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'Something That Is so Overlooked': Joyfully Exploring Queer Bodies and Sexualities in Sexuality Education with Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada

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Title: 'Something That Is so Overlooked': Joyfully Exploring Queer Bodies and Sexualities in Sexuality Education with Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada
Language: English
Authors: Casey Burkholder (ORCID 0000-0003-3979-7021), Melissa Keehn
Source: Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning. 2025 25(2):201-220.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 20
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Descriptors: Sex Education, LGBTQ People, Workshops, Teacher Attitudes, Equal Education, Controversial Issues (Course Content), Faculty Development, Sexuality, Human Body, Art Activities
DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2023.2296984
ISSN: 1468-1811
1472-0825
Abstract: In this paper, we seek out the possibility of joyful and queered spaces of sexuality education. The sexual lives of queer and transgender youth are often passed over in sex and sexuality education classrooms. In this study, we were interested in exploring how sexual and bodily diversity make an appearance in these often-normative spaces. Through participatory visual research methodologies, we created art and media alongside 40 teachers in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, to look at the ways in which queer sexualities and bodies are made possible and impossible in their sex education practice. In three workshops, we found teachers negotiating the presence of 2SLGBTQI+ sexuality in their classrooms and a missing discourse of queer pleasure -- mimicking the province's tired sexuality education curriculum. We notice that artmaking helps diffuse the discomfort that often accompanies talking (and teaching) about sex in workshop spaces. We argue that sexuality educators need additional professional learning and resources to tend to the sexual lives of young people -- and ultimately, a queering of sexuality education that is more intersectional, pleasure-centred, and joyful.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1466530
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0183055792;bf401mar.25;2025Feb18.03:58;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0183055792-1">"Something that is so overlooked": joyfully exploring queer bodies and sexualities in sexuality education with teachers in New Brunswick, Canada </title> <p>In this paper, we seek out the possibility of joyful and queered spaces of sexuality education. The sexual lives of queer and transgender youth are often passed over in sex and sexuality education classrooms. In this study, we were interested in exploring how sexual and bodily diversity make an appearance in these often-normative spaces. Through participatory visual research methodologies, we created art and media alongside 40 teachers in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, to look at the ways in which queer sexualities and bodies are made possible and impossible in their sex education practice. In three workshops, we found teachers negotiating the presence of 2SLGBTQI+ sexuality in their classrooms and a missing discourse of queer pleasure – mimicking the province's tired sexuality education curriculum. We notice that artmaking helps diffuse the discomfort that often accompanies talking (and teaching) about sex in workshop spaces. We argue that sexuality educators need additional professional learning and resources to tend to the sexual lives of young people – and ultimately, a queering of sexuality education that is more intersectional, pleasure-centred, and joyful.</p> <p>Keywords: 2SLGBTQI+; New Brunswick; participatory visual research; pleasure and desire; queer joy; sexuality education</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-2">Introduction</hd> <p>How do educators welcome intersections of bodily unruliness and queerness in sexuality education? This study was interested in exploring how teachers in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, think about queerness and bodily diversity[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref1">1</reflink>] in their sexuality education practices. Working within a broader research study exploring sexuality education with 440 in-service educators (see Burkholder, Byers, and O'Sullivan [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref2">9</reflink>]), we engaged 40 New Brunswick educators in a series of media-making workshops to seek out queer sexuality and queer-bodies as projects of sexuality education. We wondered, where do intersections of queerness and pleasure emerge in New Brunswick sexuality education classrooms; how might attention to sexuality education through artmaking help educators attend to its transphobic, queerphobic, patriarchal, ableist and racist underpinnings; and how might queer joy spark more life into these spaces?</p> <p>In particular, we explored how teacher practice bumps up against a local cis-heteronormative curriculum – exploring how it is both done and undone by the scripted nature of schooling (Gilbert [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref3">24</reflink>]). We crisscross notions of critical queer theory (Halperin [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref4">33</reflink>]), queer joy (Persaud and Crawley [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref5">50</reflink>]) and comprehensive sexuality education (Eisenberg et al. [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref6">20</reflink>]) and draw attention to those educators carving out spaces of queer sexuality and bodily unruliness[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref7">2</reflink>] in their classrooms. Attention to queer joy highlights the power and uniqueness of queer and trans communities (Duran and Roland [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref8">19</reflink>]) and offers educators an opportunity to disrupt the cis-heteronormative projects typical of formal sexuality education.