Possibilities for Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Including Pleasure in Sexuality Education

Abstract

The chapter introduces an arts-based methodology for thinking about pleasure within sexuality education and considers what forms of learning, 'unlearning' and 'emotional understanding' such an approach might allow. The methodology is drawn from The 'good sex project—a participatory filmmaking and knowledge exchange project that sets out to reanimate original research materials from a study of young people’s sexual cultures. This chapter documents two of the strategies developed during the project that I am calling—visualization/scriptwriting and performance/response. In my discussion, I consider these techniques not just as technlcal solutions within a filmmaking/research project but as potential strategies for sexual learning. I examine what kinds of 'places of learning' were created by using these strategies and what kinds of knowledge and knowledge-making were made possible as a result. The chapter starts by outlining the study on which the 'good sex' project is based—a four-year doctoral study of young people's understandings and experiences of 'good sex' and sexual pleasure conducted by the author between 2009 and 2013. In summarizing the findings of this study, I outline the rationale for the approach taken in 'good sex' project and our interest in using a participatory, performative and arts-based methodology. I then move on to provide a reflexive account of the two methods that are the focus of this chapter. I write as the lead researcher on the 'good sex' project and author of the doctoral research on which the project is based, using data from workshop recordings, materials produced during the workshops and my own observations and reflections recorded on the project blog. In concluding the chapter, I evaluate the potential of the methodology described for enabling innovative sexuality education in different institutional contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)