CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Novoa Villada, Manuela |
|---|---|
| Title | Reimagining Sexuality Education: Transforming Everyday Sexual and Gender Dynamics as a Peace-building Strategy to Address Colombia's Gender-based Violence Continuum |
| Summary | This study explores the relationship between Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and peacebuilding, arguing that CSE addresses and responds to the continuum of gender-based violence (GBV) and conflict in Colombia. The existing literature on gender, war, and peace has overlooked the critical role of sexuality in peacebuilding practices. By emphasizing gender and sexuality through a community-based approach, CSE promotes feminist, queer, and decolonial understandings of peace. From my engagement with ethnographic research, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with three CSE organizations in Colombia – Jóvenes sin Tabú, Niñas sin Miedo, and Poderosas – my findings suggest that CSE practitioners perceive GBV as institutionalized within everyday behaviors and subjectivities, perpetuated by social institutions and dynamics of relationality. They assert that incorporating sexuality in social transformation processes is crucial, as CSE encourages teenagers to reconfigure sexual and gender power relations, mitigating violent patterns of behavior exacerbate by war and rooted in colonial legacies. This bottom-up approach to social change, in which horizontal and critical pedagogies are utilized, aims to create a domino effect within communities. By recognizing youth agency, CSE expects teenagers to embody feminist and queer forms of solidarity in their everyday lives, despite the social, political, and cultural resistance against CSE and the monetary challenges faced by organizations. From my engagement with all three groups, I identified that their implementation strategies and institutional models are distinct, resulting in different yet similar pedagogical approaches to comprehensive sexuality education. Regardless of their organizational differences, all the CSE that inform this study, strive for justice of women and feminized populations, taking an intersectional approach that acknowledges overlapping systems of oppression based on class, race, ethnicity, and ability in the Colombian context. |
| Supervisor | Julia Sachseder |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/novoa_manuela.pdf |
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