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Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and
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‘Pleasure has no passport’: re-visiting
the potential of pleasure in sexuality
education
Louisa Allen
a
& Moira Carmody
b
a
School of Critical Studies in Education, The University of
Auckland , New Zealand
b
School of Social Sciences and Psychology , University of Western
Sydney , Australia
Published online: 08 May 2012.
To cite this article: Louisa Allen & Moira Carmody (2012) ‘Pleasure has no passport’: re-visiting the
potential of pleasure in sexuality education, Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 12:4,
455-468, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2012.677208
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2012.677208
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‘Pleasure has no passport’: re-visiting the potential of pleasure in
sexuality education
Louisa Allena
* and Moira Carmodyb
a
School of Critical Studies in Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand; b
School of
Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia
The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea
in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived
notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to
sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and
varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we
did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive
limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on
Foucault’s thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical
understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of
pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open
spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively
pre-conceived or mandatory.
Keywords: education; sexuality; pleasure; ethical erotics; Foucault
The call to pleasure and desire within sexuality education was cemented 23 years ago with
the seminal essay by Fine (1988) about the missing discourse of desire in American sex
education. Although Jackson (1978) had raised an earlier feminist critique of the
‘reproductive’ emphasis of sex education, the negation of pleasure and desire did not gain
traction until Fine’s essay 10 years later. By this time, the effects of the second wave
feminist movement had engendered a focus in education on girls, and the pedagogical
omissions of their schooling. Within sexuality education, an identified silence was the
space and language for girls to explore sexual desire and pleasure (Lenskyj 1990).
The fact that this interest within sexuality programmes has predominately been driven
by feminist scholars is a phenomenon signalled by Lamb (2010). She attributes this focus
to the potential that feminists saw in pleasure and desire to recoup power for young women
lost through their sexual ‘objectification’, ‘abuse and victimization’ and ‘stereotypes of
female passivity’ (see Lamb 2010, 294). While ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’ have been taken-up
within a broader public health agenda as part of addressing sexual health holistically
(Philpott, Knerr, and Boydell 2006), historically within safer sex education programmes
for gay men and by some male sexuality researchers (Ingham 2005), within sexuality
education these foci remain largely the preserve of feminists (who are female).
Since the call by Fine (1988) for the inclusion of a missing discourse of desire in sex
education, there has been a flourish of international research seeking to answer and build
ISSN 1468-1811 print/ISSN 1472-0825 online
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2012.677208
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*Corresponding author. Email: le.allen@auckland.ac.nz
Sex Education
Vol. 12, No. 4, September 2012, 455–468
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on her preliminary thoughts. In a now often quoted passage, this work has been premised
on the idea that:
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 dialectics of
victimization and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality,
initiators as well as negotiators. (Fine 1988, 33)
Much of this ensuing research has sought to uncover the absence of this discourse
globally in, for example, Ireland (Rolston, Schubotz, and Simpson 2004; Kiely 2005),
Canada (Tolman 2002; E. Connell 2005), England (Measor, Tiffin, and Miller 2000;
Forrest, Strange, and Oakley 2004; Alldred and David 2007), Australia (Harrison, Hillier,
and Walsh 1996; Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt 2004; Beasley 2008) and New Zealand
(Allen 2001, 2004; Abel and Fitzgerald 2006). Some of these studies have sought to
develop Fine’s initial vision by delineating the benefits of including a discourse of desire
in programmes (Allen 2005; Higgins and Hirsch 2007; Beasley 2008). Others have
translated empirical and theoretical insights about pleasure into educational programmes
and resources (Philpott, Knerr, and Boydell 2006; Sexual Health and Relationships
Education (SHARE) South Australia 2006; The Centre for HIV and Sexual Health 2007;
Carmody 2009b).
These debates follow heated conversations and feminist conferences resulting from the
1982 Barnard Sexuality Conference in the USA. The linking of pleasure and danger
sparked significant controversy and resulted in exposing significant ideological chasms
between feminists. The ‘sex wars’, as they were subsequently called, saw some women
arguing for a singular focus on eliminating all forms of danger facing women. This
included campaigning around pornography and broader issues that were viewed as antisex
(for example, Dworkin 1979). For others who supported women’s sexual freedom,
such an exclusive focus and politics was perilous, making women’s sexual pleasure
invisible (Vance 1992). Other authors such as Grosz (1989) and Waldby (1997) were
crucial subsequent contributors in taking sexuality discussions further using post-modern
theoretical approaches.
