Lines of flight in sex education: Adolescents’ strategies of resistance to adult stereotypes of teen sexuality

Abstract

Can school-based sex education (SBSE) that reproduces structural inequalities simultaneously hold possibilities for meaningful and transformative experiences? In this article, we situate students’ perspectives on stereotypes encountered in their school-based sexual education classes in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The analysis is based on 63 interviews with high school students at two schools in the same district in the USA, one high-poverty/low-ranked, and the other, low-poverty/high-ranked. Our analysis reveals how adolescents attempt to resist stereotypes in SBSE while simultaneously creating meaning in their encounters. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts ‘lines of flight’ and ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ allow us to examine resistance in a way Foucault’s interpretation of power and discourse does not. We expand on these concepts and how they are significant in explaining adolescents’ resistances in our analysis.

Keywords

Adolescence Deleuze and Guattari sex education sexual stereotypes teen sexuality

Introduction

Sex education in schools remains a controversial topic, its contents and messages debated among educators, parents, and academics alike. Popular media messages often reveal how debates over what students should and should not encounter in sex education center on discourses of risk and tensions between adolescents’ curiosities and parents’ uncertainties. The way school-based sexual education (SBSE) is framed plays a significant role in the controversy. Here, we focus on students’ engagement with how SBSE is framed, drawing from interviews with students at two public schools in the same district serving a small city in the USA. Our analysis of the data provides insight into how students encounter messages found in SBSE. Specifically, we examine how the dominant approach to sex education in the USA – emphasizing disease and pregnancy, and employing ‘scientific’ approaches to sexuality – influences the meanings students create surrounding sexuality (Bay-Cheng, 2003; Daillard, 2001; Kantor, 1993).

We use a theoretical framework that both builds upon and departs from Foucault’s interpretation of power and knowledge. Foucault’s work emphasizes discourse, and frames subjectivities and bodies as interconnected yet still discrete units transformed by discursive forces of power and knowledge (Foucault, 1978, 1980). Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist philosophy takes this further, constructing an ontology that de-emphasizes discourse and recognizes the inseparability of bodies and affects. Their approach allows us to draw conceptual maps of students’ resistances to stereotypes and identify moments of meaning-making in students’ reflections on SBSE.

Our interview data present a multiplicity of intersecting and often opposed discourses, and extend a growing body of US-based literature examining SBSE through Foucauldian frameworks. However, a Foucauldian understanding of discourse in SBSE does not fully reveal the processes that underlie students’ engagement with SBSE. Conceptually mapping resistances acknowledges the simultaneity of the material and the affectual in students’ experiences. This approach to data analysis reveals how even risk-focused and sex-negative messages about sexuality still provide young people opportunities to generate new material capacities, or resistances, in their encounters with SBSE. Following Deleuze and Guattari, we refer to these projects of meaning-making as ‘becomings.’

Adolescents’ strategies of resistance are multiple and everywhere, but their characteristics and the extent to which they are mobilized are linked to context. We examine how school context and inequality impact both how students create resistances and how stereotypes are socially reproduced in SBSE. We interrogate what differences across contexts may mean both for students and for future SBSE practices.

Critical perspectives of SBSE

The intersections of race, class, and gender play a significant role in young people’s interpretations of messages about sex and sexuality (e.g. Arnett, 2010; Giordano et al., 2009; Irvine, 1995). Scholars have examined cultural and institutional sources such as media (e.g. Ward, 2003), religion (e.g. Meier, 2003), family (e.g. Miller et al., 1986), and school contexts other than formal SBSE classrooms (e.g. Pascoe 2007). SBSE is often preferred and trusted by teens as a source of information about sex and sexualities (Hoff et al., 2003; Somers and Surmann, 2004). While the internet provides speedy access to information, information that may be free of scare tactics, formal SBSE still matters. School curricula inform identities (Apple, 1996) and factor into the construction of ‘normal adolescence’ (Carlson, 2012). Contextual factors such as aggregate socio-economic status, racial composition of student body, and academic achievement indicators impact students’ experiences in schools (Anyon, 2006; Neckerman, 2007; Weis, 1988).

SBSE, regardless of type of program, can be a forum for teaching and reinforcing gendered sexual stereotypes (Connell and Elliot, 2009; Fields, 2008; Wilson and Wiley, 2009). Existing models of SBSE in the USA typically focus on lessons about human reproduction, disease transmission/prevention, and may include other topics such as intimate-partner violence, contraception, and influences on decision-making such as peer pressure and alcohol/substance use (Brandt and Rozin, 1997; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2015). These conventional approaches to SBSE, regardless of whether they are abstinence-only, abstinence-focused, or comprehensive (Jeffries et al., 2010; Lesko, 2010) tend to reinforce the notion that genders are as naturalized as sex organs themselves, a notion supported by other messages about sex and gender that permeate teens’ experiences in schools (Bay-Cheng, 2003; Pascoe, 2007; Schalet, 2000, 2004). In this model, masculinity and sexual obsession remain fused. The responsibility for dealing with this condition falls upon girls and women, rather than equally across genders to mutually articulate wants and limits (Lamb, 2011).

