Pleasure’s perils? Critically reflecting on pleasure’s inclusion in sexuality education

Abstract

Until now, the inclusion of a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education has been constituted as a ‘progressive’ and ‘liberatory’ undertaking. This article seeks to scrutinize the political and moral motivations that have underpinned this discourse by tracing the origins of its emergence. It employs a series of anecdotes from the author’s everyday experience, as a launching point for thinking theoretically about how this discourse might be ‘being put to work’ in educational settings. With recourse to the writings of queer theorists, I interrogate the possibilities and limits of a discourse of pleasure in regard to its social justice aims. It is argued that the ‘politically depressed’ picture these anecdotes suggest, is a consequence of a particular conceptual framing of ‘agency’ that implies future-focused and advancing action. The article proposes new ways of thinking about pleasure’s agency, which hold in tension ‘leftist politics’ and queer theoretical understandings.

Keywords

Agency desire pleasure politics sexuality education

Like other critical sexuality education researchers, I have advocated the inclusion of ‘pleasure’ in sexuality education (see Allen, 2004, 2005a, 2005b). My campaign commenced 10 years ago when I argued for closing sexuality education’s knowledge/practice ‘gap’ with the inclusion of a discourse of erotics (Allen, 2001). More recently, I have suggested the importance of acknowledging young people as sexual subjects who are viewed as legitimately sexual and thus able to access information about sexual pleasure through sexuality education (Allen, 2005a, 2011). Some teachers agree with this call, and increasingly I respond to their requests about how to ‘insert’ a discourse of erotics in sexuality education. This article emerges from simultaneous feelings of ‘thrill’ and ‘disappointment’ about this turn to pleasure. I am thrilled that ‘pleasure’ is now being acknowledged and included in some sexuality education programmes both in New Zealand and internationally.¹ Concurrently, I am despondent about what I have anecdotally witnessed and learned in conversation with colleagues, about the configuration of pleasure’s inclusion in some educational contexts.

This article undertakes a critical interrogation of the desire and ‘vision’ for including pleasure in sexuality programmes. It speaks to Rasmussen’s (2010) observation that there has been a lack of scrutiny of the political motivations that underpin research on sexuality education associated with pleasure and desire. Rasmussen (2010) argues that research in this area perpetuates a problematic binary between ‘progressive secular’ and ‘backward religious/conservative’ perspectives. The inclusion of pleasure in sexuality programmes is constituted as ‘progressive’ involving liberatory and thus ‘noble’ aims. Conversely, moralizing about sexuality education is equated with neo-liberalism and fundamentalism. The latter stance is attributed to religious/conservative perspectives, which are subsequently conceptualized as ‘backward’ and ‘restrictive’. While advocates of pleasure are seen to employ reason, religious perspectives are deemed only to wield ‘morality’. Rasmussen argues that this results in a double standard where the morals of so-called progressive sexuality education, are not explicitly named or scrutinized.

This article seeks to make explicit the disciplinary and political frameworks which have shaped the call for positively addressing pleasure in programmes. My objective is not to undermine the body of important work that has championed the significance of pleasure. Nor do I wish to suggest a kind of moral/philosophical relativism where pleasure is only as ‘valid’ or ‘useful’ to sexuality education as other agendas. Instead, I hope to encourage sexuality researchers and educators to reflect more critically on why and how pleasure is included in programmes. This article constitutes my own attempts at this conceptual/pedagogical deconstruction. As someone who has as Talburt (2009) coins it, ‘put pleasure to work’ for social justice aims, I want to explore pleasure’s theoretical possibilities in this regard. I do not want to abandon pleasure, but revisit it, and like a baker’s dough, knead, stretch and reshape it in order to discern new possibilities (and limits).

The article draws on anecdotes, comprising fleeting observations and snatches of conversations with colleagues. The examples used to generate ‘theory’ were not garnered as part of a formal research project, but surfaced in the course of my everyday life. Some might view this as a flaw in the arguments proffered. However, my aim is not to provide evidence about whether the insertion of pleasure in sexuality education is achieving social justice aims. I endeavour to contemplate the possibilities of this discourse as it gains currency in some educational contexts. The goal is to take a step back and identify how this discourse might be being put into circulation. How are discourses of pleasure configured in educational spaces and what possibilities do these offer students as sexual subjects? While a sustained and systematic study of these discursive manoeuvres could be usefully undertaken, this article offers an antecedent. I pluck experiences from my everyday life as an academic and educator, as points of departure for thinking about and theorizing how pleasure might be being ‘put to work’ in education.

