1st Edition
The Limits of Sexuality Education Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India
This book explores different strands of thinking about sexuality education in contemporary urban India. It interrogates the limits of sexuality education as we know it today by rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle-class urban India.
This book contributes to the wide gap in theorising sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India. It presents an adolescent perspective on sexuality education, looks at adolescent love from the school teachers’ perspective, and tries to understand a teacher’s negotiations with student romance. It unravels the sexual and romantic lives of adolescents and examines the circulation of sexual knowledge and sources of information on sex that adolescent boys in India have access to. This book uncovers the limits of sexuality education by examining State, feminist, Christian, and sexological materials on sexuality education in Mumbai and Delhi. Based on detailed research and narratives from teachers, young men, and women, the book explores adolescent male romance and its affective registers, adolescent male sexual knowledge, and the regulation of romance in school spaces.
This book will be of interest to students and researchers of education, sexuality and gender studies, masculinity studies, sex education as well as those interested in education policy, education politics, educational research, and inclusion and special education. Located at the intersection of sexuality studies, education, masculinity studies, and cultural studies, it will also appeal to those working in sexuality education in urban India within the complex web of the middle classes, consumerism, post-feminism, romance, adolescent masculinities, and cinema.
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Different discourses on sexuality education: Examining sexuality education materials in urban India 17
2 ‘Nothing much happened’: Rethinking heterosexual middle-class adolescent boys’ romance in urban India 45
3 Learning about sex in urban India: Rethinking the sexual ‘knowledge gap’ debate in sexuality education 68
4 ‘I am a teacher, I think the worst’: Teacher responsibilities and regulation of student romance in schools in Mumbai 101
Conclusion 118
References 125
Index 134
Biography
Ketaki Chowkhani is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India, where she teaches India’s first ever course on Singles Studies. Her writing on gender, sexuality, and singlehood has appeared in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, Journal of Porn Studies, The New York Times, Square Peg, and The Hindu, as well as in edited volumes. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, where she researched sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India.