Normative gendered messages in SBSE also commonly portray teen girls as sexually victimized and emotionally vulnerable (Elliot, 2012; Fine, 1988). Along with scholars such as Amy Best (2007) and Meda Chesney-Lind (2010), we take a critical approach to suggestions that the often intense emotional experiences of adolescent girls should be understood as indicators of pathology or vulnerability (Fine and MacClelland, 2006). Rather, we interpret the emotional aspects of teen sexuality as affective intensities, forces of desire that can create meanings and disrupt the normative (DePalma and Francis, 2014; Driscoll, 2013; Ringrose, 2012).

Extending across gender divisions, traditional perspectives of adolescent development reinforce a particular controlling image of ‘the hypersexual teen,’ operationalized as depictions of adolescents as ‘irresponsible, controlled by their hormones and sexually vulnerable’ in ways that ‘promote the belief that young people need protection from themselves, other teenagers, and adults, and cannot be trusted with sexual knowledge and citizenship’ (Elliot, 2012: 66). The notion of adolescents as hypersexual bodies driven by chemical impulses pathologizes adolescent behavior (2012: 68). This pathological characterization is especially directed at young black men, who are often characterized as promiscuous and predatory (2012: 87). As Bay-Cheng (2003: 62) writes ‘… the infusion of a biologically determined hypersexuality into the identity of the adolescent succeeds in giving inevitable and natural cause for adult intervention and surveillance’. SBSE is a key entity in the cultural construction of normative discourses about teen sexuality. Stereotypes about young adults and ‘risky behavior’ constructed outside schools are reinforced through risk-focused sex education curricula (Lesko, 1996, 2010). Discourse analyses of policy and curricula involved in SBSE are critical of its tendency to essentialize adolescence and sexuality (Bay-Cheng, 2003; Doan and Williams, 2010; Fine and McClelland, 2006, 2007; Irvine, 2002).

Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, resistance, and SBSE

Deleuze and Guattari’s work provides a language for describing how adolescents make meaning from and create resistances to adults’ messages in SBSE. As we demonstrate in our analysis, many students constructed narratives that diverged from adults’ assumptions about what teens know, practice, and desire. Others seemingly accepted these stereotypes as truth, revealing how SBSE also contributes to the social (re)production of teen sexuality. The complexity of adolescents’ narratives about their experiences with SBSE, especially concerning strategies of resistance, which students cultivate during encounters with normative stereotypes about teen sexuality, necessitates the use of a theoretical lens that allows us to examine the social production and reproduction of adolescents’ sexualities.

We conceptualize school-based sex education not as a singular event or rigidly contained process within the classroom, but as a location of exploration, a process that brings together an assemblage of affects (Allen, 2015; Duff, 2010; Ringrose, 2011; Thanem, 2010). Affect, not to be conflated with a psychological definition of emotion, is the ‘ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act’ (Massumi, 2002). Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘an assemblage, in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously …’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 22). Their construction of an ontology that eschews dualisms and rejects the separation of affect and materiality allows us to look beyond the discursive construction of students’ narratives and to examine how their desires, hesitations, and resistances emerge from engagement in SBSE. Following Alldred and Fox (2015: 907), we explore teen sexuality as ‘an assemblage of multiple bodies, things, ideas and social formations that cut across cultural and natural realms’.

The assemblage we describe is a conglomeration of the different material and affective forces producing students’ experiences: reactions to ‘nasty’ photos of STIs, discussions about sexuality with friends at their lunch table, drinking and ‘hooking up’ on weekends, text messages with ‘crushes’, and teachers’ discomfort talking to students about sex. These constitute an assemblage in their relation with one another, and these relations have the potential to affect and produce new sexual capacities and desires. This assemblage, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, is a rhizome. The concept of the rhizome emphasizes Deleuze and Guattari’s relational ontology and reflects the constant flux of affects in SBSE: ‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo … The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and … and … and …’ (1987: 25).

In analyzing how students understand their SBSE experiences, we look beyond what ‘is’ and focus on the aspects ‘between things’ that shed light on processes of meaning-making and resistance. While the interviewer asked students about their experiences in SBSE, many respondents provided stories and comments about conversations, events, feelings, and objects from outside the classroom, revealing how what is external invariably flows into and out of SBSE (de Freitas, 2013; Kofoed and Ringrose, 2012). By discussing students’ comments about SBSE and desire in terms of flows, intensities, and multiplicity, we can better convey how adolescents’ experiences of sexuality are complex, produced by much more than just classroom activities and teachers’ lesson plans.

