Bad Sex vs. No Sex: The Rhetoric of Heteronormative Temporality in Utah’s Abstinence-Based Education

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Contents

Introduction

History of Abstinence Education in the United States and Utah’s Sex Education

Methods of Queer Linguistics and CDA: The Construction of Heteronormative Temporality

The Introductory PowerPoint: Heteronormative Parameters of Utah’s Sex Education Material

Junior High (JH) and High School (HS) Resource Guides: Heteronormativity vs. “Bad Sex”

Binaries: Fractal Recursivity and Erasure

Future vs. Sex

Conclusion

Works Cited

About the Author

Junior High (JH) and High School (HS) Resource Guides: Heteronormativity vs. “Bad Sex”

As discussed previously, repetition and collocation are the lexical tools I use to prove coherence of the two motifs of 1) heteronormative temporality and 2) the negative depiction of sex throughout the junior high and high school resource guides. The first motif that becomes apparent is heteronormative temporality. Each resource guide begins with:

“A resource guide for parents and teachers on teaching human sexuality:

• To prepare students for lives as responsible adults and for their potential role as parents.
• To enhance the ability of students to be productive, effective, communicating members of their present and future families.
• To foster the knowledge, values, attitudes, and skills that build and nurture healthy relationships’ (USOE JH 1, emphasis added)

Not only are the parameters established for heteronormativity in the presentation, but the materials immediately define the same scope for the resource guides. The words I bolded in the excerpt highlight the beginning of a heteronormative temporal motif with implications of the future, such as “prepare” and “potential.” Paired with these markers of future time are heteronormative lexical items such as “family,” “responsible adults” and “healthy relationships.” Since teachers are restricted from advocating for "homosexuality," we understand these to be heterosexual families and heterosexual relationships.

The following chart maps out the continued thread of heteronormative temporality (use of bolding below calls attention to these moves):

The bolded words show themes of family, abstinence, and the future. “What decisions protect my future?” encapsulates the main message of both junior high and high school resource guides. The number of times each word appears in the document is noted in the “Number of Repetitions” column; the repetition and collocation of these words construct heteronormative temporal spaces which are aligned with positive evaluative words, like in the sentence: “As people mature and marry, sexual intimacies contribute to a healthy relationship.” “Mature and marry” operate as a parallel for “healthy relationship” in this sentence, making the two phrases synonymous. Mature marriage is framed as “healthy,” a positive evaluation. Another sentence emphasizes abstinence: “Identify the benefits of premarital sexual abstinence.” “Benefits” is paired with “abstinence,” a link that happens often in both resource guides—again, positively connoted words accompany the themes of abstinence and marriage. Male and female, woman and man, girl and boy, are the only gender categories presented, reinforcing the heteronormative gender binary in the texts. We also begin to see the binary of adolescence versus adulthood, with sentences such as “Adolescents need to understand the responsibilities associated with parenthood” and “As young people begin to gain independence, parents and families can continue to provide valuable input.” Both examples suggest that adolescents and young people do not understand how to navigate decisions that accompany independence, which is knowledge that only parents, adults, possess. As we will see in the next table, adolescents are framed as lacking the wisdom to navigate decisions that belong in the future, belong with their mature selves. When not related to the concepts of abstinence, family, marriage, or heterosexuality, sexual violence and negative effects are emphasized in the resource guides, which is the second motif that appears.

Though characteristics of rape and sexual abuse are important to discuss with students, collocation in the above table shows us that much of the sex education language surrounding the concept of sex, whether it is the act of intercourse or an effect of it, is negative: “Discuss the consequences that may occur when adolescents are sexually intimate before marriage.” “Consequence” carries a much different connotation than “result” or “effect”; it has the weight of irresponsibility attached. Throughout the documents, sex is at times paired with abstinence and in a few sentences, paired with marriage. In the heteronormative motif, sex is associated with positive evaluative words, depicted as an absence in the present: “Positive, responsible sexual behavior will be presented in the context of abstinence before marriage and fidelity after marriage” (USOE PPT). Abstinence means no sex until marriage, and marriage is defined as an adult decision in the future, not for adolescents: “Teen marriages are generally not stable and frequently end in divorce” (USOE HS 56). Therefore, sex in the present is the rival of a successful future. When sex is not paired with marriage or abstinence, it is either defined as an act without agency, such as rape or harassment, or as adolescent premarital sex, and paired with consequences: “Recognize the impact teen pregnancies have on quality of life, incidence of child abuse, and changes of lifestyle” (USOE JH 41). Sex as act and effects is prominently displayed as negative, again and again in the education materials, opposing the sexless domain of heteronormative temporality.

The resource guides also highlight the impossibility of being a teen parent, showing that they do not fit in heteronormative temporality, or the vision of a successful future: “Teenage women have a high probability of raising children alone—they often do not marry at all” (USOE JH 42). Teenage mothers may not be able to access marriage; they have been displaced from the traditional heterosexual time frame of marrying after adolescence and having children after marriage. Another example discusses their intellectual future: “When young teens become parents, they find it is much more difficult for them to continue their education” (USOE HS 15). A middle-class notion appears of establishing an education and then marriage, with the assumption that students have access to continued education. Many middle-class ideals are presented in the documents, such as the assumption that these adolescents do not have STIs, HIV, or children. Also, especially in the high school guide, case studies or hypothetical situations are presented for students to imagine, such as a “self-esteem thinking exercise” where students rate themselves from 1-10 on achievement and effort. In this exercise, the situations that students should envision are things like: “Playing the piano,” “using computers,” and “being happy/smiling” (USOE HS 22). Many of these activities are privileged ones, indicating the creators’ assumptions about the student demographic. In the sex education documents, heteronormative temporality is built on “middle-class logic,” as Halberstam discusses, defining its realm in opposition to a realm of adolescent sex and working-class teen parents who cannot achieve financial stability. A clear binary is established through the lexical cohesion of heteronormative temporality versus sex. Middle-class logic furthers the rhetoric of heteronormativity, which queer linguistics and CDA tools help reveal as the perceived “moral” side of the binary, opposed to the apparently depraved realm of sex outside marriage, erasing everything external to this dichotomy.