Sexual Evangelism: Youth Activism and the Fight for Comprehensive Sex Education in East Tennessee

In the face of structural oppression perpetuated in part by a conservative U.S. state that limits their access to comprehensive and accurate information about sexual/reproductive health (SIECUS, 2019), each year high school students (aged 14-18) in East Tennessee are recruited by Family Futures to form a peer education/activism group promoting comprehensive sex education awareness. While youth’s participation in activism is often situated in terms of individual empowerment separate from structural forces (Watts & Flanagan, 2007; Bay-Cheng, 2017), our understanding of how youth negotiate their experiences with sex education activism as situated within larger systems is limited, particularly as youth’s voices are often erased (Fahs & McClelland, 2016). Thus, we recruited eight adolescents to participate in a year-long ethnography during which we sought to understand the motivations behind their engagement in counterculture activism and how it was impacted by and negotiated through marginalization (e.g., queer erasure, cisheterosexism) and privilege (e.g., class, Whiteness). Grounded theory coding and situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) of biweekly meetings and semi-structured interviews revealed intersectional patterns of critical consciousness development linking participants’ experience of privilege and oppression to their emergent activist identities, as well as the emergent concept of sexual evangelism.