Following other scholars of sexuality and Deleuzian theory (Allen, 2012; Braidotti, 2006; Fox and Alldred, 2015; Ivinson and Renold, 2013; Niccolini, 2013; Renold and Ringrose, 2011), we analyze assemblages of sexuality, adolescent desire, and contested bodies using two key concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari: lines of flight and territorialization. Even though the youth in this study are inevitably embedded in relations of forces, they still participate in meaning-making and often cultivate strategies of resistance (Allen and Carmody, 2012). We use the concept of the line of flight, a movement and flow of desire that ‘branches out and produces multiple series and rhizomic connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 15) to describe teens’ resistances. Adolescents draw lines of flight when resisting stereotypes about teen sexuality and subjectivity, and these resistances constitute fluid and constant movements of desire termed ‘becomings’ (Ringrose, 2010). These becomings are ‘series of flows, energies, movements and capacities … of fragments or segments capable of being linked together in ways other than those that congeal into an identity’ (Grosz, 1994: 198). As opposed to the fixity of ‘being,’ becomings are ongoing transformations and meaning-making projects that involve and arise from affective and material engagement with the social.

However, SBSE is not purely a site of resistance for adolescents, and often operates as a location in which normative sexual attitudes, stereotypes about teen sexualities, and sex-negative messages are socially (re)produced. In this way, SBSE and its contents – hierarchical arrangements of social relations between student and teacher, risk-centered imagery, and biologically essentialist notions of teen desires – can be highly territorializing. Territorialization works to ‘define or sharpen the … boundaries’ of an assemblage and coagulates the assemblage’s multidirectional flows, ‘increasing its internal homogeneity’ (DeLanda, 2006 in Tamboukou, 2010: 13). It is a process that entails how social forces impose themselves on subjects, constructing identities, producing cultural inequalities, and reproducing the normative (Fox, 2016). While lines of flight have deterritorializing potential, in that they resist the solidification of an assemblage’s affective flows and movements of desire, deterritorializations are always relative, and the lines of flight adolescents draw are often reterritorialized in SBSE (Allen, 2012; de Freitas, 2013; Renold and Ringrose, 2008; Thanem, 2010). As such, we recognize that teens’ strategies of resistance, understood as fluid lines of flight and becomings, are not total resistances that allow youth to escape fields of power relations, but reveal processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Tamboukou, 2008). This process underlines the social (re)production of adolescent sexualities in SBSE – ultimately, despite students’ resistances, SBSE is a territorializing force that acts on the affective and material assemblage of students’ engagements.

We focus on two emergent themes from our interviews: adolescents’ reflections on conceptions of teenagers as hypersexual, and the notion that girls’ emotions relative to sexuality are fragile and unpredictable. We demonstrate how adolescents interpret, and often resist, these stereotypes. Further, we explore the salience of school context, race, and class in how SBSE can be a territorializing force. Across these factors, we find differences in strategies of resistance to messages from adults, and frame these strategies of resistance as lines of flight through which students are able to create meaning and cultivate ‘becomings’ in their SBSE experiences.

Methods and data

The following analyses are based on 63 interviews conducted by the second author with high school students sampled according to gender and school context at two distinctly different schools, Area Accolades High (AAH) and Partition High (PHS). Both schools were within the Addleton City Public School district (APSD). Pseudonyms are used for all organizations, places, and individual participants. In interviews, as part of the assent process and in an attempt to give teens some ownership over how they are represented, interviewees had the opportunity to select their own pseudonym.

School context was determined by Department of Education data about academic performance and socio-economic status of the student body at each school. AAH is a consistently highly ranked, low-poverty school and, on multiple indicators, such as standardized test scores, starkly contrasts with PHS. However, these dimensions do not represent the full conceptualization of school context. To fully understand school context and its importance to this study, it is crucial to acknowledge that Addleton is one of the most racially segregated cities in the USA. This study compared across school context as a means for gaining insights into the ways that hyper-segregation and stratification influence what students learn about their bodies and about sexualities.

While we analyze data from interviews, a discourse-based methodology, the questions asked and students’ responses to these questions allow us to identify affects and recognize the embodied nature of teens’ experiences of learning about and engaging in sexuality. We approached our multiple phases of coding the interview data as ‘experiments with order and disorder, in which provisional and partial taxonomies are formed, but are always subject to metamorphosis, as new connections spark among words, bodies, objects, and ideas’ (MacLure, 2013: 229). Both the first and second author coded transcripts in separate phases: the second author conducted the first analyses and the first author coded specifically for the present analyses.

In each phase, we open-coded each transcript, finding and identifying emerging, relevant themes. We identified substantive issues of inequality and adolescents’ encounters with adults’ conceptions of teens and teen sexuality, and then shifted the focus of coding scheme development to include adolescents’ interpretations of and experiences with adults’ understandings of teenagers. This refinement of our focus in analyzing the data allowed us to move beyond identifying substantive patterns and to draw from students’ affects, recollection of embodied experience, and descriptions of complex sexual assemblages (Renold and Ivinson, 2014). The first author’s analysis brings the second author’s analysis into dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s materialist ontology, interpreting the qualitative data through a lens emphasizing affect, resistance, and territorialization.

