Learning the desire-able: a critical geography of Vietnamese young people's alternative sexuality education

Whether explicitly, implicitly, or informally communicated, gender and sexuality are continually learned through everyday relations and practices, permeating and exceeding any designated educational space (Allen, 2017; MacAulay et al., 2021). Such learning is shaped by hegemonic ideologies of cisheteropatriarchy, intersecting with class, race/coloniality, disability, and other axes of power (Bay-Cheng, 2017). This calls for close attention to the lived dimensions of young people’s sexual learning, understood as “an amalgamation that draws from all curricula acting on the subject” (Tillett & Cushing-Leubner, 2021, pp. 7–8), in order to examine how young people navigate changing, enabling, constraining, or conflicting forces. In Vietnam, post‑Đổi Mới restructuring and the “socialisation” of education have driven the withdrawal of public investment and social infrastructure which, together with socio‑cultural constraints, renders formal sexuality education insufficient, uneven, and fragmented. This displacement of responsibility onto private and informal spheres underpins the formation of “alternative” sexuality education across informal, formal, and in‑between spaces.

Thinking with young Vietnamese participants’ accounts and critical theories on space, gender and sexuality, my research proposes understanding alternative sexuality education as interstitial, agentic, libidinal practices of bodily and spatial appropriation that young people assemble and curate across these spaces. Examining these practices from the standpoint of young people’s everyday life helps locate and articulate the interconnections, tensions, and struggles that shape processes of sexual learning.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with 28 young people aged 16–32 coming from different class, gender, sexuality, regional, and (dis)ability backgrounds, the study traces how they learn about gender and sexuality and negotiate institutional constraints in schools and families as well as wider social dynamics. Reflexive thematic analysis suggests that alternative sexuality education constitutes an assemblage of dialectically related social spaces that young people strategically relate to as they navigate contradictions, constraints, and gaps in their sexual learning journeys. It emerges through engagements with formal sex education (state and school policies/curricula and schooling cultures), semi‑formal sex education (clinics, NGOs, private companies, families), and informal sex education (peer and intimate relationships and media ecologies), as young people recognise and mediate tensions within and among these spaces in pursuit of desirable sexual learning and becoming.