we must stop treating it differently. HIV is primarily transmitted through sex and should be addressed accordingly as an STI. While it can also be transmitted through childbirth and breastfeeding, these too fall within a holistic, integrative understanding of sexuality. We don't teach just about sex acts; we teach about the broader spectrum of human sexuality, including reproduction, health, and relationships.
Some other examples of how drugs have an effect on identity and social relations:
Pharmaceuticals like flibanserin (sometimes called “pink Viagra”), hormonal birth control, HIV prevention drugs (PrEP), and puberty blockers for transgender youth are changing how we think about biology, identity, pleasure, and rights.
These drugs sit at the crossroads of bioscience, identity politics, and capitalism
People who might use these drugs both welcome and question medicalizing aspects of sex and gender, as society debates which parts of sexual and daily life should be controlled or changed through medicine. Like Viagra—which was originally studied for heart problems before being used for sexual health—these drugs often start as accidental discoveries and then cause big social and physical changes. These changes can reinforce or reshape existing cultural ideas.
I want to build on critiques of medicalizing sexuality and explore questions important to anthropology and public health education, including:
- How do these drugs raise new questions or highlight existing ones about how we experience our bodies and our very being?
- Which kinds of inequality are challenged or reinforced by greater access to these drugs?
- How do these inequalities connect with others based on race, money, religion, or ability?
- What roles do place, environment, and migration play in these issues?
- As we move beyond traditional ideas of sex and gender, do these drugs change old stories about sexual pleasure and pain?
- Or do these drug treatments lead people to resist not just medical control, but also the social norms tied to pharmaceutical use?
Looking at sexual pleasure through the lens of politics and economics helps us see these drugs not just as medical tools but as parts of bigger systems that promote certain ways of being while also sparking new sexual identities and behaviors…..
Theories of Change
What sort of social theory would actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are to to govern their own desires, pleasures, and love affairs? (Anarcho-existentialism)
Marxism
My work is first and foremost an exercise of the imagination (see my post entitled "thinking about thinking." Secondly, I will pull concepts and questions from this writing to use in the first livestreaming sexual education series that my colleague in Knoxville and I are putting together. And with triplicity, I aim to develop the ideational foundations for a new framework for sexuality education in public health.
Considering the number of different approaches to the topicality of sexuality in education, especially prioritizing youth and young adult populations, is evidence that the need for pedagogical change is universally accepted. This common cause is inspiring, considering the lack of disciplinary movement in most fields of study; but with so many voices, it is difficult to hear any one instructional theory rise above the rest. Pluralism has its benefits, but so does collective action, which requires universality.
Pedagogical diversity is great until you want to organize against the structures that minoritize and reify the topicality of sex in the first place.
We need a way of thinking about sexuality that includes the diverse ideas and ideals of the petite bourgeoisie's educator class, represents the values, anxieties and aspirations of labor and the poor, and is "sticky" enough to attach itself to the structures of state and social systems that need to be overthrown. This isn't metaphor. Educators have a moral obligation to speak truth to power and work theory into social action to motivate revolutionary work.
It's time to get free...and we do this by discussing how identity-based inequality, systemic inequities in health outcomes, and disparate sexual subjectivities are causalities of Capital and the apparatus of violence that supports it. This is easy work! Now, let's go further LEFT...🡸 ♇
Post-structural and Deconstruction
Note: this is different from Marxism which directly points out the structures of state and society that oppress the working class and keep us from the Communist ideal; but here we are looking at what is beneath these structures securing them in place. That is, the underlying principles and practices we accept as normal; and the authoirty we give to the cognitive categories and linguistic binaries which set our dichotomous views of sexuality in opposition to more fluid approaches. Power and meaning are seen as one. Differences are determined by culture and contextuality.