Our analysis does not provide records of respondents’ ‘own stories,’ rather, the analysis is based on the collaborative work of meaning-making. It is a collaborative process through which meaning ‘is constructed at the confluence of sites of narrative production and the work of situated storytellers, listeners, and readers’ (Gubrium and Holstein, 2009: 197). Through such methods, we are able to address the questions: How do adolescents create lines of flight when encountering and resisting sex-negative, risk-focused messages? How are school context, race, and class important in understanding how SBSE can be a territorializing force?

Strategies of resistance: Challenging adult authority through sexuality

Students at both Partition High School (low-achieving, high-poverty) and Accolades Area High (high-achieving, low-poverty) employed strategies of resistance in their encounters with adults’ conceptions of teenagers, though these strategies distinctly varied across school context. At PHS, students frequently discussed how teenagers will ‘do it anyway’ or ‘want to do it more’ when reflecting on how adults’ messages about sex influenced their affects and desires. PHS students questioned why adults framed sex as bad, dangerous, and to be avoided, and expressed curiosity that pushed against sex-negative messages.

PHS students conceived of agency as embodied sexual intentionality – acting against, or in spite of, adults’ abstinence-focused advice. Such a strategy of resistance allows students to draw lines of flight from adults’ attempts to constrain adolescent sexuality, messages which often cultivate greater mystique and promote curiosity about sex. While a Foucauldian approach simplifies these resistances as remaining embedded within the very discourses teens intend to flee, it is important to recognize how students create meaning in these fluid moments of resistance through drawing lines of flight, generating new sexual capacities and intensities. Charlotte at PHS explained how adults’ prohibitions on teen sex had a paradoxical effect in creating more desire to experiment:

Basically they make you wanna have sex ‘cause they make it seem like it’s something so bad. It’s like a cat being curious. Why can’t I do this? You’re telling me I can’t do it, but you’re not telling me why. So I’m gonna go figure out why not. And that’s what they do. And if they do and find out that they like then, that’s what they do!

Charlotte’s resistance to adults’ abstinence-only messages prohibiting sexual activity and experimentation represents a line of flight. By explaining both her and her peers’ unwillingness to accept adults’ decrees, instead, desiring experience, she practices a form of resistance. This strategy of resistance represents a flow of desire away from the condoned, and Charlotte’s narrative emphasizes the intensity of affective forces in generating resistance. The majority of discussions of resistance through desiring sexual activity and acting on these desires were those of PHS students. Frankenstein at PHS, while explaining her frustration with opaque, vague abstinence-centric messages encountered in SBSE, said:

But if you tell us why we shouldn’t do it then maybe we could get the insight like ‘oh no, we shouldn’t do it,’ as opposed to ‘well I wanna know why they gonna tell us not to do it, I’m gonna go do it anyway to see what’s gonna happen.’ So.

She provides a conceptual map of the collision between abstinence-focused messages about sex and adolescents’ curiosities and desires, raising questions that resonate not only for teens, but also for those interested in improving SBSE curricula. If a strict and authoritarian ‘don’t do it’ dictum, in adolescents’ own words, makes teens want to ‘go do it anyway’, this paradoxical effect has serious implications. Frankenstein’s identification of this possible paradox deterritorializes dominant adult discourses about teen sexuality, challenging the supposed effectiveness of adults’ approaches. Students at PHS described this strategy in ways that reflected concerted attempts to challenge parents’ and teachers’ advice, and revealed how teens possess sexual agency. Sandra conveyed ‘… I dunno, some people, people, some people you can’t stop them from doin’ what they gon do. You can tell ‘em all you want to, but they not gon stop.’ Roxanne explained this theme further:

A parent’ll tell you ‘well don’t do this, and don’t do that,’ but a teacher will tell you ‘well, when you do this, you should,’ like they’re really calm … [B]ut parents are just overprotective over their child, so they tell them what not to do. I’m not sayin that parents should allow it all the time, but, I mean … if your parents tell me not to do somethin’ then I’m gonna do it anyway.

Roxanne’s focus on differences between messages received by different types of adults in her experiences draws into question the generalizability of adults’ knowledge. Ambivalence and confusion arise between ‘truth’ about sexuality provided by educational and family sources and their sometimes-conflicting messages. In voicing her frustration and making her agency clear, Roxanne draws a line of flight and resists adults’ authority – she challenges parents’ abstinence-centered advice as ‘overprotective’ and asserts that, despite what adults say she should do, she is ‘gonna do it anyway.’ Her insistence on making her own decisions when faced with teachers’ and parents’ confusing advice and prohibitions, reveals how affective intensities create movements toward possibilities for action.

