The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education draws together a vibrant collection of writings from around the globe that highlight key debates and signal new developments in the field of critical sexuality education studies (Plummer 2008). A volume of over 720 pages and 32 contributions, involving 56 sexuality researchers, it is one of the first handbooks to attempt such an international overview focused specifically on sexuality education. Our aim has been to assemble contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, across a wide breadth of regional, national, and transnational contexts. We have sought to offer diverse and compelling accounts of how sexuality education is conceptualised, practised, politicised, regulated, struggled over, reconfigured, and hoped for. Imperative to this delineation of the field has been capturing the pulsating richness of the landscape of sexuality ducation research internationally. The handbook is structured into four parts, curated by leading scholars in the field of critical sexualities studies. The handbook is structured into four parts, curated by leading scholars in the field of critical sexualities studies; Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education (Part I), Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media and Communication Technologies (Part II), Sexualities Education in Schools (Part II) and Re-animating what else sexuality education research can do, be and become (Part IV). Importantly, this handbook does not equate sexuality education with safer sex education; such an approach narrows the scope of the field. Instead, this text critically delineates the field to date, while sketching innovative conceptual and pedagogical possibilities for the future.

In order to achieve this disruptive agenda, the handbook is unconventional in its approach to what counts as sexuality education. It seeks to extend traditional conceptualisations beyond school-based approaches and into new spatial and ontological dimensions. Traditionally, sexuality education has been conceived as programmes to prevent ‘negative outcomes’ of sexual activity such as unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmissible infections (Sears 1992). Instead, contributions in this collection attest to the fact that sexuality education also inheres in other, less anticipated places. For instance, in an animated television series found in Mexico called Catolicadas (see Chap. 23 by Aldaz, Sandra Fosado and Amuchástegui), in commercial blog spots in Singapore (see Abindin Part II), and prisons in the USA (Chap. 14 by Fields in Part II). In addition to challenging entrenched notions of the concept of sexuality education and its practice across the globe, we also attempt to unsettle conventional perceptions of a handbook’s creation. Taking up what is an emerging theoretical strand within critical sexuality studies, that of new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), the next section reconfigures the idea of a handbook and its production. Via this theoretical discussion, our aim is to ontologically reconfigure what it means to undertake scholarship such as this handbook, within the field of sexuality education research.

The Handbook of Sexuality Education-Assemblage

The metaphor for this book is an assemblage. We borrow it from new materialist ontology to see what it might do (Rasmussen and Allen 2014) as a way of conceptualising the work of this collection and probing the boundaries of sexuality education research globally. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) have previously considered the possibility of books being assemblages when they write in the beginning of their joint-authored volume, A Thousand Plateaus, ‘A book is an assemblage. … There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made’ (2013, p. 2). Their words were a precursor to an idea that now holds currency within new materialist thought known as onto-epistemology, in which there is no separation between ‘being’ and ‘knowing’, but only a ‘being in knowing’ (Barad 2012, p. 207). Employing this idea to think about this handbook, we might imagine that there is no ontological separation between its subject, which is sexuality education, and the handbook itself as a material ‘thing’ (Bennett 2010). As Deleuze and Guattari (2013) explain, ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters. … To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations’ (p. 2). It is to the ‘working of matters and the exteriority of their relations’ that we pay attention in this introduction. We illuminate those aspects of a handbook’s production that do not usually appear in an introduction and attempt to foreground materiality. We do so in a bid to disrupt conventional notions of a handbook, as manufactured anthropocentricallyFootnote 1 by humans, and also the parameters of sexuality education research itself.

Before we can conceptualise this handbook as an assemblage, we need to establish how we are using this term. Various theorists employ different terminology to invoke the notion of assemblage. For instance, it is an idea often associated with Deleuze and Guattari (2013) and the seminal quote in which Deleuze writes, ‘in assemblages … you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and regimes of signs’ (2007, p. 177). Within her evocation of a political ecology of ‘things’, Bennett (2010) also mobilises the term ‘assemblages’, indicating they are ‘ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations’ (p. 23). Similarly, while employing this term, less frequently than the previous authors, Barad (2007) explains ‘an assemblage is a complex entangled web of phenomena’ (p. 502). These evocations of the term enable seemingly cohesive entities, such as societies, institutions, and even handbooks, to be understood as groupings of heterogeneous elements of material, ‘social, representational, discursive, subjective and affective orders’ (Youdell and Armstrong 2011, p. 145). In this sense, we conceptualise the handbook as a heterogeneous collection of discourses, people, regional locations, affective imaginaries, spatial dimensions (e.g. cyberspace), matter, and phenomena we cannot/do not (yet) know.