It's not enough to just contextualize sexuality in the global political economy, that should be done in elementary school; nor can we lay the examination of power and meaning to rest without considering the very text used to describe and discuss it. We must go further to examine not only culture and context, but textuality and meaning; to expose the inherent contradictions, a priori assumptions, and embedded power structures used to maintain the current system of sexuality education.
Once applied, deconstructionism reveals how unstable and indeterminate these structures are, and through dismantling a text or concept, we can see that meaning is not fixed but rather a product of shifting interpretations and contextual influences. The whole system in truly held up entirely by rhetorical illusions.
As we dismantle conventional concepts in sexuality education by interrogating the language, power, and politics embedded in discourse; we'll also use a general critical theory to explore sexuality as a site of contest, identity-making, and collective desire. The focus is on how there isn't one fixed meaning or static truth to explain anything; instead, there's multiplicity, becoming, and ethical open inquiry.
Pedagogical Principles
Principle 1: We must de-center the "universal human body"
There is no single sexual body, and what we see as "normal" or "ideal" are determined by systems of power, and the norms we accept as natural and prediscursive. Sexuality exists in disabled, modified, aging, deformed, ill, and cyborg bodies.
The question is why does mainstream society (and sex ed) position able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative defaults as the ideal human form? What does this say about our purpose as being who desire and exists in the sexual world? If I am only a consciousness uploaded to a computer, I still have sexuality. If my reproductive organs are destroyed, do I not still want for pleasure? This issue isn't inclusivity here either, its about have a framework that actually addresses our sexual subjectivities in a meaningful, descriptive (rather than prescriptive) way...then we will feel included because it will speak to the inner us; that which is unique.
Deconstruction begins with identifying the ideal form for every word and concept in the lexicons of control that coalesce around us.
We begin every course or topic with images of the idealistic forms, identify the hidden assumptions and ideas we see as natural or prediscurisive; and challenge them through critical discourse analysis.
Principle 2: Bodies are more-than-human assemblages
Note the "more-than-human" part because are always already assemblages of relational desire, unfixed, heterogenous, dynamic, producers (we are never simple "human").
Our sexuality is always already entangled with technology- (sex toys, prosthetics, contraception, hormones, porn, dating apps, and all the technologies of governance used to condition us in the ways of self-regulation. So, it's important to disentangle ourselves from these webs of meaning and learn to navigate these sites of sexuality with confidence, self-control, and a critical lens.
In practice, students will need to map out power and technological regulations that have been previously internalized and accepted as normal; and deconstruct the conceptual binaries and language of sex question, including the words, categories, and oppositions (healthy/unhealthy, male/female, normal/deviant) that structure how we think about sexuality. By identifying the power structures coalescing around the topicality of sex, students can see how how schools, clinics, families, media, and the state each act as “micro-arenas of surveillance” that discipline sexual behavior.
A Lesson on the Cultural Differences and Contextuality of Meaning
Meaning isn't inherent, words do not mean anything outside the contexts in which they are interpreted. A good way to demonstrate this is through history.
Instead of starting with anatomy diagrams, the lesson would open with how societies have historically constructed the “truth” about sex. Students would analyze how different eras — from the Church’s confessional practices to 19th-century medical discourse — claimed authority over sexual knowledge. The point would be to show that what we think is “natural” or “normal” has always been politically produced.
Priority Populations. What's That About?
This teaches how epidemiologic priorities and preventive taxonomies of the state becomes epistemic hierarchies that pigeonhole individuals into prediscursive categories without interpolating other aspects of identity. It shows how the state mind, or governmentality, becomes our own, through biopolitical messaging.
Lessons would highlight how public health campaigns, medical exams, and “at-risk” categories shape who is seen as dangerous, deviant, or in need of regulation. The idea: sex ed isn’t neutral — it’s part of the machinery of biopolitics, governing populations under the guise of care.
Explore how “sexual health” is often defined by pathologizing certain desires, practices, and bodies. Students would be encouraged to ask: who decides what counts as healthy? And what happens to those who fall outside that definition? For example, instead of just STI prevention, there would be discussions on how stigma attaches differently to queer communities, sex workers, or racialized groups.