PHS students use sex and sexuality as their main tool of resistance and defiance, the primary mechanisms through which they seek to break through barriers presented by prohibitions and messages about teen sex. They draw lines of flight when encountering and resisting adults’ prohibitions and constraining advice. This strategy of resistance indicates that sex-negative and abstinence-focused SBSE messages may be ineffective, or may even have paradoxical effects, considering PHS students’ curiosity about sexuality and rejection of notions that sexuality is ‘bad.’ While these teens’ resistances may have concerning implications for parents, teachers, and policymakers, they nonetheless allow students to engage in meaning-making processes and becomings.

Strategies of resistance: Seeking experience

In contrast to the manifestation of PHS students’ resistances, which primarily involved overt rejection of and action against sex-negative messages, Accolades Area High students approached adults’ stereotypes about teens by emphasizing their perceptions of themselves as mature decision-makers. They made concerted attempts to challenge adults’ presumed authority and knowledge more often than their PHS counterparts by speculating about teachers and parents’ teenage experiences. Through thinking about adults’ possible adolescent errors and desires, AAH students employed a strategy allowing them to question the authority and ‘truth’ of what their teachers and parents may have told and/or taught them.

Both AAH and PHS students speculated about adults’ sexual experiences and challenged parents’ and teachers’ knowledge, but AAH students did so with greater frequency. AAH students also pointed out how adults used stereotypes to be unfairly judgmental of teens, and in doing so, critically called their parents’ and teachers’ perspectives into question. These strategies provided teens opportunities to reflect on how and why adults know what they know about sex – ultimately, they recognized that their parents and teachers learned about sexuality through their own sexual practices, and this allowed them to resist the more sex-negative and ‘scientific’ messages they encountered in school. Many spoke about learning through experience and contrasted this with what was learned in SBSE. Hannah, reflecting on reasons why adults may hold certain conceptions of teenagers, speculates:

I think it’s mostly like if they have children themselves, they don’t want their children to make bad decisions, and maybe as a teenager, they’ve experienced these things with sexual education and with sex and stuff, they believe that maybe from past experiences that they’ve had they believe that teenagers aren’t in the correct mind to make the best decisions … But I think that a whole part of being a teenager is that you’re learning from your own mistakes. You have to learn for yourself instead of having someone who’s already experienced make those decisions for you.

By suggesting that adults who provide specific advice about sex, especially advice focusing on avoiding ‘bad decisions,’ speak from a place not only of past experience, but also of past immaturity, regret, and error, Hannah and other AAH students challenge the authority and knowledge of their teachers and parents. AAH students’ acknowledgment of adults’ own fallibility is a line of flight, a form of resistance to the presumed truth of SBSE’s messages and the hierarchical arrangement of social relations between teachers and students.

In contrast to PHS students’ strategy of resistance to adults’ abstinence-centered or sex-negative messages about teen sexuality, AAH students resisted these messages by calling into question their practical worth and real-life applicability. By emphasizing how they can ‘see both sides’ yet struggle to accept injunctions to ‘wait until marriage,’ AAH students position themselves as mature yet still challenge adults’ advice, drawing lines of flight and emphasizing the forces of desire and affect. Explaining her perspective on experience and sex, Lucy said:

I understand where adults are coming from when they say ‘wait for marriage to have sex,’ but I don’t necessarily agree with it … I think it’s important to stay safe, but it’s also important to gain experience. I’m not saying have sex with whoever you want, but I also believe … it’s emotions too, it’s not just a physical activity.

Lucy’s response challenges adults’ advice to remain abstinent until marriage, and reflects an understanding of sexuality as multifaceted and complex. For Lucy, sexuality is ‘emotions’ and ‘physical activity’ – not just physical action, and not just romantic feelings, but an assemblage of affects and desires. As Brianna reported: ‘you really don’t know until you … experience it for yourself and … dive right in.’ Brianna’s comment reflects affective intensities through her desire to ‘dive right in’ and learn about sexuality through experiencing it. These affective intensities and flows of desire are lines of flight, resisting sex-negativity and abstinence-focused messages. However, AAH students’ expressed desire to learn through experience, unlike that of PHS students, as a whole, was posited as something reserved for the future, when they felt ready for sexual encounters. Rachel commented ‘I can rationalize that better with myself, having sex when you’re a junior or a senior rather than a freshman or sophomore’, and Kate explained her perspective on waiting to have sex until ‘you’re … at the point that you feel that you’re mature enough.’ Rachel and Kate frame teen sexuality as something that requires maturity and preparedness, but still insist upon having agency in deciding when they feel ready – not necessarily waiting until a culturally significant point like marriage. Maturity is something they ‘feel,’ tied in with other affects and embodied experiences in sexuality assemblages that adolescents hope to define for themselves. Kate also draws a line of flight, resisting abstinence-centered narratives, and implies the importance of learning through experience when she comments ‘I may be like Catholic but I don’t think … you should wait until you’re married because you could be like engaged for ten years, and that’s a really long time.’ For Kate, the forces and flows of desire override injunctions to wait for marriage imposed by her religious background.

