Battling Body Politics: A Comparative Study of Sex Education Policy and Practice in the U.S.

The three papers that comprise this dissertation explain the causes and consequences of U.S. sex education policy. As a critical issue of reproductive politics, sex education divides schools, communities, and legislatures. Given the current battles over teaching about power and privilege in schools, this dissertation provides timely insight into the gendered and racialized anxieties that fuel such controversy. Findings demonstrate how gender and racial power relations inform policy adoption and implementation at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. While sex education policy has been championed to promote health equity, findings here suggest that the battle surrounding sex education mediates the potential impact of policy. This dissertation leverages multiple data sources to address this agenda, including an original time series dataset of sex education policy outcomes 130 hours of observations, and 37 in-depth interviews with sex education professionals in California, North Carolina, and Texas. Chapter 1 demonstrates how gender power relations and partisanship impact policy adoption at the macro-level. Chapter 2 shows how the efforts to quell controversy over sex education mediate the impact of policy at the meso-level by deterring efforts to further social justice through sex education. Chapter 3 illustrates how race informs the micro-politics of policy interpretation and negotiation. Taken together, findings contribute to the sociology of politics, gender and race, and reproduction by demonstrating how power relations inform policy adoption, interpretation, and negotiation. I conclude that the contestation over what young people learn about gender and race is both the cause and the consequence of sex education policy.Doctor of Philosoph