This profusion of research and writing has brought us to the current moment where the
suggestion of including pleasure and desire in sexuality education is no longer new. Such
proposals are, however, still considered as contentious and vigorously contested in some
contexts as they were 23 years ago (see Kiely (2005) for debates in Ireland). What has
changed, however, is that previous feminist proponents of pleasure and desire in sexuality
education have reached a critical pause. Rather than a moment of inactivity, this pause is
about critically reflecting on what has been achieved through the call for inclusion of a
missing discourse of desire and pleasure (Fine and McClelland 2006; Lamb 2010; Allen in
press; Rasmussen in press). This reflective process began in 2005 when Fine published the
article ‘Desire: the morning (and 15 years) after’ in Feminism and Psychology. She wrote
of the inextinguishable presence of desire despite the fact that its trajectories, ‘have been
mediated and colonised by global capital, medicalisation, privatisation and the imperial
presence of the state’ (Fine 2005, 56). While still hopeful about its possibilities, Fine
lamented the way in which calls for desire have been unhooked from their original
objectives and expressed disenchantment with the transformative potential of schools to
incorporate this discourse productively.
456 L. Allen and M. Carmody
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This paper forms a part of this reflexive pause. As part of a special issue concerned
with international perspectives of obstacles to good sex education, we seek to interrogate
how the way in which pleasure is theoretically conceived may inhibit its productive
inclusion in sexuality classrooms. Our paper is deliberately theoretical to build on a
companion piece by the first author which illuminates in a more practical sense the way
pleasure has been or is being put to work in classrooms (Allen in press). We write from
specific cultural and disciplinary locations as two feminist critical sexuality researchers
and educators living in Australasia. As proponents of the potential of pleasure in sexuality
programmes we engage with culturally specific pleasure debates resonant of Anglophone
and wealthy capitalist countries.
Both authors have advocated for the inclusion of pleasure within educational
programmes around sexuality: as part of a perceived need for a discourse of erotics in
sexuality education in Aotearoa New Zealand (Allen 2001, 2005), and within the field of
sexual violence prevention and the sexual ethics work (Carmody 2009a, 2009b)
implemented in Australia and New Zealand. How we seek to contribute to this reflexive
pause is by interrogating our originally conceived intentions for pleasure in our work
together with the conceptualisations of good sexuality education they contain. The reason
for undertaking this examination is to clarify pleasure’s conceptual basis in our research so
that we might see what limitations and possibilities it offers. Our intention is to encourage
other reconfigurations of desire and pleasure that attend to the limitations these discourses
have been perceived to contain to date. While illuminating the normalising potential of our
work we also want to re-think pleasure’s potential through Foucault’s concept of pleasure
as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical work by Jagose (2010) around sexual
pleasure and agency. Although we acknowledge the inevitable caveats of pleasure in
sexuality education programmes, we argue for the continued importance of wedging open
spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not pre-conceived,
heteronormative or mandatory.
This paper begins with each author reflecting on their original intentions for pleasure
within their work and how we sought to take up and contribute to the discourse of desire
discussed by Fine (1988). In a bid to reveal some of the constraints to our originally
conceived intentions and their normalising effects, we explore the closely related issue of
how pleasure has been put to work and interrogated by others. Like Fine (2005), we end
with ‘a rich sense of theoretical possibility’ about pleasure so as to render this pause
generative rather than stagnating. In the final section, we seek to conceptually stretch
pleasure’s possibilities with reference to theoretical tools from Foucault and Jagose.
A discourse of erotics in sexuality education
Young people’s calls for the inclusion of information about pleasure and desire were the
motivating force for engagement with these concepts within sexuality education. Louisa
Allen first became aware of these persistent and vociferous requests during her doctoral
studies in 1997. This involved a project to explore the so-called ‘gap’ between what young
people learn in sexuality education and what they do in practice (Allen 2005). While this
research did not intentionally solicit ideas about content young people deemed important
in sexuality education, it generated tangentially a large number of impromptu comments
about this issue. Students were highly critical of what they saw as the irrelevance of
sexuality education to their lives because of its de-eroticised approach that conflicted with
their own experiences of relationships and the portrayal of these in the media (i.e.
television, film, music, magazines, etc.). In attempting to think through why some young
Sex Education 457
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people do not always, or ever, operationalise sexuality education’s messages, their words
pointed to the fact that it did not contain the information they valued and deemed useful.