Our use of the term assemblage draws from Barad (2007), Deleuze and Guattari (2013), and Bennett (2010) in distinct ways. In imagining this handbook as assemblage, our aim is to weave together elements of each of these theorists’ thinking as a means of enunciating the process of this handbook’s formation. A unifying feature of this new materialist work is the way it offers ‘a flattened’ ontology (DeLanda 2002; Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010) where discourse and matter are mutually implicated in the ‘unfolding emergence of the world’ (MacLure 2013, pp. 659–660). For the process of this handbook’s formation, this means that instead of understanding the editors and contributors as ‘autonomous agents’ (MacLure 2013, p. 660) who write and produce it, we decentre this human involvement and pay attention to other features of the handbook-assemblage. As described next, these other components can comprise ‘all manner of matter; corporeal, technological, mechanical, virtual, discursive and imaginary’ (Renold and Ivinson 2014, p. 4).

How we wrote this introduction you are now reading offers a poignant example of the notion of assemblage as a mutually implicated unfolding emergence of the world. Or rather, as Deleuze and Guattari (2013) phrase it, the idea that ‘There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made’ (p. 2). Within a conventional understanding of writing a book’s introduction, humans as its authors are deemed pivotal to its making. Understanding the handbook as assemblage deems its manifestation to have occurred within a living, throbbing confederation of entangled phenomena of which we, the authors, are just one part. For Barad (2007, p. 33), ‘phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components’ that are not discrete entities but inextricably (i.e. intra-actively) entangled. Some of the entangled phenomena of this handbook introduction include computer hardware/software; virtual communication tools like Skype and Google Drive we as authors used to share ideas; transport like planes and cars that delivered us to book meetings in diverse regional locations—Auckland, Melbourne, and Brisbane; the movement of the train which carried us into Brisbane as we discussed book contributions; indoor/outdoor spaces such as offices, hotel rooms, and the Queensland Library’s outdoor veranda where we worked on this introduction; and even the majestic tree that gave us shade from the Queensland sun, and the lapping of the Brisbane river as we tapped on our keyboards, talked, and thought together. This larger material arrangement (Barad 2007) is integral to the becoming (Barad 2007) of this introduction and acknowledges an exteriority of mattering relations (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, p. 2) which spill (i.e. intra-actively unfold) beyond human action. Within the flattened logic offered by the idea of assemblage, we as human authors of this introduction are not its centre, but just one of many intra-acting parts. This understanding of the handbook as assemblage attempts to destabilise our authoritative human influence as its editors/authors.

A characteristic of assemblages is that they are an ‘ad hoc’ (Bennett 2010) or a ‘hodgepodge’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013) of diverse phenomena. From this perspective, they appear to exhibit a kind of randomness that cannot be explained by human agency. Such an idea seems antithetical to the perception of a handbook as a carefully orchestrated collection of writings by experts in the field. But perhaps, such a portrayal of handbook creation is more human fantasy than most of us are willing to admit? When we allow the agency of human actors to recede and pay attention to other phenomena in the assemblage, it is possible to notice that what ends up in a handbook and what is left out are quite often not of human control. Complex webs of material–discursive intra-actions (Barad 2007) of unknowable/unnameable proportions meant tired, sick, and overworked bodies sometimes could not deliver on promised contributions. Or, faulty technology, physical distance, or lack of a shared language meant some invitations to contribute were not possible or successfully delivered. In some cases, lack of government funding or support for sexuality education regionally meant research in particular areas of the globe was not available. On other occasions, it was a chance meeting at a conference, conversation with a colleague, or stumbling across excellent research as part of an unrelated intellectual endeavour which engendered a chapter’s inclusion. When the role of human editors and contributors collide and connect on the same ontological level as disease-carrying particles, space, cyber-technology, language, and insurmountable physical features of the environment (at least for humans), the creation of a handbook becomes much more ad hoc than (humans) might have originally thought.

