Sexuality in school: the limits of education

Review of Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education by Jen Gilbert, University of Minnesota Press, paperback, 2014, 120pp. , $20.00Discovering the new work by Jen Gilbert was particularly valuable, applicable, and timely for me as feminist/queer education researcher. Situating firmly in the philosophical, ontological, and epistemological foundations of education, Gilbert provides significant contributions to queer and sexuality scholarship. I found Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education effectively challenging as it relates to the socially constructed boundaries and norms of education. This work is a robust commitment to the messiness, complications, and contradictions that circulate within knowledge production of school aged children.Gilbert begins the text by situating her positionalities as a queer educator who is emotionally invested in the subject of school as a social justice advocate/activist. Additionally, she provides the theoretical lens to which she examines schooling as a productive force. Queer/after-queer theory intersects with psychoanalysis enabling Gilbert to discursively articulate the ways sexuality in always already part of schooling. She demonstrates how sexuality is operationalized to manage cultural norms and reminds educators to think with theory towards inventing space for "our unintelligible selves" and unleashing possibilities (pg. xxiv). The book has five topical chapters that are all entangled but have specific analytic goals. The first chapter is crucial as it frames and serves as a methodological tool for the following chapters. The following chapters expound on the assertions that are contextualized in chapter one. Additionally, Gilbert strikes a strong balance between theoretical inquiry and applied examples. In doing so, she breathes life into the complexities of sexuality in schooling while creating accessible, material illustrations of educational theories in practice.In the first chapter, Gilbert effectively delineates how adults and at-large cultural norms informs school environments and in turn regulates and limits the metaphysical "child" and childhood sexuality. By eliminating queer knowledge, becomings, and possibilities from educational arenas, schools imagine that they successfully have saved our future through preserving hope that exists within the rhetorical narrative of the innocent, pure, child; yet, Gilbert notes how quite the opposite occurs. She articulates how this productive, xenophobic epistemology harms all people (e.g. students, parents, teachers, administrator, the public) who are entrenched within and place value into this narrow, discriminatory schooling cultural climate.In the later chapters, she continues to skillfully demystify sex and sexuality of children, unveils the flawed nature of liberal sex and sexuality education, and challenges and encourages schools to be hospitable for open discussions about sexuality, sex, desire, and pleasure. Gilbert is able to demonstrate how heteronormative sexuality is entrenched in schools, the deliberate actions that schools take to mute and/or curb non-normative and unimaginable sexual possibilities, and the political becomings of "the child" that adults exploit for their own particular agenda. …