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Face-to-face adult communication with young people about sexuality is, for the most part, assigned to two main groups of people: educators tasked with teaching school-based sexuality education that is provided as part of the compulsory Life Orientation (LO) learning area, and parents. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with Further Education and Training College students in an Eastern Cape town. Using a discursive psychology lens, we analysed data from, first, a written question on what participants remember being taught about sexuality in LO classes and, second, focus group discussions held with mixed and same-sex groups. Discussions were structured around the sexualities of high school learners and the LO sexuality education that participants received at high school. We highlight participants' common deployment of a 'discourse of disconnect' in their talk. In this discourse, the messages of 'risk' and 'responsibility' contained in adult face-to-face communications, by both parents and LO teachers, are depicted as being delivered through inadequate or nonrelational styles of communication, and as largely irrelevant to participants' lives. Neither of these sources of communication was seen as understanding the realities of youth sexualities or as creating habitable or performable sexual subject positions. The dominance of this 'discourse of disconnect' has implications for how sexuality education and parent communication interventions are conducted.
Key words: sexuality education; parent communication; sexuality; youth; discourse analysis; subject positions
Introduction
School-based sexuality education, provided as part of the compulsory Life Orientation (LO) learning area, is the most widely implemented sexuality intervention in South Africa. One of the stated goals of this intervention is to 'guide learners to make informed and responsible choices about their own health and well-being and the health and well-being of others' (Department of Basic Education, 2011: 9, emphasis added). Broad topics outlined by the Department of Basic Education (2011) in its curriculum statement for Grades 10 to 12 include puberty, STIs (incorporating HIV/ AIDS), teenage pregnancies, violence, gender inequality, power relations, sexual abuse and harassment, gender 'differences' in terms of reproduction and roles in the community, behaviours that could lead to sexual intercourse, values and skills relating to decision making regarding sexuality, and peer pressure. Officially, LO should be offered for two hours per week, with the 'Development of the self in society'...