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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
Throughout the junior high and high school documents, binaries become more and more explicit as themes emerge from lexical cohesion. Repetition and collocation make the language ideology become visible, revealing fractal recursions and erasure, along with iconization. Fractal recursions organize binaries and are complex and change in different contexts; they are “relative: dependent for part of their referential meaning on the interactional context in which they are used” (Gal as cited in Andrus 596). Ideological nuances within the layers of this binary structure are often collapsed, hidden, and ignored (Andrus 596). Gal discusses how the binary structure can be projected onto activities, spaces, identities, and any other social “objects” to further split them in two, and with further recursions, split those binaries into more and more parts (81). “Fractal thinking” can allow certain distinctions to disappear, reiterating the main binary (Gal 82). In application to the sex education materials, fractal recursions divide the material into heteronormative temporal themes that fall under “future,” and negatively connoted themes that create the category of “sex” (See Figure 2 below). The motif of heteronormativity in the data finds itself in opposition to the motif of sex; these two concepts work towards being mutually exclusive. Any distinction that may blur the separation of the two categories is de-emphasized. For example, sex within marriage contests the main binary, so it is mentioned only twice in each resource guide.
Outside the main binary of “future” versus “sex” in the curriculum, queer identities and BIPOC and working-class populations are backgrounded, ignored. Erasure occurs “in the totalizing vision of linguistic ideology—elements that don’t fit have to be ignored or transformed” (Irvine and Gal 404). Erasure also occurs when one side of the binary is emphasized—the heteronormative category is clearly the focus in the sex education materials, relegating importance to the language and identity that forms in the curriculum, and dismissing the relevance of the other category. Irvine and Gal discuss iconization as “if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed a social group’s inherent nature or essence” (403). In the sex education curriculum for Utah, heteronormative language is ascribed moral importance, and this language is iconized as an essential feature of the social group who identifies with it. Therefore, the language ideology of these documents assigns heteronormative social groups moral superiority, at the expense of marginalized identities.