So how then might we understand the role of editors and those charged with curating contributions in the handbook-assemblage? New materialist thinking about assemblages requires that we ‘co-compose ourselves with’ this handbook-in-the-making (MacLure 2013, p. 142). The decentring of humans and paying attention to other intra-acting features of the handbook-assemblage (such as surrounding matter) are one manoeuvre we undertake above as part of this co-composition. Another is to theorise human agency as something other than autonomous authority in the production of this book. Drawing on Barad’s agential realist account, Lenz Taguchi and Palmer (2013) provide a way of acknowledging our editing work as an ‘agential cut’ (p. 692). These cuts are according to Barad (2007), ‘agentially enacted not by wilful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which “we” are a “part”’ (p. 178). The cuts we participate in enact the handbook at the same time as our entanglement in this assemblage means they co-constitute ourselves. Agential cuts cut things together and apart and are never enacted indefinitely (Barad 2007, p. 178). The idea of agential cutting does not, however, devolve human actors of responsibility for their participation. There is an ethics to agential cutting that configures the responsibility of editors differently from that of authoritative actors presiding over a handbook’s contents. This ethical relation is not premised on the handbook as ‘an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped’ (Barad 2007, p. 390). The ethical response this requires of us as editors is ‘an accounting of the [handbook’s] constitutive practices in the fullness of their materialities, including the enactment of boundaries and exclusions, the production of phenomena in the sedimenting historiality, and the ongoing reconfiguring of the space of possibilities for future enactments’ (Barad 2007, pp. 390–91 [insertions not in the original]).

This is the work we have begun to undertake above by acknowledging the practices/phenomena which have constituted this handbook, including those relating to matter. It is also a conceptualisation which provides the structure for the rest of this introduction. In the next section, we engage in sedimenting historiality of this handbook by illuminating some of the referents and interlocutors preceding the book and the central ideas to which it speaks. Next, we draw the idea of assemblage back into a discussion of the book’s structure and contents. Finally, as part of ‘the ongoing reconfiguring of the space of possibilities for future enactments’ (Barad 2007, pp. 390–91), we offer up ideas around the types of contributions we would have liked to include but did not/could not because assemblages are not of human control.

Sexuality Education’s Sedimenting Historialities

This handbook is attached to innumerable interlocutors/practices/ideas/events/phenomena which precede this text, but are integral to contemporary sexuality education. These sedimenting historialities shape past, present, and future assemblages in ways that we haven’t been able to anticipate, and can’t possibly predict. In assembling this section, we turn to a decidedly partial collection of texts and events that continue to resonate in our imaginings of this space. But first, a few words about the naming of the assemblage.

Why call this The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, and not The Palgrave Handbook of Sex Education or The Palgrave Handbook of Sexualities Education? All these names are problematic descriptors of the assemblages we wish to evoke. If we look to key journals in the field: Sexualities, Sex Education, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and the American Journal of Sexuality Education, it appears that there is no consensus with regard to naming. In the four-volume collection Sexuality Education: Past, Present and Future Issues, edited by Elizabeth Schroeder and Judy Kuriansky, there is a discussion of the naming issue. Taverner, Garrity, Selverstone, and Wilson in a review of this text note that:

While ‘sex education’ is the phrase most frequently used when referring to this field, editor Elizabeth Schroeder helpfully clarifies that ‘sexuality is an expansive term that pertains to far more than our biology or sexual behaviors’ (p. 3). She quotes Mary Calderone, MD, a cofounder of SIECUS (originally the ‘Sex’—later changed to ‘Sexuality’—Information and Education Council of the United States): ‘Sex is what you do; sexuality is who you are’ (p. 3) (2011, p. 207).

This passage traces movement in the naming of sexuality education assemblages, conveying the understanding that sexuality education is best understood as more than biological or behavioural. The notion that ‘sexuality is who you are’ suggests sexuality is something deeper than sex, something stable because it is associated with identity—‘who you are’. There is also a distinction being drawn in the above quotation between ‘who you are’ and ‘what you do’, which is sometimes accompanied by further inquiries based on ‘who you do’ and ‘when you should do it’. But, assemblages of sexuality education are not so neat. They are in flux, events, phenomena, matter, affect; they are intra-active, which also means that assemblages continue to be sedimented in humanist understandings of sexuality, of particular notions of identity and representation, responsibility, consent, disease, behaviour, and biology.