The article begins by tracing a ‘turn to pleasure’ in sexuality education. The qualifier ‘might’ is imperative here as this inclusion is still a new and highly controversial undertaking in many educational contexts world wide. While pleasure has inconspicuously formed part of the curriculum in places like the Netherlands for many years (Lewis and Knijin, 2003) its insertion is much less fathomable in countries like Ireland (Kiely, 2005). By sketching how an interest in pleasure has emerged and outlining the political forces shaping it, I hope to place it under the kind of scrutiny Rasmussen (2010) demands. Thinking about why pleasure’s inclusion is deemed beneficial also forms part of this work of revealing its political motivations. The second part of the article explores three anecdotal moments that draw attention to some potential regulatory effects of a discourse of pleasure. These episodes offer a springboard to examine more theoretically pleasure’s potentials and perils.

The emergence of pleasure in sexuality education

Sexual pleasure has long been a site of political interest for feminists for whom ‘whose pleasure’ is prioritized in heterosexual relationships exemplifies unequal gendered power relations. A plethora of feminist literature has documented women as less likely to experience sexual pleasure in these relationships than men (Holland et al., 1998; Schubotz et al., 2004; Thompson, 1990; Tolman, 2006). Heterosexual relationships have been conceptualized as a site of oppression for women in which men’s sexual needs dominate (Kitzinger and Wilkinson, 1994). The experience of pleasure in heterosexual relationships has subsequently become a marker of women’s empowerment. Those who fake ‘orgasms’ (habitually conflated with sexual pleasure) or do not experience them, are often cast as ‘oppressed’ and ‘disempowered’ by/within these sexual relationships (Roberts et al., 1995). When women experience sexual pleasure, this is understood as a mark of empowerment and a more equitable relationship (Braun et al., 2003).

However, it is possible to problematize this relationship between pleasure and empowerment and even the idea that pleasure, is pleasurable. The presence or absence of ‘pleasure’ can sometimes be divorced from, or inaccurately reflect, sexual power relations. Failing to experience pleasure during sexual activity despite concerted personal and partner(s) effort may have less to do with power than corporeal conditions (e.g. tired or unresponsive bodies). It may also be too simplistic to equate sexual pleasure with an exercise of agency or as proof of empowerment. Sexual pleasure can be experienced under conditions that are not of a subject’s choosing and in which they exercise minimal or no power as those subjected to sexual abuse have testified. Colm O’Gorman, who was sexually abused by Catholic priest Sean Fortune between the ages of 14 and 17, explains that part of getting over this ordeal involved forgiving himself for the times his ‘14 year old boy’s body was obscenely charged and responding to what was being done to me’ (Ford, 2009). In addition, apparent display of corporeal pleasure may not signify this as an embodied sexual experience (Jackson and Scott, 2010). The emergence of ‘raunch culture’ (Levy, 2005) in which young women publicly perform sexual acts, is indicative of a possible disjuncture between pleasureable sexual display and embodied sexual experience.

Given the significance accorded to pleasure as a measure of women’s sexual agency, it is perhaps unsurprising that feminist critique of its absence in sexuality education has emerged. A seminal text in this area has been Michelle Fine’s ‘Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire’ published in 1988. Concerned with the way meanings about sexuality are offered to students in North American schools, Fine identified positive representations of female desire as absent:

The naming of desire, pleasure, or sexual entitlement, particularly for females, barely exists in the formal agenda of public schooling on sexuality. When spoken, it is tagged with reminders of ‘consequences’ – emotional, physical, moral, reproductive and/or financial (Freudenberg, 1987). A genuine discourse of desire would invite adolescents to explore what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experiences, needs and limits. Such a discourse would release females from a position of receptivity, enable an analysis of the dialetics of victimization and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality, initiators as well as negotiators. (Fine, 1988: 33)

The feminist framing of this call for pleasure and desire’s inclusion is signalled in the last two sentences. Fine’s argument follows that when a discourse of desire is missing, young women are positioned in ways which conform to traditional notions of female sexual passivity. By denying young women a sense of entitlement to desire and pleasure, their ability to initiate and negotiate sexual activity is impaired. Without recognition of desire and pleasure as legitimate female experiences, young women are cast within heteronormative discourses of sexuality as the passive recipients of male sexual desire. This argument seeks to disrupt gender normative understandings of sexuality, which restrict young women (and men’s) ways of expressing and experiencing this.

