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Sexuality Education in the Context of Mass Incarceration: Interruptions and Entanglements

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The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education

Abstract

What meaningful and efficacious teaching and learning are possible within the context of racialized and gendered mass incarceration? We explore the possibilities for interrupting the inequalities and injustices that thread through sexuality education available to those most affected by mass incarceration. Our discussion focuses on a broad experience of court-involvement that spans multiple settings and institutions—prisons, jails, parole, probation, and the streets. We explore examples that include peer HIV education, street-based outreach, participatory models of teaching and learning. While sexuality education gained through jails, prisons, and street outreach is an opportunity to learn and to support agentic claims to one’s own sexuality, such teaching and learning are always encumbered with the demands of the carceral institution.

The authors thank Sara McClelland, Michelle Fine, Megan Comfort, Kemi Role, and Jen Gilbert for comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Thanks are due also to Jessica’s writing group (Amy Gottlieb, Didi Khayatt, Jonathan Silin, and Anna Wilson) for their feedback. Finally, we thank our sexuality education colleagues in jails and prisons and on the streets for their ongoing work and resistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology and Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Jessica Fields

  2. Family Healthy Care Nursing, University of California San Francisco School of Nursing, 2 Koret Way, San Francisco, CA, 94143, USA

    Signy Toquinto

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  1. Jessica Fields
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  2. Signy Toquinto
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Louisa Allen

  2. School of Sociology Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Mary Lou Rasmussen

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Fields, J., Toquinto, S. (2017). Sexuality Education in the Context of Mass Incarceration: Interruptions and Entanglements. In: Allen, L., Rasmussen, M.L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_14

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