In their analysis of public pedagogy, sex education, and mass communication in mid-twentieth-century Australia, England, and the USA, Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange turn away from an analysis of sexuality education in particular institutional contexts (e.g. educational, religious) and focus their attention on the flow of communication about sexuality education. They do this to better connect the history of communication with the history of sexual pedagogies. In making this turn, they argue that critical sexuality education needs to focus not only on the content but also on the context of the sex messages being purveyed (2004, p. 73). Bashford and Strange’s focus is on broadcast radio and mass-produced magazines—two dominant modes of communication about sex in the historical context in which they situate their analysis. In the intervening period since the publication of this piece, sexuality education assemblages have proliferated and mutated as modes of communication have multiplied. Alongside this proliferation is a demand to continue to think about the context of sex messages being purveyed—that is, to think not just about what is said, but about sexual education as assemblages that are linked to other modes of communication, peoples, spaces, events, and practices.

Bonnie Trudell’s (1993) Doing Sex Education: Gender Politics and Schooling, Mary Jane Kehily’s (2002) Sexuality, Gender and Schooling, and Louisa Allen’s (2005) Sexual Subjects: Young People, Sexuality and Education are three of several important studies of sexuality education that inform scholarship in the current work, as well as being valuable observations of earlier incarnations of sexuality education assemblages in secondary schools in the USA, England, and New Zealand. Trudell’s study of sexuality in a ninth-grade classroom provides a picture of sexuality education’s legitimation of traditional understandings of gender and sexuality, understandings that accord with desired curricula outcomes. Kehily’s ethnography of English secondary schools attends to the workings of sexuality and gender and traces the naturalisation of heteronormative and homophobic sexual cultures in the formal and informal curriculum. Similarly, Allen’s school-based New Zealand research explores young people’s sexual subjectivities, knowledge, and practices revealing their gendered and heteronormative configuration within schooling culture, and sexuality education.

In another important study, Get Real About Sex: The Politics and Practice of Sex Education (2007), Pam Alldred and Miriam David look at the politics of sexuality education in all the secondary schools in one local government authority in the north of England. The context of sexuality education is critical to Alldred and David, and this is reflected in their determination to engage young people who are not in school, but clearly still sexual, and whose experiences of teenage sexuality are often intertwined with parenting, unemployment, and disengagement from education. These young people spoke about informal sexual cultures in school that reify ‘having sex’ and formal school cultures that provide below par sexuality education. Such work can be placed alongside US ethnographic studies including Jessica Fields’ (2008) Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality and Nancy Kendall’s (2013) The Sex Education Debates. Like Kehily’s work in England, both Fields’ and Kendall’s speak to the ways in which sexuality education can reinforce inequality, whether it is associated with liberal or conservative understandings of sexuality education. Both Fields and Kendall argue for critical approaches to sexuality education that will be measured not by declining birth rates or sexuality transmitted infections, but by the ways in which they help young people conceptualise inequality and imagine and participate in democratic conversations about sexuality education within the school context.

Scholars studying queer theory and lesbian and gay (and less often bisexual, transgender, intersex, and asexual) issues in education have also been fundamental to our imaginings of sexuality education assemblages. For some researchers within the field of sexuality education, queer theorising is integral to the project of apprehending gender and sexualities in education and, relatedly, sexuality education. In Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education, Jen Gilbert (2014) notes the disappointment in the realisation that,

you cannot put queerness in the service of socially progressive goals without foreclosing the more radical qualities of sexuality—the surprise of an awkward pronoun or an unexpected interpretation. Indeed an engagement with queerness must risk the failure of a certain dream of education—that prejudice can be educated and identifications anticipated. (pp. 93–94)

For Gilbert, queerness is not something that can be dictated for the purposes of education, however noble those purposes may be. Using the language of this introduction, this is because queerness, understood in this way, is a component of sexuality education assemblages that cannot be anticipated. For others, the queer in queer theorising is read as an association between queer theory, queer students, schools, and educators. Assemblages of sexuality education manifest queerness as identity and queerness as unpredictability. To our minds, akin to Gilbert’s reading of queerness, assemblages of sexuality education can’t be managed—nor are they distinct from cultural, political, economic, spatial, and affective histories, presents, and futures.