Fine’s work has encouraged a burgeoning of research that takes up the mantle of desire and pleasure by charting its omission in other global locations (Alldred and David, 2007; Allen, 2005a; Connell, 2005; Harrison et al., 1996; Holland et al., 1998; Kiely, 2005; Measor et al., 2000). Some of this work extends her original assertions by indicating how when desire and pleasure do surface they are configured in heteronormative ways (DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Rasmussen et al., 2004).

Having invigorated a turn to pleasure and desire, Fine (2005) revisits the idea of this missing discourse 15 years later in a special feature of Feminism and Psychology and laments it is still missing. She contemplates that since her original article the USA has witnessed a period in which, ‘ … pleasure is almost outlawed, dangerous and privatized’ (2005: 54). An example of this regime has been US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders’ removal from office for publicly mentioning the word ‘masturbation’. Government policy ensuring the only programmes to receive federal funding are abstinence-only has also fuelled this environment (Pruitt, 2007).² Fine’s point is that radical hopes for desire and pleasure’s inclusion in US sex education have encountered ‘extreme backlash’ (Fine, 2005: 56). The severity of these practices leads Fine to admit she is now agnostic about the potential for schools to be spaces for critical education (2005: 54).

This agnosticism stems from a decoupling of the discourse of desire from ‘what some of us thought was the object’ (2005: 56). Fine explains that ‘trajectories of desire have been mediated and colonized by global capital, medicalization, privatization and the imperial presence of the state’ (2005: 56). She reveals another contributor to the special feature, Anita Harris, ‘lets me down with characteristic ease when she explains: ‘Yes indeed Michelle, a discourse of desire is rampant, commodified and being sold – careful what you ask for’ (2005: 57). Despite acknowledging barriers to the realization of this originally envisioned discourse, Fine does not surrender it. Instead, she is hopeful about desire’s possibilities, an optimism derived from the observation that despite being ‘stretched’, ‘organized’, ‘engorged’, ‘shrivelled’ and ‘transformed’, desire has not, (and never will), ‘evaporate’ (2005: 58). To Harris’ claim that desire’s potential has been commercialized, Fine counters that this configuration should not be ‘confused with an explicit commitment to sexual freedom for women’ (2005: 57). As evidence, she points to spaces such as zines³ where young women actively strive to subvert desire’s commercialization. She also signals the enduring work of scholars who seek to include discourses of pleasure and desire in schooling contexts in non-gender normative and heteronormative ways. For Fine then, there is still hope.

Hopes for pleasure

A hope for including a discourse of desire and pleasure in sexuality education is that it might enhance young people’s experience of sexuality. An entitlement to sexual pleasure free from coercion and abuse forms part of a wider shift in understanding that sexual health is more than being ‘disease-free’. Recognition of this holistic perspective is contained in the World Health Organization’s definition of sexual health as:

a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality, it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity. Sexual health needs a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships, and the possibility of having pleasurable and safe sexual experiences that are free of coercion, discrimination, and violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the sexual rights of all individuals must be respected, protected and satisfied. (World Health Organization, 2006)

Within this paradigm, pleasure is seen to have health benefits and improve the experience of sexual activity. Research about young people’s sexual activity indicates that regret and a lack of pleasure are not uncommon experiences (Dickson et al., 1998). Young people often explain they wished they knew more about ‘actual sex’ in order to make sexual experiences more enjoyable (Alldred and David, 2007; Allen, 2005a). Some have suggested sexuality education could provide details about the logistics of sexual intercourse and how to generate a pleasurable experience (Allen, 2005a; Forrest et al., 2004; Holland et al, 1998; Measor et al, 2000) Including pleasure in sexuality education recognizes sexual health as a holistic concept. It is also an attempt to take young people’s requests for information about erotics seriously, providing them with tools that might make their sexual experiences more positive and pleasurable.

Another hope for the inclusion of pleasure is that it might offer an alternative discourse to mainstream pornography. This aim is also framed by a feminist concern for gender equity. It is premised on the notion that mainstream pornography constitutes women as pliable objects of desire for male pleasure. Pornography is one source young people indicate they consult for information about bodies and pleasures (Allen, 2001; Chakraborty, 2010). This source appears to have particular appeal to young men who while using it for sexual stimulation also learn about ‘how to have sex’, corporeality and pleasure. While mainstream pornography is a legitimate source of information about these issues, it is unlikely to be helpful in enabling young people to experience sexual activity in mutually negotiated and pleasurable ways. Mainstream pornography is based on a fantasy where partners are always willing, always easily pleasured and have ‘normative’ bodies that work as expected. In real life, sexual situations are typically more complex and require negotiation, patience and bodies that do not always look or function ‘normatively’. The inclusion of a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education that attends to these real-life complexities might be useful in filling this gap.