Further, a majority of students at AAH spoke about not understanding adults’ stereotypes of teenagers as sex-obsessed, and conveyed that such characterizations were unfair. AAH students specifically used words like ‘judgmental’ and ‘stereotypes’ when talking about adults’ perceptions of teens. By identifying certain characterizations of teenagers as skewed, inaccurate overgeneralizations, AAH students called adults’ authority into question. These resistances are affective intensities, reactions to feeling judged or unfairly categorized that generate new capacities to question and act against adults’ stereotypes. Amaya, reflecting on adults’ stereotypes of teenagers as all extremely sexually active, said:

[T]here’s people who do it and then there’s people who just, don’t do anything and, but they judge everyone as a whole. So, I don’t really like that … I mean, it’s not fair, because I’m put into a category that I don’t like … I think they’re just thinking back to what would happen then and the people that they knew and maybe that has to contribute to it.

Amaya employs two different strategies of resistance in identifying adults’ stereotypes of teenagers as unfair judgment, as well as by speculating that adults may hold such attitudes in light of past experiences. Affects and embodied experiences collide in Amaya’s narrative – her frustration, adults’ fears, her peers’ own sexual actions, and her parents’ and teachers’ potential past mistakes or regrets. She draws lines of flight when using these strategies, denying the validity of stereotypes and calling into question the source of adults’ knowledge as one not entirely based on scientific fact, but one constituted by the messiness of lived experience. Jim Kirk revealed similar sentiments:

[W]e’re not like that! … I know that I’m not a terrible, rebellious teenager … I think it’s a stereotype that shouldn’t be applied to teenagers automatically. You should really know the person before you call them rebellious or angsty or anything like that.

The topic of teen sexuality and the political, tenuous character of SBSE often distract from how discussions about sex in hierarchical settings are assemblages composed of multiple affects, bodies, and things constantly colliding and intersecting. Jim’s frustration with stereotypes of adolescence and his insistence on being understood as more than just a teenager contains meaningful affective intensities, as he emphatically exclaims ‘We’re not like that!’ and resists what adults say about teens. His comments reflect how AAH students’ strategies of resistance emphasize agency and a desire to challenge the messages and stereotypes they hear from their parents and teachers. While PHS students cultivated strategies of resistance through the body and through physical action – having sex as a way to resist how adults emphasized abstinence – AAH students attempted to challenge adult authority stereotypes about teenagers as unfair. These differences suggest that inequality across school context significantly impacts what teens’ sexuality assemblages look like, how embodiment and affect generate certain capacities for action and reaction, and what strategies of resistance are used.

SBSE as territorializing force: (Re)producing stereotypes

Students at PHS and AAH both pointed to adults as conceptualizing teenagers as hypersexual, driven by hormones, and constantly having or thinking about sex. However, the ways in which teens responded to this stereotype, either through explicit agreement with it or through personal accounts that affirmed this belief, differed significantly across school context. Almost all mentions of hypersexuality as an accurate portrayal of adolescent sexuality emerged in interviews with students at PHS. Further, considerable differences emerged between respondents’ thoughts about dominant characterizations of adolescent emotional experiences. Perceptions of teen girls as emotionally fragile and unstable stood out in interviews with PHS students. Students at AAH rarely commented on the issue in their responses, while students at PHS tended to expand on this conceptualization of teen girls in response to questions about emotions in SBSE curriculum. These differences allow us to examine how school context and social inequality may play a role in how SBSE can act as a territorializing force on teenagers’ sexual assemblages.

When PHS students elaborated on these understandings of teenagers as hypersexual, a specifically gendered theme emerged. Students at PHS described teen boys’ sexuality as reduced to pure physicality, animalistic urges, and performances of masculinity through sexual ‘achievements’. This theme only arose in interviews with PHS students, and the greatest differences with regard to interpretations of the ‘hypersexual teen’ stereotype related to masculinity occurred across school context, not gender. This suggests AAH students and PHS students encountered different attitudes about adolescent sexuality and descriptions of boys’ sexual desire in their SBSE class discussions – attitudes that contribute to processes of social (re)production of stereotypes and inequality. Ronnie at PHS discussed his sexual experiences:

I mean, being a teenager, I’m gonna have sex regardless. Especially after the first time I had sex, I knew I wasn’t going back. ‘Cause when you’re a boy, that’s really all it’s about really … if you a dude and you ain’t got no girls man … you’re kind of an outcast. You can’t really … say nothin’ about the conversation cause you don’t have no experience.

Ronnie posits hypersexuality as a given fact of adolescents’ experiences, and in his response, links masculinity with sexuality. For Ronnie, being a teen boy means ‘getting girls’ and having sexual experience. Sexual experience is linked to masculine status, but he also reveals how embodied experiences and affect generated new sexual capacities in his encounters: he ‘knew [he] wasn’t going back.’ His response also highlights the complexity of interviewing students about school-based sex education, considering his comments about sex extend beyond his classroom experience and tie embodiment to masculinity, sexual prowess, and desire. However, this narrative reveals how notions of masculinity as linked to sexuality are socially (re)produced. Interestingly, girls at PHS echoed similar sentiments about young men and hypersexuality. Erica Johnson, in her discussion of how boys spoke about sex in her SBSE class, comments:

Some boys like to have sex and they be just like ‘oh well yeah, I’m gonna do this to that girl and this to that girl and when I do …’ They talked about how their sexual life would be … We didn’t wanna hear about all of that. And, basically, some boys were saying that … he didn’t use protection and stuff and that’s when our teacher was trying to tell him the consequences of it.

