The Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) Review: Advancing Student Sexual Citizenship in Ireland for the Twenty-First Century?

In this chapter, the concept of sexual citizenship (Evans, Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993) is elaborated and employed as a lens to analyse to what extent recent Irish policy developments and more specifically the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) Review of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) (NCCA, Report on the Review of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) in Primary and Post-primary Schools. https://ncca.ie/media/4462/report-on-the-review-of-relationships-and-sexuality-education-rse-in-primary-and-post-primary-school.pdf, 2019) indicate a shift away from a construction of the student’s sexual citizenship as a problematic citizenship in need of regulation and control. It is argued that while there are positive indicators that a more positive conception of the student as sexual citizen is evident in the NCCA review of RSE (NCCA, Report on the Review of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) in Primary and Post-primary Schools. https://ncca.ie/media/4462/report-on-the-review-of-relationships-and-sexuality-education-rse-in-primary-and-post-primary-school.pdf, 2019), there are also clear indicators that the revised RSE curriculum is unlikely to trouble or move beyond normative conceptions of sexualities in significant ways. This means that the space to pursue the goals of equal and inclusive sexual citizenship in the revised RSE programme may still be limited.