A further hope for the inclusion of a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education has a more theoretical basis. It originates from an understanding of discourse as constitutive rather than simply reflective of material reality. Discourses are sets of meanings which structure how we think about something and subsequently suggest possibilities for action (Fields, 2008). This post-structural understanding of discourse (Weedon, 1987) means that how we think about and position young people has implications for their potential actions. Recognizing and addressing young people’s requests for information about pleasure in sexuality education constitutes them as legitimate sexual subjects. This means that their sexuality is viewed positively (rather than negatively as a problem to be managed or denied at school) and they are imbued with agency to make sexual decisions independently. Of course, simply constituting young people as sexual subjects does not automatically provide them with agency. Agency is mediated by a plethora of social structures and other discursive positionings to which a young person is subject to/of. However, this constitution of sexual subjectivity appears a more promising premise to exercise agency in relation to sexual matters than when young people’s sexuality is seen as problematic or denied. At the very least, when a discourse of pleasure is present it opens new possibilities for young people’s sexuality which its absence forecloses.

Drawing from the same theoretical premise, another hope for the inclusion of this discourse is the subject positions it might open for young men. Fine’s vision for a ‘genuine discourse of desire’ as outlined earlier, makes specific reference to benefits for young women. However, this constitutive power of discourse may also have benefits for some young men. Within conventional discourses of heterosexuality young men are rendered perpetually desiring and always, unproblematically able to achieve sexual pleasure (Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli, 2003). This hegemonic constitution of masculinity has particular regulatory effects, alienating some who do not conform to this performance. Within the operation of hegemonic masculinities these young men are rendered ‘effeminate’, and because of the relational and hierarchical nature of gender, subordinated. Such a constitution of masculinity also restricts the possibilities for young men to experience their sexuality in ways that transcend these prescriptions. When young men are always expected to want sex, it maybe difficult for them to refuse sexual advances or report sexual assault. In the absence of a critical discourse of pleasure in sexuality education this status quo of gender normative sexuality presides. The hope for a discourse of pleasure that critically engages with these gender norms, is that in drawing attention to them young men may take up more diverse ways of doing male sexuality. Such performances may offer greater potential for gender equity, more diverse forms of masculinities and male pleasure.

These aspirations for pleasure are clearly framed by a desire for gender equity, increased personal (and ethical) pleasures and less restrictive non-heteronormative ways of doing masculinities and femininities. They are offered in the name of social/sexual justice or at least a particular construction of social/sexual justice. And, herein lies the problem. Whose construction of social/sexual justice and what does this leave out? Does the privileging of an individual pursuit of pleasure and non-normative gender performances hint at neo-liberal discourses of personal autonomy? Who does this construction of pleasure efface? What other understandings of sexual pleasure as a community consideration does it negate? The feminist origins of a missing discourse of pleasure and desire mean that its benefits in terms of gender equity, rather than ethnicity and social class take priority. Does pleasure hold the same significance for young people of different ethnicities and diverse social classes? Coleman’s (2008) research with a culturally and religiously diverse sample of (Christian, Muslim and Hindu) 15–18 year olds in the UK would suggest so. The 3007 young people in this study indicated a preference for increased information in sex and relationships education about how to make sex more satisfying. But how might a discourse of pleasure as it is conceptualized in the existing literature, cater for these young people’s specific cultural and religious contextual/structural conditions? What possibilities for young people’s sense of sexual self exist when a discourse of pleasure and desire is antithetical to their worldviews?

I want to reiterate that I raise these issues in the spirit of critical interrogation of a discourse of pleasure, not the elimination of it. I do not see the arguments about including pleasure and desire in sexuality education invalidated by this interrogation. The issue I highlight is how can sexuality researchers be mindful of the potential limits of this discourse in order to release a more radical potential? Youdell (2009) contemplates a similar quandary in relation to the ‘No Outsiders’ project, which investigated heteronormativity in English primary schools. In reflecting on the project's tension between implementing queer theory and social justice goals she writes; ‘I want to argue that we analyse the possibilities and limits of particular philosophies and approaches including the risks that one approach may have for the goals of another’ (2009: 48) and a little further on, ‘As an everyday politics in education we might engage in an ongoing process of analysing the potential of our tactics and the multiple effects of the tactics we deploy’ (2009: 48). It is this strategy that I endeavour to employ here, and the tenor in which the anecdotes related next are offered.