</p> <p>Through an examination of teachers' artworks (collage, zines and lino prints) and their responses in semi-structured group interviews, we look to educators as they resist and (re)shape sexuality education in ways that attend to their students' queer, sexual and intersectional lives. Specifically, we employ queer joy – both in our workshop spaces and as a framework to examine participants' artwork – to respond to New Brunswick's fatigued sex and sexuality education curriculum. We think queer joy may help teachers navigate repressive norms about queer pleasures, bodies and sexualities in their classrooms – just as we witnessed in our own workshops. We see our paper contributing to literature inciting queer joy in educational practices (Duran and Roland [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref9">19</reflink>]; Wright [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref10">69</reflink>]) and explore what it might mean to cultivate queer joy in sexuality education classrooms.</p> <p>We take up this work as two queer women: one bisexual and one lesbian. Casey is a white cis femme associate professor in a faculty of education whose work centres on queer joy through participatory visual inquiry with Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex + (2SLGBTQI+) youth, adults, teachers and elders.[<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref11">3</reflink>]. Melissa is a white cis femme doctoral student and high school teacher, whose research explores gender and sexuality in schools. The sexuality education we received as queer youth in school was largely guided by moral panics and heteronormativity but would be expanded upon years later in the form of experiential learning and The L-Word. We seek to disrupt the enduring culture of silence around student sexuality in New Brunswick schooling with some educational aftercare that attends to queer sex, pleasure and bodies.</p> <p>We draw our data from participatory workshops that combine artmaking and discussion to encourage teachers to consider how sexuality, pleasure and queerness emerge in their teaching. We engage in this creative praxis in a way akin to Renold and Timperley's ([<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref12">54</reflink>], 542) research in sexuality education, where they engage with participants to encourage the 'co-creation of encounters that facilitate emergent, speculative modes of working where new things might be noticed, felt, made and enacted'. In our workshops, we prompt teachers with a question pertaining to their sexuality education practice and invite them to create art alongside us in a response. We use the art to inspire group discussion. Before explaining our methods, we first contextualise the study.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-3">Queer panic! and sexuality education</hd> <p>Sexuality education operates across every province and territory in Canada, with curricular standards regulated at the provincial level (Davies et al. [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref13">17</reflink>]). Despite its pivotal role in providing young with the competencies needed to attend to their sexual health (Wood et al. [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref14">68</reflink>]), sexuality education is regularly criticised for its inability to be accessible (Balter et al. [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref15">3</reflink>]) or fun (Kolenz and Branfman [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref16">39</reflink>]). While literature details the missing discourse of queered sexuality education in Canadian schools (Gilbert [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref17">24</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref18">25</reflink>]; Wright and Greenberg [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref19">70</reflink>]), sexuality education generally overlooks the needs of 2SLGBTQI+ youth – as well as disabled youth – and perpetuates cis-heteronormative scripts regarding gender and sexuality (Davies et al. [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref20">18</reflink>]; Robinson et al. [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref21">57</reflink>]). Queer panic exists in New Brunswick – and it is possible to draw a connection from the closure of the province's only 2SLGBTQI+ health clinic (Hansen and Harnish [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref22">34</reflink>]) to the New Brunswick Premier's fears about 4-year-olds thinking about gender (Higgs [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref23">35</reflink>]). Valentine ([<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref24">66</reflink>]) drawing on Zurn ([<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref25">71</reflink>]) notes 'queer bodies, bodies that simply do not fit normative narratives, are often talked about and are shaped by knowledge – yet our bodies do not have a place within the [sex education] discourse' (<reflink idref="bib166" id="ref26">166</reflink>). Trans and non-binary youth often experience alienation in sexuality education, which largely defaults to cisnormative understandings of gender identity (Bradford et al. [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref27">6</reflink>]) – with Black and Indigenous 2SLGBTQI+ and disabled youth remaining largely unsupported and stigmatised (Roberts et al. [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref28">56</reflink>]).</p> <p>Our work is grounded in frameworks of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE).</p> <p>Adequate access to CSE remains an ongoing concern for students and educators across Canada (Robinson et al. [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref29">58</reflink>]) – including in New Brunswick (Burkholder, Byers, and O'Sullivan [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref30">9</reflink>]). CSE may be characterised as an evidence-based and body-inclusive approach to teaching and learning about sexuality (Sex Information & Education Council of Canada SIECCAN [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref31">62</reflink>]) and accepts queer and trans pleasure as essential components of youth sexuality (Bonjour and van der Vlugt [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref32">5</reflink>]). Moving away from reproduction-focused sexuality education and towards a more complex understanding of youth sexualities – both on and offline – is central to our practice.