Sex Education in Argentina: Ideological Tensions and Critical Challenges

JUAN MARCO VAGGIONE; EDUARDO MATTIO

Critical Pedagogy, Sexuality Education and Young People. Issues about Democracy and Active Citizenry

Peter Lang

Lugar: New York; Año: 2018; p. 35 - 49

In 2006, Argentina passed a national law recognizing sex education as a right that ought to be obligatorily included in all schools. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the sanctioning of this law as part of the tensions and challenges that characterizes contemporary sexual politics in this country. Firstly, it considers the principal tensions and conflicts that underlie the legal recognition and the public policies adopted to guarantee sex education as a right. Debating sex education, its scope of influence and how it is implemented as a public policy evidences the complex connections between the religious and the political. Secondly, the chapter proposes the need for an appropriation of the law outside the ideological tensions that arose with regard to the implementation of sex education in school contexts. To this end, it is necessary to adopt a critical pedagogical perspective, which far from inclusive illusions, questions the dominant patriarcal and heteronormative contract.