Gender and Sexualities: An Inquiry

Introduction—Chapter 2: Constructed Knowledge Higher education approaches to sexuality, gender, and sex education courses and curriculum can be understood as existing in distinct realms. First, “sex education” as constituted in biology, physiology and anatomy, and health sciences (often referred to colloquially as “sex education in the hard sciences” or “health studies”) emphasizes sexuality across the life-cycle, bodily functions and parts, and what is generally coined as “sexual risk factors.” So-called risk factors are likely to include: sexually transmitted disease, unwanted or unplanned pregnancy, and relationship education (often named “healthy relationships” within sex education rubrics). Throughout this textbook, our readings concern the second distinct realm of sex education: gender and sexuality understood and determined though social and cultural factors, and as determinants of prevailing modes of social, sexual life. Our approach critically examines gender and sexual relations, the political, economic, and social factors that may frame the primary formulations and assumed truths already embedded within first realm of sex education, but taken as scientific truth. Too often, we argue, prevailing assumptions about gender and sexuality are assumed to form an eternal, value neutral ground from which to build a model of "healthy" sex, desire, and sexuality in our time. We must begin to ascertain how knowledge generated within the sciences and administered in sex education (concerned with secondary, higher, and public education in this Chapter) imports then relies on meaning from other social fields of experience. Primary education, church, family, and clinical-medical settings each assert province over sex education prior to higher education. Despite this sustained attention, sex education is not generally standardized across comparable overlap coordinates within a school, district, or state (not to mention a nation). For example, a school board may not be compelled to employ a standardized curriculum even across a single district. The struggle for comprehensive, or restricted, or religious, or any other type of sex education program must be appreciated as a political and social cauldron worthy of sustained academic attention. What most sex education models do share in common, however, is the assumption that science- based considerations of sexual reproduction may offer some final arbitration of truth. Or, at least, a solid, lasting foundation of “sex.” Indeed, inclusion of accepted scientific knowledge should be one of the primary educational aims across governmental, non-governmental, religious, and civic organizations concerned with gender and sexuality. But, critically for our readers, it must also be appreciated that science and the modes of presenting scientific knowledge do not exist in a social vacuum. In this Chapter, Emily Martin’s seminal article “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” encourages our readers to engage in critical dialogue with scientific knowledge and with the overlapping stereotypes and assumptions that too often direct gender and sexuality research and reporting. Addressing this intellectual dilemma engages us in unexpected and counterintuitive lines of questioning about gender, sex, and reproduction. Martin asks us to be aware of the ways accepted social norms and traditions also work to set the stage for scientific inquiry about the