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-4">Queer joy and pleasure: the sneaky link</hd> <p>We also frame the study using critical queer theory and queer joy. Queer theory troubles schooling spaces as it refuses stagnant understandings of gender and sexuality (Sedgwick [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref33">61</reflink>]). Queer joy is informed by queer theory, such that its existence disrupts fixed notions of bodies and sexualities and makes visible other, joyful, possibilities of being (Ryan [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref34">59</reflink>]). We conceptualise queer joy as both a key emotion (Duran and Roland [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref35">19</reflink>]) and an act of radical resistance. Acknowledging queerness as pleasurable, queer joy upsets the status quo (Wright [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref36">69</reflink>]). We situate ourselves in joy as a direct response to the woundedness which so often describes the lived experiences of queer and trans youth (Leung and Flanagan [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref37">40</reflink>]) – and push back against monolithic depictions of 2SLGBTQI+ experiences.</p> <p>We argue for a shift towards queer joy as a framework to teach sexuality education: Queer joy allows queer and trans people to exist in connectedness and pleasure (Persaud and Crawley [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref38">50</reflink>]) and seeks to renegotiate what 'relationships can look, feel, sound, and smell like' (Tristano [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref39">64</reflink>], 279). Queer joy brings humour into the sexuality education space to 'joyfully deconstruct sexism, racism and heterosexism related to sexuality, violence, health and pleasure' (Kolenz and Branfman [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref40">39</reflink>], 570). Queer joy unapologetically centres identities which disrupt heteropatriarchal culture (Turesky and Jae-An Crisman [<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref41">65</reflink>]) – through it, queerness becomes centrally positioned in the sexuality education space, rather than positioned as a sneaky link. Queer joy is 'an act of resistance and of rebellion in a society that wants to tell your story for you instead of allowing you to tell it yourself' (Scalzo [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref42">60</reflink>], para. 3). In the sexuality education classroom, queer joy seeks to disrupt heteronormativity and instead tell the story of queer gratification, sensuality and adventure and celebrates queer bodies coming together to pursue pleasure (or perhaps solitarily). Here, bodies exceed the two-dimensional anatomical handouts of penises and vulvas, they upend normative definitions of sex (fingers and fists are great on their own!) and refuse to participate in the rules of education-system sanctioned sexuality.</p> <p>Queer pleasure and joy are profoundly political. We imagine this joy wrapping itself around the white, settler, hetero and ableist projects of much contemporary sexuality education. The tenets of queer joy – connectedness, pleasure, humour and resistance – can also be used by teachers to enhance their own sexuality education. We also recognise that queer joy can be a sticky companion to sexuality education: it can bump up hard against queerphobic political and educational practices. This is something we have experienced ourselves in the workshops, and we have encountered situations where our queer joy was read as dangerous – when, for example, teachers removed themselves from the workshops after we had spoken about gender and sexuality diversity. We also acknowledge that some teachers may find that the expression of queer joy cannot be easily synchronised with the time demands of mainstream sexuality education, and this is something that we push back against in our work.</p> <p>We think about how the intersectional identities (Crenshaw [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref43">15</reflink>]) of queer youth stir the edges of the sexuality education classroom by simply living their lives – whether the curriculum or educators acknowledge their presence or not. We recognise that gender binaries and heterosexuality perpetuated by settler colonialism endure in our own context – unceded and unsurrendered Wolastoqiyik Territory (Reid [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref44">53</reflink>]). We acknowledge the studies that point to the endurance of whiteness in sexuality education classroom materials (Robert et al. [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref45">56</reflink>]), the ongoing infantilisation of the sexual lives of disabled youth in classrooms (Jones et al. [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref46">38</reflink>]) and the overall failure of sexuality education to address gender-based violence towards non-binary people (Wright and Greenberg [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref47">70</reflink>]). These normative conditions bring us to Clare's ([<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref48">13</reflink>], 143) observation that 'gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality; sexuality folds on top of race ... everything finally piling into a single human body'. By joyfully queering pleasure, we attend to this perpetuation of whiteness, ableism and settler colonialism in sexuality education – including in our own workshops – and look to how compulsory cis-heterosexuality is persistently organised across colonial and racist norms (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref49">2</reflink>]). We also disrupt the everyday ableist, racist, cisgender and heterocentric practices that are taken for granted in sex education – and push for a curriculum that celebrates just how dynamic the bodies and sexualities of queer and trans youth actually are.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-5">"Going places" with New Brunswick's sexuality education</hd> <p>In New Brunswick, queer and trans youth are currently the target of the current Conservative government's amendments to Policy 713[<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref50">4</reflink>] – a school-based policy which sets minimum standards for protecting and supporting 2SLGBTQI+ youth and school staff in public schools (Mundie [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref51">45</reflink>]). Via these amendments, schools will require parental permission from students under the age of 16 before acknowledging their genders and preferred pronouns (Ibrahim [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref52">36</reflink>], [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref53">37</reflink>]).