These sentiments were echoed in subsequent research which sought to ask students
directly what information was missing from school-based sexuality education and what
content they wanted future programmes to contain (Allen 2008). Of the 1180 survey
participants in this research, the topic they most wanted to know more about was, ‘how to
make sexual activity enjoyable for both partners’. Such resounding sentiment made it clear
that these young people had a strong investment in pleasure and that they wanted sexuality
education to take them, and ‘pleasure’, seriously.
These findings (Allen 2003, 2005) resonated with Moira Carmody’s later work
revealing that many young people felt ill-prepared with the knowledge and skills to
successfully navigate sexual intimacy (Carmody 2009a). Together, our research has
contributed to a growing focus internationally on highlighting a gap between what young
people want to know and what is delivered to them via school curricula (DiCenso and
Borthwick 2001; Rolston, Schubotz, and Simpson 2004; Abel and Fitzgerald 2006; Hilton
2007; Hillier and Mitchell 2008; Powell 2010). Young people surveyed by researchers
from a range of countries are consistently clear about what they want to know, what is
over-emphasised in sexuality education and what is omitted. These areas include
avoidance of discussion of emotional aspects of sexuality, a focus on reproduction,
absence of a discourse of desire and a concentration on the dangers of desire for women –
pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted infections. Discussions of sexuality are also
criticised for being limited to sexual intercourse and avoiding same sex desire. In addition,
students are acutely aware of the awkwardness of some teachers in answering difficult
questions.
Findings from Louisa Allen’s research on sexuality education within the New Zealand
context support Fine’s identification of a missing discourse of desire. Applying the work
by Fine (1988), she sought to draw on the missing discourse of desire as an explanation for
the perceived knowledge–practice ‘gap’. In its silence about pleasure, sexuality education
failed to capture the attention of young people with important safer sex messages, because
they were ‘switched off’ by existing de-eroticised content. Similarly, this missing
discourse constituted young people in ways that were unhelpful to its causes, by denying
them as legitimately sexual and in constraining gendered and heteronormative ways (see
Allen 2005). Including discussions of pleasure in sexuality education might be one
strategy for gaining young people’s attention as a first step in closing the perceived
knowledge–practice gap. It might also serve as a means of meeting their self-prescribed
content needs so that sexuality education better serves these. Depending on its
configuration, the inclusion of pleasure might also offer young people a more nuanced and
complex understanding of themselves as gendered sexual subjects. For young women, this
might mean a previously unacknowledged right to sexual desire and pleasure, and for
young men, access to ways of operationalising these concepts beyond notions of the
predatory male sexual subject. These hopes were framed by a sex-positive view of young
people’s sexuality, and a feminist (Tolman 2002) and critical masculinities interest
(R.W. Connell 2005) in opening up and disrupting existing gendered sexual norms.
In an attempt to build on Fine’s work, it was suggested that sexuality education needed
more than the inclusion of a discourse of desire. Instead, we called for the inclusion of a
more expansive ‘discourse of erotics’, of which ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ both formed a part.
Framed by a concern for social/sexual justice (see Allen 2011), this discourse aimed to be
inclusive of groups that were not explicitly named in Fine’s work, such as gay, lesbian
and bisexual students, those who are transgendered and young people with disabilities
458 L. Allen and M. Carmody
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(see Allen 2005, 145–64). I (Louisa Allen) also drew attention to some of its implications
for students of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds. At the time, I was absorbed with
anticipated difficulties of including such a discourse in school sexuality education when
classes comprised students whose cultural and religious affiliations might object to it.
