Sex cells : a postmodern feminist analysis of Nova Scotia's sex education curricula, 1970 and 2004

Abstract

In 1973, the Halifax Family Planning Association lobbied for comprehensive sex education to be trial-run at the Alexandra School in Halifax. Couched in heated public debate, this project records and offers analysis of the public response garnered, and compares it with the public response to the new Nova Scotian manual Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource (2004). It evinces a fraught panic surrounding adolescent sexuality, particularly girl's sexuality, and points to an urgent need for reconsideration when forming sex education curricula. Accompanied by a discourse analysis of the given curriculum materials and the accompanying manual, this project will also work to situate these materials in the long and burdened history of women's bodies and scientific knowledge. Contextualizing each of these "moments" in Nova Scotia's sex education will create an understanding of what grounds the possibility of the strict surveillance of adolescent sexual bodies, including how and why this might be resisted.