[<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref54">5</reflink>] The New Brunswick Premier (Blaine Higgs) and Education Minister (Bill Hogan) have engaged in fear-mongering and queerphobic and transphobic rhetoric – including conflating Policy 713 with the province's sexuality education curriculum (Brown [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref55">7</reflink>]), when in fact, the two operate separately. In an interview regarding the Policy 713 changes, Hogan noted that 'I want to ensure that ... when we are teaching our [sex education] curricula, that parents are informed and that we're not going places where children are not developmentally ready to be' (Brown [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref56">7</reflink>], 0:25). The revised policy combined with the rise of anti-2SLGBTQI+ rhetoric across New Brunswick[<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref57">6</reflink>] indexes the cis-heteronormative schooling environments in which sexuality education classrooms operate (Burkholder, Hamill, and Thorpe [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref58">10</reflink>], 92).</p> <p>In New Brunswick, sexual health has long been a part of the provincial curriculum (Burkholder, Byers, and O'Sullivan [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref59">9</reflink>]) – and has been translated into a variety of learning outcomes at almost every grade level. Notably, New Brunswick's sexuality education curriculum makes specific reference to 2SLGBTQI+ sexuality and identity. For instance,</p> <p></p> <ulist> <item> in <emph>Personal Wellness</emph> (Grades 3–5), students explore 'bullying based on sexual orientation and or gender identity' (GNB/PW [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref60">27</reflink>], 39);</item> <p></p> <item> In <emph>Personal Wellness</emph> (Grades 6–8), students examine how 'sexuality encompasses ... gender identity and sexual orientation' (GNB/PW [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref61">28</reflink>], 32) and learn about discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity;</item> <p></p> <item> and in <emph>Personal Wellness</emph> (Grade 9), students are expected to 'affirm the diversity of relationships across sexual orientation and gender identity' (GNB/PW [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref62">29</reflink>], para. 4)</item> </ulist> <p>While we recognise that sexuality education classrooms are also informed by the lived curriculum – a term which refers to emergent and lived experiences of young people and educators as they learn together (Gougeon [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref63">30</reflink>]) – New Brunswick's intended curriculum takes a generalised, deficit-based approach to queerness. The outcomes as detailed above do not inspire a pleasurable approach to queer bodies, sexualities and sex. In fact, they are routine and over-rehearsed and inspire us in the same way we might be inspired by discourses surrounding lesbian bed death[<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref64">7</reflink>] (Cohen and Sandra Byers [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref65">14</reflink>]) and the overplayed condom rolled onto the banana-penis (Wolfe [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref66">67</reflink>]).</p> <p>In 2020, Casey initiated a study funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council entitled Supports and Barriers in Teaching Comprehensive Sexuality Education in New Brunswick Schools. As part of this project, she published a report highlighting findings from a quantitative survey that outlined the teaching experiences of over 400 New Brunswick sexuality education teachers and found that gender diversity and sexual orientation were topics that most teachers felt needed to be introduced in elementary school (see Burkholder, Byers, and O'Sullivan [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref67">9</reflink>]). Importantly, middle and high school teachers in the study indicated hesitancy about teaching topics related to sexual pleasure – reminding us that Michelle Fine has been reporting on the missing discourse of desire in sex education classrooms since the 1980s (Fine [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref68">22</reflink>]). We were interested in exploring these intersecting lines of gender and sexuality diversity and pleasure across a K-12 framework in our media-making workshops.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-6">Foreplay: the sexuality education workshops</hd> <p>Our workshops were guided by participatory visual research methodologies – and involved working with participants to co-create knowledge and co-disseminate our findings (Moletsane, De Lange, and Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref69">44</reflink>]). Participatory visual research methodologies can allow us to co-create and co-disseminate visual texts that destabilise hegemonic ways of understanding and representing (Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref70">8</reflink>]). However, participatory visual research methods can also reinscribe unequal power relations in research, especially as time passes and facilitators negotiate authorship, ownership and potentially waning interest in the project (Burkholder, Joshua, and Funké [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref71">12</reflink>]; Switzer [<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref72">63</reflink>]). In our workshops, we worked alongside participants to co-produce art and media in response to various prompts to generate thinking around the place of queer pleasure in sexuality education. We engaged drawing (Mitchell et al. [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref73">43</reflink>]), collage (Culshaw [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref74">16</reflink>]), zine production (Burkholder, Hamill, and Thorpe [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref75">10</reflink>]), lino print making and cellphilm production (cellphone plus filmmaking) in response to a prompt (MacEntee and Flicker [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref76">42</reflink>]; MacEntee, Burkholder, and Schwab-Cartas [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref77">41</reflink>]) given to teachers to understand their ideas about sexuality education methods.