Rather than being heteronormatively prescriptive, it was hoped that this discourse would
hold open the possibility of ‘pleasure’ as a discussion in sexuality education and site of
agentic possibility for young people:
A discourse of erotics might incorporate an explicit recognition that all young people,
whatever their gender and sexual identity (i.e. transgender, intersex, female, male, lesbian,
same-sex attracted, bisexual, (hetero)sexual or something else) have a right to be positively
acknowledged as sexual subjects who may experience sexual desire and pleasure. (Allen
2005, 146; italics in original)
Opening a discursive space in which young people might have a right to pleasure and
desire is not the same as insisting that they must seek or experience these things. This was
a subtle but important distinction, which sought to preclude a ‘pleasure imperative’:
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. All discourses have regulatory effects and it
is important that a discourse of erotics does not render the experience of desire and pleasure
compulsory or constitute those who don’t experience these things as somehow lacking. (Allen
2005, 148)
My hopes for pleasure were that these were conceived in their broadest sense to avoid a
standardisation of particular practices or regulatory ideas about what ‘pleasure is’. For
instance, sexual pleasure need not be conflated with bodily sensation, emotional response
or cerebral decisions, neither is it necessarily a route to, or evidence of, ‘empowerment’ or
‘sexual health’. While it might be, its relationship to these things is more arbitrary and by
no means guaranteed. As Jagose (2010, 531) describes it, pleasure may not necessarily feel
good at all. The sense of pleasure I had in mind is more akin to Barthes’ (2005) concept
of jouissance. Barthes makes a distinction between pleasure as contained within the
social/symbolic order, consciously enjoyed and linguistically represented, while
jouissance pertains to ‘pure affect that does not know boundaries and dissolves
subjectivity’ (Talburt 2009, 91). What pleasure offers, from this perspective, is a site of
possibility.
I had also conceptualised a discourse of erotics as containing an explicit affirmation of
sexual and gender diversity politics. Talburt (2009) explains that such an intention infers
putting pleasure to work in a mode that is counter-productive. The social/sexual justice
framing of a discourse of erotics is counter-intuitive to the nature of discourse and its
operation. Discourses are not individually authored, mobilised or manipulated. Similarly,
pleasure in the mode of jouissance is, as Sullivan describes:
. . . a pre-discursive, pre-subjective event, an exposure, a becoming-open that is unnameable,
this is if you like, queer. Pleasure is a transformative process, not because it is something I can
employ to my own ends, but because it inaugurates the very site of (un)becoming. Pleasure
exists before the question of its meaning, its use, arises. (1999, 254)
For Talburt (2009, 93), this means political intentions cannot be harnessed to pleasure
because doing so undermines its transformative potential as something that ‘creates and
recreates in ways that cannot be known in advance’. Binding pleasure to political aims
such as social/sexual justice saddles it with normalising and regulatory practices.
Sex Education 459
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Paradoxically, the potential for the transformative ‘queerness’ of pleasure is eradicated at
the very moment it is identified with queer politics. In such an instance, it becomes a
regulatory practice that establishes identity binarisms of queer/non-queer pleasures and
subsequently its affective potential to dissolve subjectivity erodes.
The linking of feminist aspirations of young women’s sexual empowerment with
pleasure is another example of how a discourse of erotics might be put to work with
unanticipated regulatory effects. Tolman (2002) writes of the importance of young women
having access to a discourse of desire in sexuality education that enables them to articulate
and experience in embodied ways their own desires. It is only when young women know
what embodied desire feels like, Tolman (2002) argues, that they can decide whether to
engage in a particular sexual practice. This knowledge of pleasure and desire is deemed to
have a protective effect against sexual coercion or sexual behaviour that young women
do not actively desire.
Lamb (2010, 330) argues that these kinds of hopes for pleasure once again burden
young women with the responsibility of ‘understanding their bodies’ and ‘managing their
orgasms’ and may be unrealistic to achieve. She also maintains that: ‘the kind of sexual
person who feels pleasure, desire, and subjectivity may be ironically similar to the
commodified, sexualised, marketed teen girl that is also problematic for feminism’ (Lamb
2010, 296; see also, McNair 2002; Levy 2005). Fine (2005, 57) reminds us however that,
‘while the commodification of desire has a long history, it should not be confused with an
explicit commitment to sexual freedom for women’. Rather than a tool for sexual agency,
pleasure as discursively configured here, serves to re-inscribe traditional notions of female
sexual responsibility and objectification. The nature of discourse means individuals do not
exert control over how it operates in different contents, so it may become untethered from
its original intentions around acting as an antidote for female sexual objectification and
disempowerment.
