Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ILEF DERGISI, cilt.12, sa.1, ss.69-100, 2025 (ESCI)
The need for sex education for children and adolescents as well as adults has been a topic of discussion in different periods of the Republic of Turkey.In this essay, I focus on sex education discourse in the first thirty years of the republic to identify various tensions inherent in the modern definition of sexuality.Sex education discourse not only plays a crucial role in the formation of modern conceptualizations of sexuality but also emerges as a discursive terrain where ordinary people understand, problematize, and negotiate their own desires, sexual practices, and embodiments. Studying this terrain informs us about normative definitions of sexuality, the distinction made between legitimate and illegitimate forms of sexuality, and the experiences, subjectivities, and forms of desire constructed within this framework. During the period in question, sex education was foregrounded as a solution to various "problems," ranging from child sexuality to pathologized, non-normative gender identities and sexual desires, sexual violence, the fight against syphilis, the rehabilitation of the population, abortion, and marital equality. In this context, educators, physicians of various specialties, legal experts, journalists, writers, and members of the women's movementwrote newspaper and magazine articles, made translations, published books and booklets, and organized public conferences. The urban literate classes expressed their opinions publicly through questionnaires and question-and-answer columns. While all agreed on the need for sex education, they had different ideas about the methods and content of such education and about gender roles. Because its scope, methods, and audience remained ambivalent and flexible, sex education allowed conflicting ideas to coexist. This flexibility opened up a terrain where women's-rights advocates could find a place to publicly express their views on sexuality and produce alternative discourses against patriarchal control over women's assigned bodies and their sexualities, albeit to a limited extent, by articulating the agendas of modernity, science, population, and birth control.