Anecdotal moments

Something which has troubled me about a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education has been the potential for a ‘pleasure imperative’. This possibility was on my mind seven years ago when I wrote the following about a discourse of erotics.

Including a discourse of erotics in sexuality education could also be about creating spaces in which young people’s sexual desire and pleasure can be legitimated and positively integrated within official school culture. This does not mean that young people have to, or will necessarily seize upon these spaces, but that they are no longer denied them because they are ‘missing’ from sexuality education programmes. (Allen, 2005a: 147–148)

My concern was this discourse was not configured as an imperative, where pleasure is cast as an ideal in sexual relations that young people feel compelled to achieve. Instead, sexual pleasure would have a presence in the curriculum and be represented as a legitimate possibility. If young people want to experience sexual pleasure then, sexuality education could provide them with information and skills to increase the likelihood of this possibility. The onus was on young people’s choice about this potential, not that it should constitute a new imperative defining their sexual experience. That pleasure was a possibility and not a certainty of acknowledging and providing young people with information about pleasure, was also an (implicit) assumption. Knowing that pleasure is a possible and legitimate outcome of sexual activity is no guarantee it will eventuate. Sexual pleasure is political and governed by contextual and socially structured power relations that are not dissolved by knowledge.

The first anecdote I relay I have witnessed on a number of occasions when educators have talked about pleasure. It reveals a ‘pleasure imperative’ where pleasure twists from ‘a legitimate possibility’ to an expected component of sexual activity. The mechanism of this warping is an almost imperceptible slippage in talk. In one instance I heard an educator provide the following justification for why pleasure might form part of the curriculum; ‘If students know sex should be something that is consensual and pleasurable, it may be easier for them to recognise and say “no” to abuse’. The crucial word here is should, ‘sex should be something … that is pleasurable’. Not, that it might be, if you or your partner(s) want it, and can generate this experience, but, sex should be ‘pleasurable’. The idea that sex should be pleasurable implies that if it is not, then something is wrong and/or missing. Pleasure becomes a new gauge against which young people might measure themselves and their relationships. The regulatory potential of this discourse lies in the questions why don’t I or didn’t I feel pleasure, what’s wrong with me? Or, there must be something lacking in my relationship because sexual activity is not pleasurable?

Rather than opening up spaces for young people to experience their sexuality in more diverse and positive ways, existing normative masculinities and femininities are consolidated within this pleasure imperative. The power of conventional discourses of heterosexuality means that foregrounding pleasure in young people’s relationships can work itself out in normative ways. Within these discourses, young men are expected to experience pleasure easily and display technique in coaxing sexual pleasure from their partners (Farvid and Braun, 2006). Failure on either of these counts risks masculine status. Young women on the other hand, are caught within contemporary discourses of ‘girl power’ where they are expected to both want and achieve sexual pleasure while concurrently not appearing ‘slutty’ (Aapola et al., 2005). When coupled with existing discourses of heterosexuality, a pleasure imperative has the potential to reinscribe rather than unlatch normative versions of masculinities and femininities.

These normative expressions of gender also inhere in the relationship this imperative establishes between pleasure and abuse. In this discursive framing the onus remains on the individual potentially subject to sexual abuse to recognize this danger (as signalled by pleasure’s absence) and prevent it. As sexual violence prevention educators have identified, this responsibility has historically resided with potential victims of abuse rather than its perpetrators (Carmody, 2009). For instance, by ensuring they do not drink excessively in order to remain in control of sexual encounters or being vigilant about placing themselves in dangerous situations. These messages are unhelpful in the way they negate unequal gendered power relations. Most perpetrators of sexual abuse are men and those who are victims are predominately women. As a result, the old adage that women are the gate-keepers of heterosexual male desire is cast anew by the pleasure imperative. What is ‘ingenious’ about this recuperative move, is that heterosexual young women’s gate-keeping role is now premised not on the presence of their male partner’s desire and pleasure, but their own!

