The Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education: Pleasure Bound by Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen & Mary Quinlivan (Eds)

Abstract

From text: In introducing The politics of pleasure in sexuality education: Pleasure bound, Louisa Allen, Mary Lou Rasmussen and Kathleen Quinlivan (2014: 4) talk to the notion of “meeting at the crossroads” in order to make sense of their editorial endeavour. They present the book as a site where diverse critical views of pleasure’s possibilities and challenges, in and outside school, encounter and converse. In offering a collection of chaptered contributions from diverse geographies, disciplines and concerns about pleasure’s inclusion in comprehensive sexuality pedagogies, they work to “putting pleasure under pressure”, by bringing together perspectives that both illuminate and question, in various ways, the politics for its inclusion. Instead of “ruminating about how far a discourse of pleasure and desire has progressed in sexuality education” (2014: 10), they invite us into the crossroads as a place made to “provoke a reconfiguration of thought” and allow for “new beginnings” (2014: 4).