Ethical erotics and preventing sexual violence
Louisa Allen’s way into this work was through listening closely to what young people
wanted from sexuality education, whereas my (Moira Carmody) research began with
adults exploring the ways in which they had learnt to negotiate sexual relationships. In
2005, I published an article in the journal Sexualities (Carmody 2005), which presented
findings from a small qualitative study. These demonstrated the way in which women
and men of diverse sexualities were able to negotiate ethical and non-violent sexual
relationships. My argument in this article centred on sexual ethics and its conceptual
usefulness to sexuality and violence prevention education. It was from this starting point
that I then moved on to work with young people aged 16–25 years of age. My call
for an ethical erotics discourse to inform violence prevention programmes came from
several concerns. I argued that an artificial separation of sexuality education from
violence prevention education was not helpful to young people and was a false
separation that primarily reflected different professional backgrounds of researchers and
educators. Instead, I argued for a greater integration of all aspects of sexuality including
the need to explicitly address within programmes pressured, coerced sex and sexual
assault.
The contested nature of sexuality education is well recognised and the field is saturated
by a myriad of discourses as Jones (2011a, 2011b) has recently documented. Informed by
Foucault’s work on ethical sexual subjectivity, I put forward a definition of ethical erotics
as involving:
460 L. Allen and M. Carmody
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negotiation in which care of the self is linked to care of the other. For either to be missing or
limited tips the balance from mutual pleasure to dangerous sex either physically or
emotionally. This then would be unethical and would significantly increase the risk or danger
for the individuals concerned. (Carmody 2005, 477)
The linkage between ethical erotics and pleasure therefore created alternative spaces to
explore new possibilities of intimate pleasures not constrained by dominant
heteronormative discourses. Like Louisa Allen, I was conceptualising this work with a
focus on possibilities as opposed to a sexual restraint model often applied to young people.
The following discussion will tease this out more fully.
Until very recently, most sexuality education programmes in schools have avoided
complex ethical and legal questions such as pressured and coerced sex. As such they have
avoided dealing with aspects of unethical sexual subjectivity. Interviews with young
people conducted in 2008 in NSW, Australia, found that sexual and other forms of
intimate violence were rarely discussed in schools (Carmody 2009a). If they were
included, they appeared as part of a larger discourse of sexual risk but were not addressed
in any depth. Alternatively, a violence against women service might be invited in to
provide a one-off presentation on the law and victim support services. These approaches
are severely limiting in terms of equipping young people with the knowledge and skills
needed to explore and develop ethical sexual lives. They fail to recognise that sexual
encounters can move from pleasurable to dangerous in the space of seconds and this
reinforces discourses of sexual violence as happening outside the ‘normal’ practices of
sexual intimacy.
Normalising discourses attempt to suppress, control and police the sexual activity of
communities and subgroups within them. Young people are one such group that are a
constant focus of moral panic. Their desires, acts and pleasures are held up to scrutiny and
control in official discourses but meanwhile they operate in their own worlds with their
own rules, methods of regulation and customs. While they cannot stand outside the
cultural and historical forces that shape them, some can and do resist dominant societal
expectations of how they are expected to behave. One of the difficulties young people face
is having access to some navigation tools or maps to guide them through the new world
they enter as emerging sexual subjects. Sawicki argues that:
Foucault attempted to open the epistemological and cultural space for us to invent new truths
about ourselves – to subject ourselves to new forms of self understanding. Why? Because he
believed the cost associated with continuing to operate within the regime of sexual
normalisation was both too high and unnecessarily constraining. (2010, 186)
It is this challenge to sexual normalisation including the normalisation of sexual
violence between intimate partners that ethical erotics discourse seeks to address. It aims
to do this by placing ethical sexual subjectivity as central to the task of countering the
disciplinary system of sexuality. Within this counter discourse lies the possibility,
following Foucault, ‘of a non-disciplinary eroticism – that of a body in a volatile and
diffused state, with its chance encounters and unplanned pleasures’ (cited in Jagose 2010,
523).
Sexual expression is primarily a relational activity and as such raises the question of
how we are ‘to do’ this relationship (however fleeting or lasting) well; if we wish to live an
ethical life. The approach I have taken in relation to sexual ethics falls broadly within the
tradition of continental philosophy. This is concerned with determining the conditions for
ethical exploration for different types of people, rather than establishing the borders
of acceptable or unacceptable desires, thoughts and actions. I extend the continental
approach to include feminist conceptions of ethics, including a conception of gender that
Sex Education 461
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acknowledges the possibility of multiple forms of masculinities. My approach to sexual
ethics is therefore not about seeking new certainties in the sense of new moral codes.
