Travelling with comprehensive sexuality education (CSE): critical reflections on the historical geography of the CSE curriculum

This paper offers a critical historical-geographical examination of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), interrogating its claims to comprehensiveness and universal applicability. Drawing on the left-of-queer frameworks from queer Marxist, decolonial queer and queer of colour literature, it argues that CSE's transnational travel from its US origins to global contexts like Vietnam is deeply implicated in neoliberal and neocolonial processes. Combining the analysis of institutional curricula (from the U.S., UNESCO, and Vietnam) and autoethnographic reflections on a decade of teaching and designing CSE, the paper demonstrates how the transnational/translocal circulation of CSE functions as a biopolitical technology: it promotes an individualistic, depoliticised ‘pan-optimism’ that instrumentalises sexuality education for capital accumulation and colonial hierarchisation while obscuring historical power relations and material structures of inequalities. The paper concludes by calling for a re-positioning of sexuality education through an emancipatory, internationalist, and materialist queer politics that centres the very intersectional struggles CSE often marginalises.