Critical Theory to Action: Towards an Integrative Approach
Teaching sexuality as a site of resistance, where students study historical and contemporary movements that resist dominant sexual norms — from queer liberation to disability rights in sexuality; will open introduce them to enormity of sexual subjectivities and diverse desires to which they can juxtapose their own ideas and ideals. These would not be treated as “special topics” but as critical interventions in the politics of health. Encourage a commitment to the survival of difference and alterity in sexual communities and groups is a project that keeps us all safe the rigid structures and sterility of fascist health states.
The aim is not simply to follow the rules of sexual citizenship, but to interrogate and transform them. Build critical literacy alongside health literacy
Students would learn to read sexual health campaigns, media, and medical guidelines as texts that have an author, a target audience, and an agenda. Assignments could include rewriting a government safe-sex brochure to reflect different political priorities. Replace moralizing with power analysis. For example, design a one-page hand out for gay men potential exposed to MPOX that encourages vaccination.
We have to break the fundamental dichotomy that gives birth to all binaries: good vs bad.
No “good vs. bad choices” framing — only inquiry into how choices are structured and constrained. Pregnancy prevention, STI testing, and consent would be taught alongside analysis of how laws, economic conditions, and institutional policies make some sexual futures possible and others impossible.
Core Competencies & Activities
Students will understand
- Sexuality is Political and Power doesn’t just regulate sexuality — it builds it.
- How state, corporate, and religious forces shape our bodies and desires.
- Activity: Group mapping of local sexual health policies and who benefits from them (abortion, consent, marriage, etc)
- History of Sexual Regulation
- Describe how colonialism and Western science built systems to control reproduction, desire, and gender.
- Surveillance and Social Control
- From confessionals to clinic forms: how do institutions extract sexual “truths” to govern us.
- Activity Case study: How STI contact tracing can both protect and police.
- Build a flowchart of how sexual data moves from the individual to the state.
- Bioethics and Data Justice
- Medical Authority and Who It Serves
- How “health” has been weaponized against queer, trans, sex-working, and racialized bodies.
- Case study: Psychiatric pathologization of homosexuality, gender variance, kink.
- Sexuality, Race, and Reproductive Justice
- How reproductive control has been used as a tool of white supremacy and population management.
- Introduce the reproductive justice framework.
- Activity: Design a campaign linking sexual health with racial justice demands.
- State Violence in Sexual Policy
- How sex laws criminalize survival — sex work, HIV exposure laws, abortion bans.
- Case study: Grassroots resistance to criminalization.
- Activity: Draft a decriminalization statement for your local context.
- Public Health as Biopolitical Warfare
- How “at-risk populations” are manufactured to justify control.
- Case study: HIV/AIDS and the politics of neglect.
- Activity: Map how “risk” language has been applied to your community and strategize counter-language.
- Resistance I: Queer, Feminist, and Trans Liberation
- How radical movements have redefined sex, gender, and health.
Reading: Gayle Rubin, Sylvia Rivera, ACT UP statements. - Activity: Plan a disruptive action targeting a harmful sexual health policy or campaign.
- Resistance II: Disability Justice and the Politics of Pleasure
- How disabled activists reclaim sexuality from the medical-industrial complex.
- Case studies: campaigns for sexual rights in institutions.
- Activity: Create a zine centering pleasure and access as political demands.
- Media as a Weapon
- Reading public health campaigns as propaganda.
- Workshop: turn state messaging into counter-propaganda.
- Activity: Produce a poster, meme series, or video challenging a current sexual health narrative.
- Digital Surveillance and Sexual Freedom
- How apps, platforms, and governments monitor sexual activity online.
- Case study: data leaks and their impact on LGBTQ+ and sex worker communities.
- Activity: Build a sexual privacy survival guide for your community.