Debbie Epstein’s (1994) Challenging Lesbian Inequalities in Education and William Pinar’s (1998) Queer Theory in Education are two edited collections with, arguably, quite different locations within sexuality education assemblages because they depict distinctly different relationships to questions of sexuality, identity, and subjectivity. Challenging Lesbian and Gay Inequalities in Education, as the title suggests, is a work rooted in an assumed relationship between sexual identity and inequality. It reflects a historical moment from the point of view of activists and educators embroiled in struggles against legislation on the prohibition of the promotion of homosexuality. While the struggles against such legislation have passed in some country contexts, many others find that conflicts over the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) issues in education in school contexts persists. These conflicts continue to make up part of sexuality education assemblages. In naming this work in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, we reject a collapsing of categories—where LGBT issues are associated exclusively with minoritarian sexualities and genders.

William Haver’s contribution in Pinar’s collection Of Mad Men Who Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility foreshadows contemporary thinking about assemblages in sexuality education. Haver observes that:

The body is not yet an object in fantasy with which one can identify or disavow, but the very happening, the place of sociality; the body is not a ‘thing’ but an ‘event’, the event of its material thingness. This is the body that matters. (Haver 1998, p. 362)

For Haver, questions of intelligibility and representation may miss the point precisely because it is the body that matters. In tracing these parts of the assemblage, our intention is not to fix them in time, but rather to underscore some of the intricacies of sexuality education assemblages as we have encountered them, returned to them, rejected them only to embrace them again, in a different moment, event, location, grant application.

We now turn to some key events within contemporary assemblages of sexuality education. First to Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, a collection edited by Carol Vance, bringing together papers originating from a conference Toward a Politics of Sexuality. Held in 1982 at Barnard College in New York City, the conference was attended by over 800 women. It was also a decidedly interdisciplinary conference; this is reflected in the inclusion of poetry, images, and essays contributed by academics, poets, photographers, sexuality educators, and reproductive rights activists. The conference was denounced by ‘Women Against Pornography, Women Against Violence Against Women, and New York Radical Feminists … for inviting proponents of “anti-feminist” sexuality to participate’ (1984, p. 451). A petition in support of the conference states its aim,

was to address women’s sexual autonomy, choice and pleasure, acknowledging that sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression and danger, as well as exploration, pleasure and agency. The organizers were concerned that a premature orthodoxy had come to dominate feminist discussion. (1984, p. 451)

Sexual autonomy, choice, pleasure, and agency continue to shape assemblages of sexuality education—though increasingly pleasure, its enactments, and assumed dispositions are coming under scrutiny as scholars wonder whether new orthodoxies are associated with pleasure imperatives (Allen 2012). Which isn’t to say pleasure isn’t still part of the assemblage. For instance, how does apprehending sexual autonomy, choice, and pleasure as more than human shift their enactments within assemblages of sexuality education?

Danger and repression also continue to loom large in sexuality education assemblages. Arguably, sources of danger are now more diffuse with the emergence of new technologies of sexuality. Childhood and sexuality are prominent in Pleasure and Danger, with over 25 entries listed under the heading children. Children are, have been, and will continue to be part of sexuality education assemblages. How do children matter differently 30 years post the Barnard event? What cuts are made around child sexuality in an era where sexual cultures penetrate everyday spaces in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated in the early 1980s?

Looking back on this text also provokes speculation about contemporary orthodoxies in sexuality education, and some of these might pertain to the place of religion in assemblages of sexuality education, including perceived cuts between the public and private, and the sacred and secular. Abstinence doesn’t make an appearance in the index of the Pleasure and Danger collection, though it continues to be the subject of much debate, and is associated with many practices across diverse religious and secular traditions. Might abstinence matter differently when understood as entangled phenomena?