</p> <p>Consent, ethics, sensitivity, confidentiality, access, power dynamics between ourselves and teacher participants and handling the data are all issues that are not diminished by engaging in participatory visual research (Moletsane, De Lange, and Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref78">44</reflink>]) and needed to be negotiated carefully in the study. In the course of three workshops held across New Brunswick – in Fredericton, Saint John, and a rural community located in the South of the province – we engaged 40 educators in four participatory artmaking practices to make visible their sexuality education practices.</p> <p>We invited teachers to the Fredericton research project in December 2022 by posting a recruitment poster which Casey created on social media (Figure 1) and by directly emailing sexuality education teachers around the city. The second workshop took place in Saint John in May 2023 and was part of a larger teacher professional development day hosted by the New Brunswick Teachers Association (NBTA). Our third workshop was held in a rural community in August 2023. Here, we were invited by a teacher to conduct the workshop with the school's entire teaching staff. At each workshop, we offered multiple opportunities for participants to opt into the research, highlighting the importance of ongoing, enthusiastic and negotiated consent. Participants were asked if they wanted to produce art, then to decide if they wanted to participate in a discussion to respond to one another's artworks. Participants were asked if they would consent to having their art pieces photographed, and where they would be comfortable sharing these pieces (in online spaces, in academic outputs, in reports). Participants were invited to decide to what extent they wanted to participate, if they wanted to use a pseudonym or claim authorship of their pieces, and if they wanted to continue collaborating beyond the workshop times and spaces.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 1. Media-making workshop poster.</p> <p>More specifically, we asked teachers 'How do you take up desire in sexuality education; what are your boundaries in teaching sexual health; what do you wish you had learned about teaching sexuality education; and what resources do you need?' Guided by these prompts, together with the teachers we made cellphilms, zines, lino prints, drawings and collages, and invited participants to consider how desire, joy, queerness and bodily diversity emerged within their sexuality education practices (Figure 2). After the artmaking, we conducted and recorded semi-structured group interviews as we reflected on our teaching practices within sexuality education. We focused in particular on the side of sexuality education that takes up space in non-prescribed ways – that may be fleeting, unanticipated, queer, humorous, awkward, messy, and sometimes uninvited. Our goal was not to prescribe strategies for teaching sexuality education but to encourage teachers to think about how a joyful, anti-oppressive, and queered approach to teaching sexuality education can transform an otherwise boring experience (Bauer, Hämmerli, and Leeners [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref79">4</reflink>]) into something a bit more pleasurable. We explore the dominant themes that were developed in the workshops below.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 2. Collage response to the prompt: what do you wish you learned about teaching sex education?.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-7">Queer pleasure: "I could like this!"</hd> <p>In looking through the artwork and transcripts, we noticed that teacher-participants frequently pointed to a missing discourse of queer desire in sexuality education. They called out the normative culture of government-sanctioned sexuality education and its lack of relevance in the sexual lives of 2SLGBTQI+ students. After creating a clay sculpture of a vulva, for example, one participant noted, 'I feel like we don't cover ... gay relationships, [and] it's usually gay male relationships because lesbians get left off in the dark. Because no one talks about how they have sex ever. Most kids have no concept of how a lesbian would have sex'.</p> <p>As a response to heteronormative sexuality education (think: external condom demonstrations, genital labelling, deficit approaches to sexting and moral panics), some teachers referenced the emergent nature of their teaching when it came to meeting the needs of their queer students. One teacher explained, 'a lot of my students are exploring their sexuality and gender identity at this point, and I'm just trying to figure out better ways that I can help them ... navigate that'. When queer pleasure was brought into sexuality education, participants noted how this was largely done in transgressive ways. Another teacher described how 'there are some [students] in the class that are vehemently against the gender and sexual orientation unit to a point where it's almost unmanageable'. Melissa, reflecting on a previous conversation she had had with Casey, wondered 'what if we talk about just using our fingers? Because for many people, just using your fingers is full blown sex. Imagine how that [conceptualisation] might change the dynamic of a sexuality education classroom'. Melissa offered up her own clay vulva as a response (Figure 3).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 3. A participant's (left) and Melissa's (right) vulva soft sculptures.</p> <p>The educators in the three workshops were aware that they were teaching sexuality education in ways rooted in heteronormative frameworks – often pointing to their own experiences as students. One teacher explained how 'When I was in school at least, they didn't actually talk about women enjoying anything around sex ... as part of my queer experiences, I didn't know I was supposed to like sex. So, I just assumed that all straight women hated sex. Just like me. And then when I came out, I'm like "Oh wait. I could like this!"' And at times, we witnessed these same queer educators – including ourselves – constructing spaces in which to speak back to their/our own very unqueer experiences with sexuality education (see Figure 4).