Rather, it is about a transformation of personal existence, paying attention to the cultural,
psychological, interpersonal and emotional conditions of personal transformation that
make ethical choices possible (Schroeder 2000).
Foucault’s ideas of mutuality and the constant state of reflection and renegotiation are
crucial to assess and rework where we are in relation to living an ethical life (Rabinow
1997). Rather than assuming a fixed and stable feminine or masculine subject, a process of
constantly becoming or performing gender, as Butler (1990) points out, is possible. Each
sexual encounter invites the possibility of also reworking desire and pleasure. Therefore
the difference is acknowledged and the possibilities to conform to or resist dominant
discourses of gender and sexuality are more likely.
Foucault’s central argument about ethics involves what he calls rapport a` soi – the
relationship you ought to have with yourself – which determines how an individual is
supposed to constitute himself [sic] as a moral subject of his [sic] own actions (Rabinow
1997, 263). Foucault argues therefore that the care of the self is intimately linked with
ethics and that ethics is, in a very practical sense, the considered form that freedom takes
when it is informed by reflection (Rabinow 1997, 284). Care of the self is synonymous
with living an ethical life, but it is not the Socratic admonition to ‘Know thyself’, as if we
can discover an essential self. The ethical adventure is not finding or revealing who we are,
but the work involved when exploring the self in this or that cultural and historical lineage
(Flaming 2006, 221). This is not a solo journey, rather, ‘The care of the self is ethical in
itself: but it implies complex relationships with others insofar as this ethos of freedom is
also a way of caring for others’ (Rabinow 1997, 287).
So what does this mean for a conception of ethical erotics? Constructing sexuality
education and intimacy on the basis of ethical sexual subjectivity provides a counter
discourse to education based on fear and pathology. Caring for the self and considering the
impact of your desires and wants on the other require a process of dynamic mutual
negotiation and reflection. This has the potential to encourage practices beyond the
regulatory and highly gendered system of sexuality which is focused on control and
surveillance. Foucault (cited in Davidson 2001, 213) argued that: ‘Pleasure is something
that passes from one individual to another, it is not a secretion of identity. Pleasure has no
passport, no identity card’. This opens up the erotic exchange between partners to move
beyond the dominant sexual norms and create possibilities of unplanned pleasures not tied
to assumptions about desire (identity) or acts.
Pleasure as a site of possibilities
Having canvassed our individual approaches to pleasure, we now extend the discussion
to broader issues of how to re-signify and re-deploy pleasure in sexuality education
through the work of Foucault (original in French cited in Eribon 1994) and queer
theorists like Jagose (2010). Our aim is to re-conceptualise pleasure as a site of
possibility, shaking it from some of the discursive baggage it has collected so far in its
trajectory. This work is necessarily theoretical because to implement pleasure as a site of
possibility within sexuality education at school, space must be opened for it to be thought
as such.
Foucault argues that desire, acts and pleasure are three key elements to understanding
sexual behaviour (Rabinow 1997, 268–9). Pleasure is illusory if desire is heavily policed.
For Foucault, the distinction between ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’ was critical to outlining his
462 L. Allen and M. Carmody
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preference for the latter. Foucault sought to detach the experience of pleasure from a
psychological theory of sexual desire and sexual subjectivity (Davidson 2001). He saw
more potential in pleasure, because desire is tied to identity in ways that can be
problematic for those who are not deemed ‘the norm’. For Foucault, desire is always
expressed as for someone or some act and as such seen to reveal ‘what one really wants,
who one really is’ (Davidson 2001, 211–2). Advancing this argument, Foucault wrote,
‘Tell me what your desire is and I will tell you who you are, if you are normal or not; I will
therefore be able to admit or disqualify your desire’ (cited in Davidson 2001, 212). Desire
therefore, creates a permanence of identity on which psychological assessments and
subsequent management of the subject rest.
In contrast, pleasure is only related to itself, it does not represent anything and
therefore cannot be counterfeit. Pleasure is free of use, almost devoid of meaning:
There is no ‘pathology’ of pleasure, no ‘abnormal’ pleasure. It is an event ‘outside the
subject’, or at the limit of the subject, in that something which is neither of the body nor of the
soul, which is neither inside nor outside, in short, a notion not assigned and not assignable.
