Hära Jess Haltorp: Sexualitetens historia i klassrummet: Normer, sexualitet och relationer i gymnasieskolans historieundervisning

Zoom link to the thesis defence

Abstract

History education offers a unique arena to examine how students and teachers negotiate norms and values in relation to the past, present, and future. While previous research has addressed the role of Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) in biology, less is known about how these themes are enacted and understood within history classrooms. 

This thesis investigates how history teaching can function as an arena for meaning-making about gender, sexuality, consent, and relationships, and how these processes intersect with the school’s democratic mission. It examines which discourses are produced and negotiated in classrooms and what significance they hold for students’ historical understanding. The study draws on classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students in Swedish upper secondary schools. Using poststructuralist and feminist theoretical frameworks, including Foucault, Butler, and Ahmed, discourse analysis is employed to explore how meaning-making unfolds in practice.

The analyses identify six interrelated discourses: the discourse of shame; two norm-related discourses that reflect tensions between reinforcing and challenging normative orders; and three future-oriented discourses —utopian, dystopian, and ambivalent. These discourses reveal how meaning-making constitute discourses, and how students navigate tensions between identification with and distance from the past. Lessons that confront norms tend to elicit both engagement and resistance, particularly in relation to masculinity and equality.

The study demonstrates that addressing RSE questions within history education is vital for connecting students’ understanding of the past with contemporary struggles over gender, sexuality, and democracy. History teaching can make visible how norms have evolved over time, how they continue to shape lived experiences, and how they might be reimagined in the future. The findings call for educational policies and pedagogical practices that view norm critique as a situated, dialogic process—positioning history education as a key arena for advancing students’ understanding of sexuality, consent, and relationships in a historical perspective.