Talk about Sex

How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right

Janice M. Irvine

Praise for Talk about Sex:
“Must reading for scholars, sexuality researchers, activists, and public policy and public health planners engaged in efforts to promote education on sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV infection prevention for adolescents in schools.”—JAMA

Talk about Sex is a rich social history about the political transformations, cultural dynamics, and emotional rhetorical strategies that helped the right wing manufacture controversies on the local and national levels in the United States. Although the emergence of a politicized Christian Right is commonly dated at the mid-seventies, with the founding of groups like the Moral Majority, Talk about Sex tells the story of a powerful right-wing Christian presence in politics a full decade earlier. These activists used inflammatory sexual rhetoric—oftentimes deceptive and provocative—to capture the terms of public debate, galvanize voters, and reshape the culture according to their own vision.

This 20th Anniversary Edition includes a new preface and epilogue by the author that examines current controversies over public education on sexuality, gender, and race.

Demonstrating how the right wing draws on the cultural power of sexual shame and fear to build a political movement, Talk about Sex explores the complex entanglements of sexual knowledge, politics, and discourses.

Reviews

“A riveting account of how the Christian Right came to control much of the sex education curriculum taught in public schools. . . . In chilling detail, Irvine shows how the Christian Right’s provocative, often distorted depictions of secular sex education heated emotion.”—Gail Bederman, Women’s Review of Books

“Judicious and perceptive(,) . . . Irvine explores the clash between professional sex education advocates and politicized Christian evangelicals that has played out on the stage of local communities and school systems since the 1960s. She illuminates a significant yet largely unknown story of the politics of sexuality.”—Kathy Peiss, author of Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture

“A remarkable acute work, with great insights for historians interested in post-1960s politics, issues of free speech, and the history of sexuality.”—Helen Horowitz, Journal of American History

“Must reading for scholars, sexuality researchers, activists, and public policy and public health planners engaged in efforts to promote education on sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV infection prevention for adolescents in schools.”— JAMA ( Journal of the American Medical Association)

About the Author(s)

Janice M. Irvine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism. She is coeditor of Temple University Press’s Sexuality Studies book series.

In the Series

Sexuality Studies

Sexuality Studies, edited by Janice Irvine and Regina Kunzel, features work in sexuality studies broadly construed, in its social, cultural, and political dimensions, and in both historical and contemporary formations. The series includes titles located within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frames that combine theoretical methodologies with empirical research.

Proposals may be submitted to Shaun Vigil, Editor, Temple University Press

Talk about Sex

Reviews

About the Author(s)

In the Series

Also of Interest

Temple University Press