In the Australian context, home to Rasmussen, 2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Schooling and Sexualities: Teaching for a Positive Sexuality (1996), a publication by the Deakin Centre for Education and Change (based on a conference held the preceding year). This publication turned out to be critical in forming Rasmussen’s attachment to sexuality education. She began her doctoral studies at Deakin prompted, in part, by this text. The text organises studies of schooling and sexuality into four sections: Schools and the Social Construction of Sexuality; Teaching about Sexuality; Teaching against Homophobia and Beyond the Silences?; and Violence, Harassment, and Abuse. Notably, 20 years after the publication of this collection, the place of sexuality education in curricula in Australia continues to be tenuous and contested; there is still no national curriculum statement on the teaching of sexuality education. Teacher education in Australia also seems to largely overlook sexuality education as a space for engagement with beginning teachers. Australia is not unremarkable in this regard. But, the absence of movement regarding the place, status, and disciplinary location of sexuality education in school curricula and in teacher education is an impetus for our determination to construct this handbook in a way that does not perceive the school as the central focus for imaginings of sexuality education. Schooling and Sexualities is organised in such a way that a section on countering homophobia is distinct from a section on sexual violence and abuse. While there are clearly crossovers between the sections in this volume—the organisational distinction between studies of sexuality education, and studies of sexualities and genders in education, may appear as distinct projects in the minds of peers and scholars in the field. Assemblages of sexuality education don’t sustain such distinctions. Cindy Patton’s Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong, also published in 1996, was a seminal text (and we use this word knowingly) for helping us apprehend sexuality education as assemblage. Here Patton, a Professor of English, examines how the battle against acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) can only be grasped through reference to porn, specific sexual practices, mass media, public health policy, homophobic cultural politics, and American anxieties about teen sex (to name just a few of the things that went into the production of Fatal Advice). This book explores the tensions between US government-sanctioned approaches to teaching about AIDS and counter-public approaches that were much more sexually explicit, as well as being manufactured by people touched by the crisis—radical safe-sex educators (as Patton terms them) who were enraged by the information about the epidemic being purveyed by the state.

The importance of looking to archives of education and sexuality is underscored by Daniel Marshall in his discussion of queer reparations. For Marshall, the point of departure for such reparations must not be a false hope that it is possible to put people’s lives back together (p. 357). While queer reparations don’t assume that the past can be repaired, it does attend to the sedimentation of the past in the present—this is manifest in the production of sexuality education assemblages. What assemblages come into view? What assemblages were never able to take shape because of attitudes towards non-normative bodies, genders, and sexualities? What stories of sexuality education’s colonising and pathologising tendencies continue to be erased because the tellers of such stories are no longer here, or, because lives/practices/bodies/events continue to be constituted as ungrievable, unbearable, and therefore unknowable? In Too Early to Talk About Sex? Issues in Creating Culturally Relevant Sexuality Education for Preadolescent Black Girls in the United States, Adilia James (2010) wonders about the racial politics of sexuality education assemblages in the academy and the ways in which they efface the experiences of young black girls, while Jesse Mills’ (2012) I Should Get Married Early: Culturally Appropriate Comprehensive Sex Education and the Racialization of Somali Masculinity considers the ‘stereotypes of African American class, gender, and sex pathology at work in shaping the acculturation process for refugee youth’ and the ways in which histories of sedimentation of black sexuality in the USA obscure young Somali refugees enactments of gender, race, and religion and their intra-actions in contemporary San Diego.

To be clear, this idea of queer reparations is not something Marshall perceives as specific to people, things, or practices that might be constituted as queer. Rather, queer reparative work can be utilised in thinking about the status of sexuality education as a field in education more broadly. As Marshall notes, ‘until researchers across the broad field of education reconcile themselves to the various ways in which they are writing over sexuality in their own work, queer matters will continue to be seen as marginal, as the personal projects of queers themselves, and thus lack credibility across the system at large’ (2014, p. 357). Our own intra-actions with sexuality education assemblages have produced this space as boutique, marginal, salacious, white, middle class, not for nice straight girls, well suited to not straight girls and a cul-de-sac (Rasmussen and Allen 2014).

In thinking through sexuality education’s sedimenting historialities, Marshall’s work on reparations is also instructive in thinking about the future of sexuality education. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick, Marshall argues that queer reparative work can be signified by a practice of determining how to put information together differently (2014, p. 357). In compiling this handbook, we are keenly aware of the limitations of the distance between imagining that something can be done differently and the reality of execution—the mattering that limits what voices, objects, spaces, projects, bodies that have been incorporated in this space, and what are left out. We were very keen, for instance, to incorporate disability into this assemblage, but timelines, illness, and other contingencies thwarted our efforts. Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole’s study of the ‘leaking, lacking and excessive’ bodies of disabled children is a valuable contribution to assemblages of sexuality education that sits outside the handbook, but helps inform our analysis. Goodson and Runswick-Cole think about how young people’s bodies can quickly become constituted as excessive when disability is conjoined with sexuality. They tell the story of Mandy, a 16-year-old girl who has ‘the label of moderate learning difficulties’ and attends a mainstream secondary school (p. 11). One day she is sent home with a note about inappropriate touching, in reference to excessive hugging. Hugging, Mandy’s mother observes, is a practice that had been sedimented in Mandy’s exchanges with peers and teachers over many years (p. 12). Through this note, Mandy’s hugging is now sexualised, and it is non-normative, ‘in lacking the words to describe of justify an “appropriate sexual encounter she is, potentially, denied sexuality”’ (p. 12). How can young people like Mandy become a part of sexuality education assemblages that is not overdetermined by excess or risk? In short, we are keenly aware that this particular assemblage of sexuality education is partial and incomplete. We hope it will also generate future assemblages that surface different cuts, possibilities, turns, and sedimenting histories.

