Sünde – Gefahr – Risiko – Management: Konzepte sexueller Gesundheit in der deutschen Sexualerziehung im 20. Jahrhundert. Schwerpunkt: Konzepte sexueller Gesundheit vom Mittelalter bis zum 21. Jahrhundert

The paper explores the changing concepts of sexual health under which German sex education operated during the twentieth century. The four main, at times closely overlapping concepts defined sexuality as sinful, as a danger to public health, as a controllable risk to the individual, or as something that can be negotiated and managed. Using discourses about contraception for young people as an example, I investigate how these concepts operated in sex education material published for young people between c. 1900 and c. 1980. I argue that assumptions about a “liberalisation” of sexuality are not useful to understand changes in sexual morality, access to sexual knowledge, and sexual practices of young people. Rather, from the late 1960s sex education became part of a neoliberal governmentality strategy and contraception an important technology of the self that was mediated in sex education material. Young people had to learn these sexual technologies of the self and negotiate their sexual activities with their partner