Overview

Sexuality education in schools in urban India today is often perceived as 'promoting promiscuity', leading to 'experimentation' and being 'detrimental to society'. The State and religious groups believe that sexuality education is against 'Indian culture and values'. This heady cocktail imagines a 'depraved' adolescent - especially adolescent boys - at the centre, one who needs to be taught 'restraint', 'abstinence' and whose 'natural tendencies' are sought to be controlled. Adolescent boys are imagined to possess 'uncontrollable sexual urges' while adolescent girls are imagined as victims of these 'urges'. Various organisations have advocated for comprehensive sexuality education which includes information about the body, sexual and reproductive health and rights and identities. But is that enough? Can there be a way to imagine sexuality education outside the binaries of abstinence/'Indian values'1 and comprehensive sexuality education? Simultaneously, can there be a way to rethink adolescent male sexuality outside the 'uncontrollable urges' paradigm? Putting these concerns together, I ask in the dissertation: how can rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle class Mumbai reveal to us the limits of sexuality education as we know it today? I reflect on the limits of sexuality education by examining State, feminist, Christian and sexological materials on sexuality education in Mumbai; by exploring adolescent male romance and its affective registers; adolescent male sexual knowledge and the regulation of romance in school spaces. These allow me to point to how the State, feminist, Christian and sexological discourses are limited in their approach; how a discussion of negative affect and love are missing in the curriculum; how the official sexuality education curriculum is limited in providing prohibition, secrecy and thrill in sexual learning and how sexuality education might be counter-productive if student romance is regulated in school spaces.

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