From Reticence to Abundance: Talking Back to American Sex Education’s Racialized Rhetorical Figuration of Childhood

Lecture by Associate Professor Erin J. Rand, Syracuse University, on her book: Minor Troubles. Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queernes.

Sex education programs in the United States have played a crucial role in constructing a racialized rhetorical figuration of childhood by emphasizing childhood’s innocence, advocating for abstinence, promoting a eugenicist model of the white, heteropatriarchal, nuclear family, and denying female sexual desire. In this talk, Rand will trace the history of US American sex education’s rhetoric of reticence and highlight an abundant alternative: a sexual-wellness program called KIMBRITIVE that “talks back” to the racist, sexist, and heteronormative assumptions of this history. Rand argues that KIMBRITIVE challenges both the substance and the style of speech presumed in sex education, emphasizing the processes of rhetorical invention through which childhood can be figured queerly as a site of embodied knowledge and agency.

Program

15:00–15:50: Lecture by Erin J. Rand

15:50–16:00: Short break

16:00–16:25: Short presentation by Louise Anna Ladegaard Chair of Normstormerne, followed by a conversation between Erin and Louise

16:25–16:55: Q&A

16:55–17:00: Closing remarks

Bio

Erin J. Rand (she/her) is associate professor in Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliated with LGBTQ Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University in the United States. Her scholarship examines rhetorics of gender and sexuality in public discourse, focusing particularly on queer and feminist modes of agency, dissent, and social protest; her work can be found in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ World Making, and Women’s Studies in Communication. Rand is the author of Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness (Ohio State University Press, 2025) and Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance (University of Alabama Press, 2014).

Registration

The lecture is free, but registration is required, send an email to fhb@hum.ku.dk.