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 4. Casey's (left – funny, less anxious and queer desire) and Melissa's (right – make it queer and support asexual students) collages.</p> <p>While most teachers expressed the desire to make their practice more inclusive, many pointed to the barriers that prevented them from exploring queer pleasure in meaningful ways, including a lack of resources, lack of training and discomfort (Burkholder, Joshua, and Funké [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref80">12</reflink>]) (see Figure 5). When queer sexuality was discussed, it was mainly positioned as an outlier to heteronormativity, rather than as a joyful process of desire, embodied sensation, fucking and curiosity all on its own. And yet, in all of these conversations in mostly white and able-bodied spaces with mostly white and able-bodied educators, we did not explicitly hear anything about disabled sexualities, nor did we hear about what decolonial and antiracist sex education classrooms might look like.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 5. Linocuts in response to the prompt: what do you need moving forward?.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-8">Queer bodies: "it makes me feel bad ass and amazing"</hd> <p>Participants' discussions and artwork about bodies centred on style, deviancy and overall student sexuality. Roberts and Labuski ([<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref81">55</reflink>], 156) theorise on bodily excess in sexuality education spaces and write, 'it is precisely this excessiveness that can facilitate the disruption of normative and fixed bodily imaginaries'. We see participants negotiating through this excess as one participant offers her own critique: 'What are girls wearing? I wouldn't have worn that to the clubs, like how are they dressing like that? And I think they're so exposed to nudity and lingerie and a hypersexualised society on digital media that it's normalised'. Casey offers her own schooling experiences to the conversation, 'well I remember a teacher making me put on a sweatshirt when I had on a spaghetti strap tank top on ... and that [tank top] made me feel joyful in my burgeoning sexuality, but the teacher made me cover up ... [and today] I feel gender joy when I wear a short skirt. It makes me feel bad ass and amazing! And that's how I show that I'm a femme, and that makes me feel awesome, and I don't do it for the male gaze'. We see these types of discussions around youth stylistic expressions reflecting the patriarchal and colonial culture of policing bodies in educational spaces (Neville-Shepard [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref82">47</reflink>]). Although some teacher-participants called attention to how schools problematise student bodies in their artwork (Figure 6), teachers were divided with regard to their opinions on how students dress and re(claim) their bodies in school buildings.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 6. Tell me my body isn't wrong.</p> <p>And yet we also note that participants' conversations and artwork generally prioritised cis, white able-bodies. Teacher-participants noticed how formal sexuality education limits bodily diversity, including queer bodies. Teachers in the workshops reported that bodily diversity – including fat bodies – was often minimised in teaching sexuality education. One teacher said, I really do think [queer bodies and body diversity] is something that is so overlooked and yeah, [students] they literally get a piece of paper with a photocopy of male and female genitalia with little lines that say all the parts and that's basically it, and it's just a shame that it stops there (Figure 7). These limited genitalia brought into the sexuality education space largely belong to normative, thin, white bodies (Fields [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref83">21</reflink>]). Intersex people's bodies and desires were completely absent from these conversations.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 7. How to teach children to be animal.</p> <p>While reference to gender and identity was frequently present in participants' artwork (Figure 8), the bodies of non-binary, trans and gender-diverse students were minimally referenced, or if present were engaged through frameworks of resiliency (Robinson and Schmitz [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref84">57</reflink>]) rather than joy. One workshop participant equated transness with something to overcome, 'I just put a heart with "trans" because I am so proud of our brave students who are, you know, willing to talk about their journey'. Nicolazzo ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref85">48</reflink>], 520) writes about the problem of 'bravery narratives' used to describe trans experiences, and that 'being an "inspiration" is nothing short of a further enactment of systemic trans oppression'. Another participant centred their desire to provide their students with information to understand themselves and noted that they needed more resources: 'I want an expert's help to give my trans and nonbinary students accurate information so they can understand their own bodies'.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 8. Gender, sexuality, Consent, pleasure, kink, spectrum.</p> <p>We wonder how queer and trans bodies might help mobilise New Brunswick educators to engage more fully with pleasure, joy, messiness and resistance – disrupting ideas about how people should look, move, love, fuck and live. Roberts and Labuski ([<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref86">55</reflink>], 157) argue that 'differences are minimised, risks and conformity are maximised, and viscerality is kept at bay' in the sexuality education classroom. We saw this narrow notion of bodily representation reproduced in the workshops that took place – pointing to the need for intentional and queered professional learning. It is concerning that in the workshops we facilitated there was a missing discourse of racial diversity, mimicking the larger trend of sex education being a site of whiteness (Parra [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref87">49</reflink>]). We also saw the absenting of disabled representation from our teachers and in our discussions – sexuality for people with disabilities was only brought forward through infantilising terms (Valentine [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref88">66</reflink>]).