Ronnie describes the intensity of his own desires, subtly framing them as urges that do not provide a choice, but rather, present an imperative: ‘I’m gonna have sex regardless.’ Students may resist sex-negative messages through seeking out and engaging in sexual activity, but when these resistances also (re)produce stereotypes along the lines of racial and class-based inequality, their lines of flight are reterritorialized by larger cultural forces and phenomena. Erica’s observation of the boys in her class reflect this point – intensities of sexual desire and affects flowing across assemblages of bodies, desires, and the material are caught (re)producing dominant narratives about masculinity and risky sexual behavior. This suggests PHS students are provided fewer conceptual resources to navigate and question stereotypes; inequality across school context shows differences in students’ perceived agency and readiness to question the ‘hypersexual teen’ narrative’s role in the social (re)production of hypersexualized masculinity.

This theme is also closely linked with race and class, and reflects how SBSE is a territorializing force primarily for students of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Almost all students interviewed at PHS were black. More than half the sample of AAH students interviewed consisted of white students, with slightly over a quarter self-identifying as black. Inequality plays a significant role in contributing to the (re)production of stereotypes, and students in low-achieving, high-poverty educational contexts are more readily perceived as latent pregnant teenage girls, unexpected teenage fathers, diseased bodies, and precarious subjects lacking the ‘bright futures’ many AAH students described (Fields, 2005, 2008). Racialized stereotypes of young black men as wanton and predatory not only circulate in social networks and through messages from family, but are also deployed by teachers in SBSE, even if inadvertently so (Collins, 2004; Elliot, 2012; Ferguson, 2000).

In a similar vein, PHS students, when describing girls’ affective intensities – reacting to heartbreak, desiring a relationship, or even coping with sexual assault – tended to characterize affects in psychological terms that framed such intensities as fragility, instability, and even pathology. This process mirrors the social (re)production of hypersexual masculinity stereotypes at PHS, and suggests that students’ encounters with SBSE at PHS were encounters with territorializing forces that limited lines of flight and solidified the fluidity of sexuality assemblages. Sean describes how his SBSE teacher framed girls’ emotions, saying ‘he basically just taught us that women, when you have sex … become more attached … it messes up a woman’s psyche.’ When expressing desire for more discussion of the emotional aspects of sex and sexuality in SBSE, Kesi said:

I think [teachers] should talk about that … because a lot girls, after they have sex with a guy, they’re so depressed, wanna kill themselves, or end up feeling worse than they did before having sex.

Kesi’s response describes the potential victimization girls face in sex and relationships, reflecting broader cultural narratives. Rather than discussing the possibility for embodied pleasures girls can find in sexual or romantic experiences, she emphasizes negative outcomes, charged with affective force and intensity. Kesi expresses that she wants more conversation about emotions in SBSE, but she does so by emphasizing notions of femininity that pathologize girlhood. Her focus on extreme negative outcomes of the perceived victimization at stake in teen girls’ exploration of sexuality arose in other PHS students’ responses. Sam Jenkins, also reflecting on potential benefits of discussing emotions and relationships in SBSE, said:

I think it would help because maybe a lot of boys would get a better understanding on … you just don’t say you’re with a girl just to have sex and then you get her feelings all caught up and attached and then you just go off and be with the next girl and she try to commit suicide or try to hurt somebody.

Both Kesi and Sam Jenkins emphasize the perceived emotional fragility of teenage girls in their responses, (re)producing social ideas of women as ‘hysterical’ and ‘hormonal’ in the context of sex and relationships. They discuss their own desire to cover the emotional aspects of sex more in depth in their sex education classes, and imply fear, uncertainty, and ambivalence, concerned about how to navigate a female psyche able to shatter at the slightest hint of heartbreak or suggestion of abandonment. Their responses emphasize how sexuality is an assemblage of affects, bodies, and movement, but they see getting ‘caught up and attached’ with others’ intensities as being potentially dangerous, given the ostensible risk posed by girls’ supposed fragility.

