Reimagining the Norm: A Critical Examination of Queer and Disabled Perspectives of Sex Education
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Authors
Kirby, Emily
Date
2025-10-31
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
sex education , sexualities , disability , crip studies , education , queer , LGBTQ
Alternative Title
Abstract
This thesis examines the intersections of queerness, disability, and sex education in Ontario through an interview-based study with queer and disabled adults. Despite reforms to sex education curricula across Canada, dominant frameworks continue to privilege heteronormative, able-bodied, and developmentally “on time” trajectories, leaving queer disabled students marginalized or rendered unintelligible. Drawing on crip theory (McRuer 2006; Kafer 2013) and affect theory (Ahmed 2004), this project examines how participants experienced and navigated these exclusions and how their experiences of sex education reverberated across identity, intimacy, and self-knowledge.
Methodologically, this study is grounded in qualitative approaches and deploys the method of semi-structured interviews with queer disabled adults who received sex education in Ontario’s public school system. Through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006, 2019) my project explores how participants remembered, critiqued, and reinterpreted their sex education, as well as how they constructed alternative avenues of learning about sexuality and relationships. In the analysis, I uncovered themes which include misconceptions surrounding dating and safety, the emotional labour of negotiating identity, temporal complexities in experiences of intimacy, do-it-yourself and media-based sex education, and the role of family and community networks.
Findings highlight the ways in which participants engaged in significant emotional and intellectual labour to unlearn normative scripts and to create space for queer disabled forms of intimacy and desire. These narratives underscore both the enduring exclusions embedded within Ontario’s sex education system and the resilience and creativity of queer disabled communities in cultivating alternative knowledge practices. By centering disabled and queer voices, this thesis reframes sex education not simply as curricular content but as an experience that can leave affective residue throughout students’ lives.
This research contributes to sociological understandings of disability, sexuality, and education by showing how crip and queer perspectives destabilize normative constructions of sex education. In doing so, it calls for pedagogical frameworks that move beyond inclusion and instead embrace the generative possibilities of “cripping” sex education.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International