</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-9">Artmaking as joyful practice</hd> <p>In the workshops that took place, teachers used artmaking to speak back to normative understandings of pleasure in sexuality education. We saw participants thinking about queer sexualities in their classrooms (Figure 9) and using artmaking to include the bodies and sexual experiences of 2SLGBTQI+ students in discourse on sexuality education. The messy nature of making collages, zines, drawings, and cellphilms helped ease participants' discomfort, enabled us to disrupt a culture of silence, and establish participatory learning opportunities. Teachers expressed their enjoyment with this creative approach to thinking about sexuality, and we suggested they might use these same methods to create sexuality education lessons that students might learn from, find useful, and also enjoy.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 9. Including kids who don't want to be there, like LGBTQ.</p> <p>We see value in the practice of artmaking alongside experienced educators to centre disruption and queerness (see Figure 10). At times, the workshops mirrored how our own sexuality education classes often unfolded – we laughed, ate food, told stories, and talked about the sexy and unsexy parts of teaching sexuality education together. Although participant conversations about youth sexuality were generally conservative (no one talked about fisting, polyamory or kink), we witnessed teachers showing resistance to this normativity and being adventurous in their artmaking (see Figure 11).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 10. Artmaking workshops with New Brunswick teachers.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 11. Why didn't mom tell me to enjoy getting off?.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-10">Conclusion: some educational aftercare</hd> <p>Queerness is omnipresent in the sexuality education space: sometimes it may be felt (Allen [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref89">1</reflink>]), other times it is not (Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref90">52</reflink>]), but it is always unruly (Roberts and Labuski [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref91">55</reflink>]). In this paper, we have shown how New Brunswick sexuality education teachers sought to attend to the queered sexual lives and bodies of students, given the limited pre-service and in-service training available to them.</p> <p>Here, and in the work we have described, we have sought to explore how queer pleasure intersects with teacher lived practice – and how, at times, it may challenge the boundaries of curricula. Queerness and bodily diversity were present in teachers' thinking and artwork, but queerness was discussed under narrowed frameworks such as those offered by white homonormativity. We recognise a similar sentiment in social and cultural perceptions of gender whereby cis queer people seemed more palatable than nonbinary and trans folks for teachers' consideration and classrooms. Furthermore, we noticed that when teachers talked about queer sexuality, it was frequently done using deficit language.</p> <p>We view this absence of queer joy – as a sensuous embodiment that is playful and fun – as a product of our cisheteronormative schooling system (Burkholder, Hamill, and Thorpe [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref92">11</reflink>]), but also, a product of the overall absence of teacher education on sex, gender and sexuality. In contrast, we also saw a lot of joy in the workshops we contributed to (bad sex jokes, humility, and collegiality), with teachers resisting the banal school sexuality education curriculum. For this reason, and because teacher-participants express the wish for it, the potential to broaden the practice of sexuality education is there, simmering. Moving forward, we suggest that teachers in New Brunswick need more professional learning around sex, gender and sexuality. Furthermore, we suggest that queer joy, as a foundation to teach sexuality education, holds the potential to reframe white ableist and homonormative fantasies of gender and sexuality in the classroom.</p> <p>In the workshops, teachers offered us insight into a quietly taught – but loudly lived – part of the New Brunswick public education system. Sexuality education research must 'be open to the surprise, adventure, and [the] wildness of life' (Gilbert and Fields [<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref93">26</reflink>]). We see value in giving greater emphasis to queer bodies as sites of desire in sexuality education – both taking part in and defying homonormative arrangements of pleasure as they move towards something 'fuller, vaster, more sensual and brighter' (Muñoz [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref94">46</reflink>], 189). While queerness is often something that is so overlooked in sexuality education, we think it is exactly the place where we need to direct our teaching efforts.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-11">Acknowledgments</hd> <p>We are thankful to the teacher-participants and to the larger <emph>Supports and Barriers in Teaching Sexual Education in New Brunswick</emph> research team: Lynn Randall, Pam Whitty, Katie Cassidy, Emily MacKenzie, Aaron Beaumont, Katie Hamill, Abbey LeJeune, and Brittany Murphy at the University of New Brunswick, Anik Dubé at the Université de Moncton, Pam Malins at Wilfred Laurier University, and Katie MacEntee at the University of Toronto.</p> <hd id="AN0183055792-12">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0183055792-13"> <title> Notes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref1" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> We use the language of 'queerness and bodily diversity' to gesture towards the multitude of bodies and sexualities that make up a sexuality education classroom. Sexuality education programming often ignores or downplays the range of sexualities and body types that exist in schools (Roberts and Labuski [55]). We actively seek to disrupt these assumptions.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref7" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> We are inspired by Roberts and Labuski's ([55]) work on bodily excess in sexuality education. Bodily unruliness refers to the messy nature of the human body – which cannot be easily contained within the narrow aims of sexuality education.