Queerying the politics of race in the sexuality education classroom

This paper explores what queer theoretical approaches might offer in problematizing the politics of race in the sexuality education classroom through an exploration of the ways in which the politics of liberal recognition (Povinelli, 2002; 2006) shape how sexuality education in schools can respond to cultural difference. Queer theory’s conceptual orientations to confound and provoke notions of normalcy within normalising school cultures (Talburt, 1999), and resist the desire to draw on liberatory emancipatory imperatives to create more inclusive environments Talburt, 2009; Talburt and Rasmussen, 2010), are used to critically engage with the deployment of the Maori notion of Hauora in the New Zealand Health Curriculum.
We critically explore the slippage between the liberal desire of curriculum developers to integrate Maori epistemologies into the New Zealand Health Curriculum document, and their problematic collision with neo-liberal discourses in the contemporary sexuality education classroom.
Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference (Rasmussen, Sanjakdar, Aspin, Allen and Quinlivan, 2011) our findings suggest that the notion of Hauora is made palatable through being aligned with individualistic notions of wellbeing that reflect the individual enterprise subject. Despite the best intentions of curriculum developers and classroom teachers to draw on Maori epistemologies and ontologies, their intentions are thwarted. In the context of a school classroom driven by notions of individual competition, our findings show that engaging substantively with Hauora is secondary to successfully performing the individual enterprise subject Povinelli, 2006). The ‘cunning politic’ of liberal recognition appears to legitimate Maori ways of knowing but actually reproduces, rather than disrupts networks of power, in the process dumbing down Maori epistemologies.