The Limits Of Sexuality Education

Abstract

Sexuality education in schools in urban India today is often perceived as promoting newlinepromiscuity , leading to experimentation and being detrimental to society . The newlineState and religious groups believe that sexuality education is against Indian culture and values . This heady cocktail imagines a depraved adolescent especially adolescent boys at the centre, one who needs to be taught restraint , abstinence and whose natural tendencies are sought to be controlled. Adolescent boys are imagined to possess uncontrollable sexual urges while adolescent girls are imagined as victims of these urges . Various organisations have advocated for comprehensive sexuality education which includes information about the body, sexual and reproductive health and rights and identities. But is that enough? Can there be a way to imagine sexuality education outside the binaries of abstinence/ Indian values 1 and comprehensive sexuality education? Simultaneously, can there be a way to rethink adolescent male sexuality outside the uncontrollable urges paradigm? Putting these concerns together, I ask in the dissertation: how can rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle class Mumbai reveal to us the limits of sexuality education as we know it today? newlineI uncover the limits of sexuality education by a) examining State, feminist, Christian newlineand sexological materials on sexuality education in Mumbai, b) by exploring newlineadolescent male romance and its affective registers, c) by examining adolescent male newlinesexual knowledge and d) by understanding the regulation of romance in school spaces. These allow me to point to how the feminist, Christian, State and sexological newlinediscourse, while making important contributions to the curriculum, are limited in their approach. The feminist discourse brings to the fore the social and political context of sexuality education, stressing on a Rights-based discourse; the Christian organisation brings in an extensive discussion of romance and love; the State discourse brings in