</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib3" idref="ref11" type="bt">3</bibl> <bibtext> Settler-colonialism has eradicated existing sexual and gender diversity in this territory, and for this reason, it is necessary to foreground Two Spirit identities at the beginning of the acronym (Reid [53]).</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib4" idref="ref50" type="bt">4</bibl> <bibtext> Original Policy: Government of New Brunswick ([31]). Policy 713 [original]. Retrieved June 23, 2023 from: <ulink href="http://asd-n.nbed.nb.ca/schooldoc/policy-713-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity">http://asd-n.nbed.nb.ca/schooldoc/policy-713-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity</ulink></bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib5" idref="ref32" type="bt">5</bibl> <bibtext> Amended Policy: Government of New Brunswick ([32]). Policy 713 [amended]. Retrieved June 23, 2023 from: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/news/news_release.2023.06.0297.html</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib6" idref="ref27" type="bt">6</bibl> <bibtext> The September 2023 1 Million March 4 Children, for example, rallied against the inclusion of sexuality or gender identity in Canadian schools. 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  Label: Title
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  Data: 'Something That Is so Overlooked': Joyfully Exploring Queer Bodies and Sexualities in Sexuality Education with Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada
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– Name: Author
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Casey+Burkholder%22">Casey Burkholder</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3979-7021">0000-0003-3979-7021</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Melissa+Keehn%22">Melissa Keehn</searchLink>
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Sex+Education%3A+Sexuality%2C+Society+and+Learning%22"><i>Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning</i></searchLink>. 2025 25(2):201-220.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 20
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  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2025
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  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Sex+Education%22">Sex Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22LGBTQ+People%22">LGBTQ People</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Workshops%22">Workshops</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teacher+Attitudes%22">Teacher Attitudes</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Equal+Education%22">Equal Education</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Controversial+Issues+%28Course+Content%29%22">Controversial Issues (Course Content)</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Faculty+Development%22">Faculty Development</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Sexuality%22">Sexuality</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Human+Body%22">Human Body</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Art+Activities%22">Art Activities</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/14681811.2023.2296984
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  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 1468-1811<br />1472-0825
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: In this paper, we seek out the possibility of joyful and queered spaces of sexuality education. The sexual lives of queer and transgender youth are often passed over in sex and sexuality education classrooms. In this study, we were interested in exploring how sexual and bodily diversity make an appearance in these often-normative spaces. Through participatory visual research methodologies, we created art and media alongside 40 teachers in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, to look at the ways in which queer sexualities and bodies are made possible and impossible in their sex education practice. In three workshops, we found teachers negotiating the presence of 2SLGBTQI+ sexuality in their classrooms and a missing discourse of queer pleasure -- mimicking the province's tired sexuality education curriculum. We notice that artmaking helps diffuse the discomfort that often accompanies talking (and teaching) about sex in workshop spaces. We argue that sexuality educators need additional professional learning and resources to tend to the sexual lives of young people -- and ultimately, a queering of sexuality education that is more intersectional, pleasure-centred, and joyful.
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  Data: 2025
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      – Text: English
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      Pagination:
        PageCount: 20
        StartPage: 201
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: Sex Education
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: LGBTQ People
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Workshops
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Teacher Attitudes
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      – SubjectFull: Equal Education
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      – SubjectFull: Controversial Issues (Course Content)
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      – SubjectFull: Faculty Development
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      – SubjectFull: Sexuality
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      – SubjectFull: Human Body
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      – SubjectFull: Art Activities
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    Titles:
      – TitleFull: 'Something That Is so Overlooked': Joyfully Exploring Queer Bodies and Sexualities in Sexuality Education with Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada
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            NameFull: Melissa Keehn
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              Type: published
              Y: 2025
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            – TitleFull: Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning
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