Knowing-in-being: traversing the mind/body dualism to dissolve sexuality education’s ‘knowledge/practice gap’

This article is an experimental, philosophical exploration of what productive possibilities new materialist theory offers for reimagining sexuality education policy. It uses feminist, new materialist [Barad 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press] thinking to generate an interruption of binary thinking around mind and body in relation to sexuality education. It extends the knowledge/practice gap literature [Allen 2001. ‘Closing Sex Education’s Knowledge/Practice Gap: The reconceptualisation of young people’s sexual knowledge.’ Sex Education 1 (2): 109–122] to suggest that sexuality education policy should traverse the mind/body dualism so that we no longer think of sexuality’s physical and mental/emotional aspects as separate. Grounded in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand policy, this article re-thinks the relationship between sexual knowledge (thinking) and sexual practice (doing) and argues for a sexuality education informed by knowing-in-being. It is suggested that allowing embodied, complex, posthuman knowledges that do not separate mind and body offers an alternative to individual responsibility, which might enable sexuality education to respond differently to the policy problems it seeks to address.