Delineating the Assemblage (or Organisation of the Handbook)

Part of the beauty of an assemblage is that although some of its phenomena might be recognisable in advance, it is not possible to appreciate what their intra-relating will look like beforehand. This has been our experience in editing this handbook, and one which we have endeavoured to encourage in the assembling of contributions. Premised on our aims for the volume outlined above, and in accordance with established ideas about how handbooks are structured, this work was divided into four sections. These agential cuts (Barad 2007) do not constitute a categorising or cordoning off of elements of the field as a conventional notion of ‘cutting’ or editing imply. Rather, we conceptualise this work in the Baradian (2007) sense as ‘cutting things together and apart’ (p. 178). As such, these parts are conceptualised as phenomena that intra-actively form part of the larger handbook-assemblage while simultaneously comprising their own intra-acting phenomena. In accordance with the ad hoc nature of assemblages, we delineate the parts of the handbook below, but not traditionally in the running order of their appearance in the book. Instead, we address each one in accordance with the force (Bennett 2010) of (our authorial) ideas as they unfold, and subsequently in the directional flow in which this introduction takes us.

Part I of the handbook offers a useful example of this web of intra-relations, in that it is named ‘Global Assemblages of Sexuality Education’. As such, it offers a collection of intra-relating phenomena (an assemblage) connected to the larger handbook-assemblage. Rather than offering a nation-specific exposition of the politics of sexuality education as a regional reference to ‘global’ might imply, we envisaged it comprising writing that engaged with the field’s historical and philosophical derivations. That is, it would span diverse temporalities, places, nations, spaces, and technologies (legal, medical, religious, feminist, and scientific). The phenomena within this section would be historical and philosophical, articulating with critiques of sexuality education in terms of its heteronormalising and colonising capacities. Overall, our aim was that contributions would reveal how sexuality education has been conceptualised and critiqued across time and cultures.

As the leading scholars who head each of these parts write their own introductions, we do not detail individual contributions in each part of the book here. Instead, in accordance with Barad (2007), our aim is to account for their ‘constitutive practices’ (pp. 390–391). While we outline our original imaginings for each part of the handbook, you will see from section introductions that heads and contributors stretched and moulded their shape in directions we could not foresee. Indeed in alignment with the notion of assemblage, this is something we had hoped for. For instance, almost all these scholars renamed the working titles we offered for their sections. As one example, in keeping with our intention that sexuality education be more broadly envisioned than formal sexuality education, Part III was originally named ‘New Technologies, Space, and Sexual Cultures’. Its focus was on learning via new technologies including Facebook, MySpace, and sexting as well as what are now more conventional spatial forums such as film and television. Our aim for the section was to reveal the expansive way in which sexuality is ‘educated’ and attendant sexual cultures that are produced in virtual spaces and contexts beyond the classroom. Due to the ad hoc nature of assemblages described above, the final title of the section became ‘Sexual Cultures, Entertainment Media, and Communication Technologies’. This enunciation better encapsulated the way contributions in this assemblage came together and section heads and contributors interpreted their task.