Kesi and Sam Jenkins both point to an extreme manifestation of girls’ supposed vulnerability. While one can speculate as to whether a crisis such as a heartbroken young girl’s suicide attempt occurred at PHS and figured as the central topic of students’ focus on emotions and sexuality, it is students’ acceptance of, rather than resistance to, such an extreme narrative that raises concern for the present analysis. The reification of gendered categories – territorialization – of boys’ hypersexuality and girls’ hysteria holds real implications for adolescents. Ronnie described how he felt his girlfriend’s past sexual trauma affected her:

When somebody destroys your innocence like that, I just feel that … you’re not even in the right frame of mind … she’s bisexual. She smokes weed. Just probably all types of stuff to get away from the pain of her being hurt …

Ronnie’s description of his girlfriend’s pain and ‘destroyed innocence’ coincide with characterizations of teen girls’ experiences of sexuality as victimhood that leaves them broken and vulnerable. Further, his mention of his girlfriend’s drug use and bisexuality, implicitly framed as coping skills, construct an image of a victimized teen girl in crisis through the lenses of heteronormativity and pathologization.

The contrast between boys’ hypersexuality and girls’ fragility in PHS students’ responses are specifically gendered and imply that at PHS, SBSE facilitates the social (re)production of masculinity and femininity stereotypes. We did not find these themes in interviews with AAH students, which suggests racial and socioeconomic inequality between schools influences the types of messages students receive in SBSE and how these messages contribute to the (re)production of stereotypes that have serious consequences. At PHS, SBSE is a territorializing force insofar as it limits students’ resistances and solidifies desire and assemblages of affects and bodies into territories defined by power and dominant narratives. This territorialization of sexuality may have serious implications for teens’ sexual practices and understandings, (re)producing race and class stratification that extends beyond the classroom.

Discussion and conclusion

Our data and analysis reveal how the difference in school context, an indicator of racial and socioeconomic inequalities, affects not only the degree to which adolescents are able to resist and challenge stereotypes of teen sexuality, but also creates conditions under which adolescent sexuality is territorialized and limited to (re)producing harmful stereotypes. We find that differences between respondents from AAH and PHS suggest low-income, black students at a low-ranked school face significant disadvantages in their experience of SBSE. By using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to examine students’ experiences of SBSE, we provide an analysis of how inequality positions teens to either question narratives presented by adults, or to (re)produce those narratives. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of lines of flight and territorialization in our analysis provided a language with which we could explore adolescents’ strategies of resistance as able to generate meaning and movement toward becomings.

We find that differences in strategies of resistance are particularly salient considering students at PHS emphasized stereotypes of teens as hypersexual and vulnerable much more than AAH students. Students who engaged with SBSE curricula in a high-poverty and low-achieving school context tended to resist abstinence-centered and risk-focused messages by explicitly challenging them and expressing that such sex-negativity actually sparked greater curiosity and desire. This finding raises questions concerning the effectiveness or even paradoxical effect of a SBSE curriculum that sends inflexible, negative messages about sex (‘do not have sex’; ‘sex is dangerous and bad’).

Students at PHS, a typically low-income, low-achieving, primarily black school, (re)produced culturally dominant notions of adolescent boys as hypersexual alongside conceptions of girls as emotionally fragile. These two gendered stereotypes send adolescents – specifically low socioeconomic status racial minorities – the message that their bodies are the sites of biologically determined sexual outcomes. Students’ responses suggest that stereotypes were presented as scientific facts, and point to SBSE as a territorializing force, especially for disadvantaged youth.

AAH students’ responses indicated that students exposed to SBSE curricula in a low-poverty, high-achieving school context conceptualize SBSE as providing decision-making tools, emphasizing students’ perceived agency. Their strategies of resistance called into question adults’ authority, knowledge, and own experience. While students at both schools attempted to subvert their parents’ and teachers’ messages about sexuality, PHS students’ descriptions of their experiences revealed strategies of resistance generated in terms of physical, sexual action, while AAH students approached resistance by framing themselves as mature decision-makers.

Presenting adolescents’ experiences through the lens of gendered, essentialist logic suggests teenagers need protection not only from disease, pregnancy, and violence, but also from themselves, as their surging adolescent hormones and unstable emotions render them at risk. Culturally dominant frameworks that psychologize affect and biologize desire lend justification to risk-centric and sex-negative messaging that may have negative implications for youth. Adolescents’ resistances to these narratives generate opportunities for them to draw lines of flight and create meaning in their experience of learning about sexuality – mapping out moments in which they question adults’ knowledge and authority, refuse to accept stereotypes, and seek experiential knowledge about sexuality. Our respondents’ lines of flight and strategies of resistance indicate how SBSE can be a location in which adolescents create meaning, generate new capacities for action, and experience ‘becomings,’ even if SBSE also holds the potential to territorialize sexuality assemblages. We emphasize that the extent to which inequality contributes to the social (re)production of dominant and often harmful discourses reveals notable areas for improvement in schools’ future SBSE curricula.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, Award #1303573, awarded through the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences – Division of Social and Economic Sciences.

Emma C Frieh is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University – Bloomington.

Sarah H Smith PhD, studies intersectionality, socialization, and sexual health among adolescents in the United States. Sarah is currently a Population Health Research Analyst, examining how patient-reported outcome measures bring the voice of the patient to healthcare to better manage the health of populations.

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