(Foucault, cited in Davidson 2001, 212)
This capacity means that pleasure can function as a point of resistance to the apparatus
of sexuality. Talk of pleasure in sexuality education might offer one way of unhooking
young people from confining identities which deem that they should have a particular
sexual response or expression based on gendered and sexual identity. This does not mean
sexuality education should negate desire, but that all engagements with it should be
critical.
It is through the process of examining how desire is conceptualised and allowed to be
spoken about that a regulating knowledge/power nexus is revealed. One of the difficulties
facing young people exposed to sexuality programmes in schools is a lack of
language to express their desires, to name them, to move beyond Fine’s missing discourse
of desire and claim a space for this. Whether the official discourses of sexuality
education are conservative, liberal, critical or post-modern (Jones 2011a) will determine
the shape, the texture, the gaps and the ethical underpinnings of the sexuality
education knowledge presented. The presence of these discourses may result in desires
remaining invisible or actively condemned. In the case of same sex desire, it can be
simultaneously invisible and actively denounced, with all the negative ramifications this
may have on schoolyard relations (O’Higgins-Norman 2009). This power/knowledge
relationship reveals the way in which desire is over-invested with social and cultural
norms and imbued with psychological theories of the self and forms of sexual orientation
and identity.
Pleasure on the other hand has the potential for quite different purposes. Some
conceptualise it primarily as a bodily event. For example, Lamb (2010, 294) argues that:
‘pleasure is often used synonymously with desire, but generally indicates that girls, like
boys can feel and want pleasure in sex’. While this is one interpretation of the bodily focus
of pleasure, it elides wider socio-cultural mechanisms of this concept that some writers
call on in their work with young people (Carmody 2003; Allen 2005; McClelland and Fine
2008; Rasmussen in press). To confine pleasure to primarily or exclusively a corporeal
event misses its potential for diverse and ‘new’ configurations.
Foucault argues that ‘no-one knows what pleasure is’ (Rabinow 1997, 268–9). This
quality is perceived as one of its advantages in terms of creating spaces for new
configurations of pleasure that are not bound by heteronormative imaginings. Teasing out
this potential, Jagose argues that:
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For Foucault, intense sexual pleasure, particularly that which reorganises the body’s
erogeneity, is productively impersonal in so far as it has the capacity to reorder momentarily
the subject’s sense of self, to detach the individual from the stable, coherent identity through
which modern sexuality is administered and regulated. (2010, 523)
In this sense, pleasure has the capacity to detach itself from identity, it is an experience
that can be divorced from the subject with the potential to reconfigure it. In a similar vein,
Davidson (2001, 213) articulates that the difference between desire and pleasure is the
possibilities that pleasure opens up: ‘desire holds a grip on the subject which is central
to the constitution of a science of sexuality, while pleasure escapes the discourse of
pathology and abnormality . . . it disturbs, disrupts the primacy of the subject’. In these
conceptualisations of pleasure, ‘who’ (i.e. the identity of the subject) is displaced by
pleasure’s potential as possibility.
Drawing on these insights enables a queering of pleasure that attempts to release
sexuality education from teaching for pleasure. The insertion of pleasure in sexuality
education as something which young people should strive for in relationships, or learn
skills for how to successfully achieve, we argue, undermines its transformative potential.
What we attempt to draw attention to is that, ‘pleasure is a very difficult behaviour. It is not
as simple as to enjoy one’s self’ (Foucault, cited in Jagose 2010, 53). But in difficulty lies
pleasure’s possibilities. The fact that we cannot know what a discourse of pleasure might
do in advance opens it as a site of perpetual creation and recreation and therefore (sexual)
possibility. As long as this discourse has a presence in sexuality education, the potential
for young people to mobilise and negotiate it in ways that make sense for them remains. As
a presence, it might also create spaces for ethical sexual negotiation and refashioning
gender expectations of individuals, bodies and acts. This possibility exists for those
whatever their gendered, cultural, or religious positionings are because it is the ‘presence’
of this site of possibility rather than its up-take or denial which is transformatively
important. Of course, recognising this capacity means relinquishing a sense of false
control over how pleasure is remade and recreated. However, our research has taught us
that young people have significantly more capacity for transformative sexual possibilities
than they are usually given credit for.