Slippage into heteronormative understandings of sexual activity is another potential consequence of the pleasure imperative. In this instance, it is not so much what educators say about pleasure, but how it is heard. This situation can occur despite the intentions of the speaker and what is said. For instance, I have heard experienced sexuality educators mobilize a discourse of pleasure by being extremely careful not to presuppose the gender of those involved in sexual activity. On one occasion an educator responded to a male student’s question about how to put on a condom in a way that increases sexual pleasure by saying, ‘you could ask your partner to put it on for you’. On another, I have heard educators use similar ‘gender-neutral’ language by employing the dual options ‘his/her’ or ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ when referring to sexual partners. Whatever educators say however, I suspect that the majority of students (particularly, although not exclusively, those who are heterosexual) ‘read’ the gender of partners as presumed ‘opposite’. Educator’s careful attention to gender neutrality appears to inadequately disrupt heteronormativity’s power to constitute heterosexual pleasure as ‘normal’. Similarly, the use of girlfriend/boyfriend reinscribes a binary that fails to reflect a more complex conceptualization of gender and acknowledgement of those who are transgendered. This utilization of language repudiates the possibilities of transgendered pleasures, that is, the pleasures those who are transgendered may experience as well as the pleasure someone who is transgendered may signify for others.

Another problem with the pleasure imperative is what it negates in insisting that sexual activity should be engaged in only if it is pleasurable. In another instance of sitting amongst in-service health teachers on a professional development course I heard the trainer suggest students consider the following: ‘if someone is not experiencing pleasure then why are they doing what they are doing’? This suggestion ignores the complexities of sexual activity and paradoxically accords young people a restricted exercise of agency. Sexual activity is often actively and purposively engaged in for reasons other than personal pleasure. It can serve as a means of attaining something else we want, like money, a child, some sleep, peer status, emotional security, to feel desired, to be ‘normal’, to pleasure someone else (rather than ourselves), to heal (ourselves or someone else) or to hurt (ourselves or others). Privileging the attainment of personal pleasure as a reason to engage in sexual activity not only eclipses other reasons for this practice, but invalidates them. Who says pleasure is the best and most valid reason to engage in sexual activity? What moral judgements are cast on other motivations for sexual practice when this one is promoted? The last anecdote I want to relay raises the possibility of an appropriation of a discourse of pleasure within a particular configuration of religious discourse. It transpired during a casual conversation with a colleague who is an experienced sexuality educator. I asked him how he perceived the reactions of caregivers with strong religious affiliations to discussions about pleasure with students. Without indicating which faith they were affiliated with he replied, ‘They love the pleasure stuff, because it is a way of encouraging young people not to have sex’. In this specific up-take of religious discourse typically associated with the ‘right’, pleasure is viewed as only legitimate and subsequently possible within a monogamous, heterosexual married relationship (Santelli et al., 2006). Pleasure is employed in this appropriation of the discourse as a barometer young people should employ to make sexual decisions, just as it is within a feminist framework, in other words, if it’s not going to be pleasurable don’t do it. However, couched within this particular version of religious morality, the barometer has only one reading, that is, sexual activity by young people outside of marriage will not be pleasurable so there is no point in engaging in it. The potential for sexual agency and acknowledgement that young people might legitimately experience pleasure are effectively foreclosed by this particular religious discursive configuration. Despite the existence of a discourse of pleasure in the classroom, its co-option by such a religious discourse renders this originally envisioned potential impotent. In relaying this anecdote, I want to highlight one specific configuration of religious discourse, not to suggest that all religions or religious interpretations share this relationship to pleasure, heterosexuality and young people’s sexual behaviour. Religious discourses and their mobilization are diverse and complex, and not necessarily antithetical to a discourse of pleasure as advocated by some feminists (see Hunt and Jung, 2009). What I want to highlight is that in this case, a particular configuration of religious discourse (just like a particular configuration of atheism could also do) served to undermine a discourse of pleasures’ capacity to produce young people as sexual subjects who may legitimately seek sexual pleasure.

A discourse of pleasure: Theoretical limitations

For some sexuality researchers such anecdotes are unsurprising, as a discourse of pleasure was always doomed to failure. As indicated earlier, Talburt (2009) observes: ‘it is impossible to put pleasure to work for a certain type of future’ (2009: 88). A future for example, where permutations of an originally conceived discourse of pleasure fantasize sexual relations as: gender equitable, gender non-normative and non-heteronormative. Framing her argument within Queer theory Talburt writes of pleasure’s limits ‘Queer conceptualizations of pleasure place it outside the realm of the political, as a force that we mistakenly tether to purposes, however liberatory our purposes’ (2009: 89). The theoretically conceived ‘error’ of this tethering is the consequence of the impossibility of ‘queer futurity’. Queerly conceptualized, ‘pleasure’ cannot have a politics because this implies a notion of (future) temporality which queer theory seeks to deconstruct.

