Sex Education: Representations and Norms Regarding Reproduction, Birth Control and Social Relations in French Junior High School Biology Textbooks
Marie Mengotti, Université Paris Nanterre
We will study a corpus composed of all the textbooks that are currently used in French Junior High Schools. They were published between 2007 and 2017 by 7 different publishing houses (16 textbooks in all). We will take into account all the contents (texts and images) linked to reproduction (puberty, procreation and sexual and reproductive risks). We will seek to pinpoint the representations and norms linked to bodies (looks, pleasure, fertility, health risks) and social relations (couple, family, sex, class, and race relations). We will show that these textbooks, which are supposed to reconcile scientific neutrality, promotion of critical minds and respect of the democratic value of equality, do not convey emancipation, but rather perpetuate and legitimate various kinds of dominations : domination of male over female, heterosexuality over LGBTsexualities, white people over racialized people but also of a vision according to which sexuality is only a matter of physiology and health, over a vision in which social relations and pleasure take part in sexuality.
Presented in Session 12: Sexual and Reproductive Behaviour