- Collective Action for Sexual Freedom
- Final project presentations: campaigns, actions, or policy demands.
- Strategy session: sustaining organizing beyond the program.
- Closing: collective statement of political demands for sexual liberation.
Deconstructing Sex Topics & Activities
What is “Sex”?
Language doesn’t reflect reality—it creates it. We interrogate how sexual health terms (e.g., “virginity”, “consent”) carry embedded assumptions and exclusions.
The Unspeakable
What’s left unsaid about sex structures what is sayable. Standard curricula are analyzed for absences that shape normative knowledge. What didn't we talk about in this section and why?
Binary Thinking
We unpack binaries (e.g., male/female, safe/risky) and expose who benefits from them—and who is erased.
Writing the Body
Sexual knowledge is not neutral—it’s diagrammed, labeled, and fixed. Students reimagine anatomical diagrams to disrupt binary thinking. (front whole, boy pussy, etc)
Desire and Différance
Meaning is always deferred. Terms like “safe sex” shift in meaning across institutions, contexts, and media. Use articles and media to make a collage of sex safe meanings.
Translating Sexuality
How sex ed changes across cultural, legal, and institutional borders. What gets lost—and why? Research health issues at the border, in Palestine, etc.
Deconstructing “Normal”
We question who gets to define “normal,” and rewrite materials from the perspectives of the excluded. Make a poster/billboard for _________________.
Pleasure, Shame, and the Supplement
Pleasure is often added to sex ed as an afterthought—revealing its structural exclusion. Talk about how you will specifically include pleasure when you speak about sex and sexuality; write a script for role play.
Digital Play
Sexual discourse online destabilizes fixed meanings. We examine how memes, TikToks, and digital vernaculars disrupt norms.
Rewriting Sex Ed
Students create a deconstructed sex ed resource—zines, videos, or pamphlets—built on plurality, uncertainty, and lived experience. Work together as a class with the instructor to develop new materials for outreach and education.
Part II: Assembling Desire-Machines (Deleuzian Network Theory)
Desire as Production
Desire doesn’t fill a lack—it produces reality. We map our “desiring machines” as ecologies of bodies, ideas, and flows. Identify all the people, places, and things that produce and are produced by your desires today.
Escaping the Oedipal Trap
We critique sex ed’s fixation on heterosexual reproduction and rewrite its narrative.
Bodies Without Organs
We reimagine sexual anatomy beyond functional, reproductive biology—articulating bodies in flux.
Rhizomatic Desire
Desire is nonlinear, growing in all directions. Students map the infinite ways intimacy can form.
Lines of Flight
We design paths out of sexual norms, imagining new modes of becoming.
Flows and Blockages
Desire is interrupted by laws, media, and institutions. We identify blockages and invent detours.
Multiplicities over Identities
We move from fixed identities to becoming—acknowledging the self as plural, in flux.
Collective Assemblages
Desire is collective, entangled with politics, ecology, and art. Students build installations mapping these networks.
Sex in Late Capitalism
Capitalism captures and sells desire. We critique consumerized sexuality in media and commerce.
Becoming-Sexual, Becoming-Otherwise
Students create fluid, open-ended resources on sexual health—tools for experimentation, not regulation.
Foundational Framework (The Pentagonal Paradigm)
Defeat the pentagon, win the War on Sex (see my post entitled: The War on Sex: Some notes)
Biopolitics
Sexual health is a battleground for control—governing bodies, births, deaths, and desires through policies and surveillance.Identity
Sexual identity is not innate—it is formed through culture, history, and power. We trace its construction from anthropology to epigenetics.Communication
Language isn’t neutral. Meaning is fluid, context-bound, and shaped by culture. Miscommunication in intimacy reveals societal rigidity.Access
Sexual education must move beyond academic privilege. This curriculum is built to democratize theory for public empowerment.Desire
Desire is not lack—it is force, flow, creativity. Sexuality must be understood as becoming, not being.
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