In recognition of the queer potential of ‘pleasure’ Talburt draws attention to the distinction Barthes (2005) makes between ‘pleasure’ and ‘jouissance’. For Barthes, pleasure is confined to the realm of ‘conscious enjoyment and linguistic representation’ while ‘jouissance is pure affect, that does not know boundaries and dissolves subjectivity’ (Talburt, 2009: 91). Within this conceptualization there is no need (and no concept) of a subject who seeks or creates pleasure with an agenda or temporal location. In ‘true’ queer fashion, identity is not only displaced but also dismantled, opening up possibilities of what pleasure might ‘be’. As Talburt explains: ‘Pleasure does not develop. It creates and recreates in ways that cannot be known in advance or directed to a future’ (2009: 93). The foregoing anecdotes appear to attest to this situation. Despite so-called ‘liberatory purposes’ a discourse of pleasure has been configured and recuperated in unpredictable ways.

So where do these theoretical explorations of pleasure leave us? Does what I have anecdotally witnessed about a discourse of pleasure mean its presence in school is futile? In order to answer this question I turn to the work of Annamarie Jagose (2010) who examines the phenomenon of ‘fake orgasm’ as a site to rethink the relationship between sex and politics. Her discussion might be usefully rearticulated and applied to offer insights about pleasure as a politics and the agency it might bestow.

Conventionally, ‘fake orgasm’ has been regarded as an apolitical act, one which suggests a lack of agency on behalf of the person (usually woman) who ‘fakes’ and signals submission to, and reinscription of, normative forms of heterosexualities. Jagose suggests however we reconsider the potential for fake orgasm ‘as an inventive bodily technique that differently addresses itself to the regulatory apparatus of sexuality’ (Jagose, 2010: 529). This is possible by reframing pleasures’ relationship to fake orgasm in recognition that

fake orgasm can have nothing to do with pleasure; in miming pleasure, it removes itself from the scene of pleasure. It is because fake orgasm must be impersonal and cannot be pleasurable, that it is always also a problem. I want to suggest instead that the impersonality of fake orgasm is bound up inextricably with its pleasures … [enabling us to] … refigure the implausibly Foucauldian – and perhaps even more implausibly feminist – fake orgasm not as a problem but a counterdisciplinary practice. (Jagose, 2010: 530)

In thinking about pleasure and agency’s relation ‘Queerly’, we might acknowledge ‘the counterintuitive possibility that pleasure does not necessarily feel good’ (Jagose, 2010: 531). In reshaping a notion of pleasure as agentic, Jagose suggests ‘fake orgasm intervenes in the presumption that to register as political sexual practices must be keyed to productive action, must move things along and make stuff happen’ (2010: 532). Instead, fake orgasm does not serve to change future life circumstances but it ‘indexes a future lived strenuously as a disappointing repetition in the present’ (2010: 532). Jagose asks us to reconsider our notion of what constitutes agency as aligned with productive action and future directed change to what might be considered a more ‘mundane’ yet no less potent repetition now. She writes:

fake orgasm affords the valuable recognition that action might be ineffectually repetitive, that agency might be, as Kathleen Stewart writes, ‘strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted’. Not the way we like to think about it. Not usually a simple projection toward a future … agency is frustrated and unstable and attracted to the potential in things. (Jagose, 2010: 534)

This conceptualization offers a different way of thinking about the configurations of a discourse of pleasure I describe in this article. What at first might seem disappointing and lacking in the potential for future directed change, is from Jagose’s perspective an effect of a particular framing of agency and its relationship to pleasure. That students who want to experience pleasure are not guaranteed this experience by this discourse’s presence is not cause for despondency. It might instead be understood as a consequence of the way in which pleasure does not always feel good. When we open up our understanding of pleasure as a site of possibility, rather than a particular future-directed vision, it is possible to recognize its potential. From this perspective pleasures’ agency is not lost when this discourse is co-opted by religious, gender and sexually normative understandings. In Jagose’s reconceptualization of agency, this is a consequence of its often ‘twisted’ and ‘strange’ manifestations. What is important is agency’s presence ‘in’ pleasure as a site of creation and re-creation. It might not look like originally imagined, but the possibility of pleasure is not extinguished. Through its perpetual reconfigurations (which it is impossible to put to work for a particular future) this discourse indexes (to borrow from Jagose) ‘a future lived strenuously as a disappointing (gender and heteronormative) repetition in the present’. For me, the existence of such agency makes it worthwhile advocating for a discourse of pleasure as a site of possibility.

