The Politics of Pleasure in Sexuality Education: Pleasure Bound

This is a book about pleasure. It is concerned with how pleasure has been conceptualised as part of a progressive vision for sexuality education over the last twenty years in countries like the US, England, Australia, and New Zealand. This trend was inspired by Michelle Fines (1988) seminal article in Harvard Educational Review entitled, Sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. Fine demonstrated that silences around pleasure and desire at school formed part of an assemblage of officially sanctioned discourses that denied female sexuality. Within the realms of sexuality education research, this work opened spaces to consider what possibilities might be engendered by including desire and pleasure officially in the curriculum.