In our re-signification of this concept we also signal that there is a need within
sexuality education to recognise that pleasure is not necessarily transformative. Foucault
refused to specify any particular set of sexual practices as inherently empowering or
resistant. What makes them resistant depends on their particular configuration at any
moment, in a specific context and temporality. Foucault writes that: ‘I do not think that
there is anything that is functionally – by its very nature – absolutely liberating. Liberty is
a practice’ (Foucault, cited in Jagose 2010, 524). The same logic might be applied to
pleasure. As a sexual practice, pleasure is not inherently transformative. While it can have
these effects, it is not always possible to predict the outcomes or for the individuals
involved to stand outside the discourses that shape them.
Somewhat disappointingly for many feminists, the experience of sexual pleasure for
young women does not necessarily lead to empowerment, nor is it necessarily a positive
indicator of sexual health. However, there is room for some optimism here based on the
empirical research with 200 young women and men of diverse sexualities who participated
in the Sex þ Ethics Program Australia and New Zealand (Carmody 2009b). Follow-up
studies with participants 4–6 months after the 6-week education groups finished found
that 85–95% are still using ideas and skills learnt in the programme about ethical sexual
negotiation. In particular, young women report consistently increased self-care and finding
their voice to speak their desires and negotiating to realise them. This suggests that
464 L. Allen and M. Carmody
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developing ideas and practices on the basis of ethical erotics or giving space in
curricula for discourses of erotics creates the very possibilities that Foucault suggested
around the predictive nature of pleasure that has remained missing in action from sexuality
education since it was first identified by Fine in 1988. This also speaks to Fine’s original
call in 1988 for ways in which young women could become both ‘initiators’ and
‘negotiators’.
Conclusion
Obstacles to good sexuality education are often perceived as occurring at policy,
managerial and community levels of schooling. What is often forgotten in the struggles
around competing discourses of education is to listen to the voices, the desires and the
pleasures that young people want to explore. We find this grounding crucial in our work
with young people. What is defined as good sexuality education is most often designed
and implemented from an educator’s perspective. There is no doubt that as educators we
often have to balance competing moral and ethical perspectives coming from multiple
sources such as schools, education departments, parents, the wider community and the
media. However, we consider it crucial that education is underpinned by clearly
articulated and diverse theoretical underpinnings. For this reason, our discussion above
is aimed at contributing to what constitutes good sexuality education by concentrating
on one aspect of theory that we feel is being constrained by specific and narrow
interpretations.
We have deliberately concentrated on the theoretical because we see current
conceptualisations of pleasure and their relationship to sexuality education as the first
obstacle to ‘good’ sexuality education. Before good sexuality education (however that
might be conceived) can be realised, it has to be conceptualised. Our aim has been to
stretch pleasure’s theoretical possibilities beyond our original hopes for it and the ways in
which these have been mobilised in other work in the field. Opening up theoretical
understandings of pleasure to possibilities beyond corporeal sensations, heteronormative
configurations and bodily acts not only highlights current conceptual constraints within
sexuality education, but also ways of moving beyond these. To understand ‘pleasure as
having no passport’ creates potential for pleasures unhinged from identity and differently
configured. Creating spaces for consideration of pleasure in sexuality education cannot be
separated from theoretical discussion about what pleasure means and how practically this
might be achieved.
To argue such a position may be seen by some as unworkable in the context of
young people’s lives when operating within the confines of the schoolyard. Put another
way; the queer notion of pleasure as a site of possibility is not easily reconciled with the
regulatory practices of schooling (Pinar 1998). However, despite attempts to constrain
expressions of young people’s sexuality, they often actively refuse to comply with these
limits. Some are smart travellers and find embodied pleasures for themselves and their
partners and also pleasure in pushing against the borders of the dominant culture. The
challenge for us as educators is, then, to understand the roles we play consciously or,
unconsciously as ‘border protection officers’. We consider that it is indeed possible, and
crucial that we resist attempts to reduce discourses of erotics into ‘a pleasure imperative’
where students learn the recipe for how to gain it, and maybe, even, how to give it. This
would see pleasure co-opted as part of the regime of sexual normalisation and rob it of its
transformative potential for women, men and those who identify their gender outside of
this binary.
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