Despite acknowledging from a theoretical perspective the impossibility of putting pleasure to work, in the course of my everyday embodied existence, I just can’t and don’t want to let this go. Spending considerable time in schools means I often witness verbal and sometimes physical abuse based on heteronormative and gender normative assumptions. When dealing with broken student bodies and hopes, I find the idea I am not implementing future directed action for change is too much to bear. This enveloping tension between lived political convictions and theoretical understanding pervades many a researcher’s work as Youdell (2009) highlights in relation to Judith Butler.

Butler’s direct work with the medical and mental health professionals who assess transgender people presenting for gender reassignment, alongside her philosophical work on the illusory nature of gender, demonstrate her recognition of the need for intellectual work and pragmatic politics. (Youdell, 2009: 49)

The solution to this tension Youdell (2009) proposes is to let Queer and post-structural theory and what she conceptualizes as ‘left politics’, co-exist and address each other. This is the space I have come to occupy. It is an existence characterized by perpetual mutability, illuminated by theoretical and lived conceptual tensions, which I struggle to draw into conversation. Such a depiction does not seek to inscribe a binary between theory and practice, but to draw attention to the complexities of the practices of theory.

(Un)Conclusion

One of the aims of this article has been to reflect upon the call for pleasure in sexuality education that constitutes itself as progressive and liberatory. My objective has been to critically interrogate the political motivations which underpin this call. This goal has been operationalized by exploring the disciplinary emergence of a discourse of pleasure and desire in sexuality education and hopes for its entrenchment in relation to social justice. Part of the reason for undertaking this examination was to address the double standard which Rasmussen (2010) identifies as eclipsing the moral agenda of pleasure’s inclusion.

I argue that a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education is underpinned by a feminist politics with aspirations for social justice that involve non-gender and non-heteronormative expressions of sexualities. Hoping to have established this is how pleasure has been ‘put to work’, I have endeavoured to determine whether how this discourse is currently being configured makes these aims possible. A series of anecdotes collected from my everyday experience as an educator and academic provided the launching point for thinking theoretically about these possibilities. At first glance these moments suggest that pleasure is always doomed to failure, will be co-opted and never realized as originally imagined.

Drawing on the work of a number of queer theorists, I conclude in thinking about these anecdotes, that it is impossible to put pleasure to work for particular political ends. This conclusion does not mean that I wish to surrender a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education. Nor does it mean that pleasure is devoid of agency or political effect. With reference to Jagose’s writing around queer agency, I argue that just because a discourse of pleasure does not ‘act’ as expected, does not mean that pleasure’s potential is lost. What might be required is a different and counterintuitive conceptualization of agency that recognizes it cannot be future-focused and able to ‘advance’ in predictable ways. Pleasures’ agency resides in it being a site of perpetual creation and recreation and therefore (sexual) possibility. For some, this might appear as Berlant has coined it ‘the politically depressed position’ noting ‘the centrality of optimistic fantasy to reproducing and surviving in zones of compromised ordinariness’ (cited in Jagose, 2009: 533). For me, it means that pleasure is still worth fighting for.

As might be expected there is still much that remains unresolved in this interrogation of a discourse of pleasure. Did you notice the references to religion, the Catholic priest who sexually abused Colm O’Gorman and the so-called religious co-option of a discourse of pleasure for the promotion of abstinence-only? I consciously surrender at these points to collusion in perpetuating a binary in which crudely, religion is negative and pleasure is positive. I toyed with leaving out the fact that Colm’s abuser was a Catholic priest, but it seemed disloyal to his courage and to erase the fact that his experience forms part of institutional sexual abuse. Herein lies ‘evidence’ of the perpetual tension between a theoretical conceived notion of pleasure’s agency ‘that cannot be put to work’, and everyday lived experience of sexual politics.

Footnotes

Notes

Louisa Allen is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her academic interests include critical sexuality education studies, masculinities, femininities and schooling and innovative research methods. Her latest book is Young People and Sexuality Education: Rethinking Key Debates (2011).

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