Part II, as originally imagined by us, spoke to ‘the production of phenomena in its sedimenting historiality’ (Barad 2007, pp. 390–391) as captured in its original title: ‘Sexuality Education in School Contexts’ (later renamed ‘Sexualities Education in Schools’). This section’s focus recognised that historically sexuality education has (and continues) to occur predominantly in school-based settings. Contributions were envisaged to focus on how such learning occurs as a consequence of the specific nature of this institutional environment with emphasis on how students are constructed via discourses and practices as ‘child’, ‘gendered’, and ‘(hetero)sexual citizen’. We imagined attention might be given to the ways parents, administrators, governments, and expert commentators are woven together in the project of designing and enacting school-based sexuality education while highlighting what has been (im)possible to achieve in this context. As conceived by the section heads and contributors, Part II stretches this original brief with the inclusion of illuminating pieces on sexuality education outside school-based contexts and within, for instance, sites of mass incarceration (See Fields and Torquinto (Chapter 14)). In the unforeseen coagulation of this assemblage, we as editors are excited by the way this chapter unexpectedly highlights how sexuality education in prisons offers a critical mirror to the inadequacies of some school-based programmes.

The final part of the handbook entitled ‘Re-animating what else sexuality education research can do, be, and become’ participates in ‘the ongoing reconfiguring of the space of possibilities for future enactments’ (Barad 2007, pp. 390–91) of the field. While the previous sections were envisaged to sketch sexuality education’s historical and contemporary conceptualisations and practices, this section was geared to orient readers towards future possibilities. It aimed to press at the edges of current thought around sexuality education by exploring new ways of conceptualising this field. To do this, critical sexualities scholars were invited to bring research and conceptual insights, sometimes beyond the field of sexuality education, to articulate a reshaping of this area. We did suggest possible names and topics for inclusion, yet the ad hoc nature of assemblages meant only one of the final contributions was someone on this list. In characteristic anthropocentric fashion, we had underestimated the flow of this particular assemblage. Its twists and turns meant its form as it appears here could not have been imagined by us.

Our desire as editors for this kind of unknown, and the accompanying sense that this project could only ever be more-than-ourselves (Lorimer 2013), was captured by another (editorial) agential cut that we have not yet accounted for. We decided to invite key figures in the field of critical sexuality studies to oversee each section in order to stamp their own mark on it. Via this cut, we attempted to divest some of our own authority in this project and enable significant others to lend shape to it. Our basis for reaching out to these people was the fact they had made significant contributions to the field, having either written authoritatively on sexuality education, and/or offered ideas that have been influential to its development from outside of it. We also recognised that as leaders in their field, they had reach into geographical locations, communities, and ideas which we did not. The nature of the handbook of sexuality education-assemblage is that (human) editors cannot orchestrate who/what joins it, but by some ‘wonder’ (MacLure 2013b) everyone we asked to be involved as a section head said ‘yes’. In joining the assemblage, each section head brought with them vibrancies of flow, ideas, people, and other matter that make this handbook a unique confederation of thought, affect, corporeality, and materiality which we feel privileged to be a part of.

Becoming Sexuality Education-Assemblage

Continuing with the Barad’s (2007) appeal for the ‘accounting of … constitutive practices’ in the becoming of this handbook, in this last section, we turn our attention to ‘the enactment of boundaries and exclusions’ (pp. 390–391). This work forms part of the ‘ongoing reconfiguring of the space of possibilities for future enactments’ (Barad 2007, pp. 390–91) within the field of critical sexualities education. In the spirit of new materialisms’ orientation to open-endedness, and the impossibility of knowing in advance what might yet become, we do not signal the limits of the collection in any conventional form. This practice usually involves editors identifying issues and areas of the field which were not/could not be included in a collection. Instead, we orient the reader to these boundaries and exclusions via a series of questions which we hope hold open, rather than close down, possibilities for being/knowing in the field. You, the reader, may notice that in the interests of opening possibilities, we do not even pose these questions conventionally. Instead of asking fully formed questions, like ‘How do space and sexuality intersect?’, we offer up particular ideas, such as ‘spaces’ and ‘sexualities’—the coming together (becoming of), we cannot/prefer not to, predict.

How do the following come together in sexuality education?

  • Spaces and sexuality

  • Time and sexuality

  • Clothes, comportment, and student bodies at school

  • Sexuality education research and ethics

  • Sexuality education and dementia

  • The sexual ‘unmentionables’ (e.g. paedophilia and sadomasochism) and learning about sexuality

  • Affect and learning about sexuality

  • Dementia and learning about sexuality

  • Cisgender and sexuality

And then, there are the questions that with our anthropocentric limits we have not/cannot imagine. The dots at the end of this sentence mark their inclusion, while acknowledging they are unknown.............