Fall 2000
Volume 27, Number 1

Talk about sex has a long history of trouble in the United States. Fear of the corrupting power of the sexual word has fueled antivice and obscenity campaigns and prompted criticism of those who would speak about sexuality. Censorship efforts depend not only on a conviction that words can perform evil but that "evil will be averted if only the words are not uttered."1 Since talk about sexuality is the medium of sex education, it is not surprising that school programs would be a field of enormous tension. Since the earliest calls for sex education in the public schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the phantasm of the innocent child being dangerously stimulated by sexual talk has provoked controversy and fueled efforts to regulate or silence sexual speech with children. The 1994 firing of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders for suggesting that it might be beneficial to discuss masturbation in sex education programs reminds us of the persistence of political contests over talking with young people about sex.

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Historical eras give rise to particular speech genres in which sets of vocabularies, grammars, tropes, and meanings form interpretive repertoires.6 Cultural battles often involved contests over meaning waged through attempts to control and fix the naturalizing potential of speech genres. Although the meanings and vocabularies have evolved over the last several decades, at the heart of the opposition to sex education has been the view that sex education speech is itself performative, regardless of actual content. Two versions of this allegation about sex education prevail. One says that speech about sex unhealthily stimulates sexual thought and practice among students. This anxious warning--that sex education makes kids go out and have sex--is as old as sex education itself. The second, more recent allegation about sex education is that speaking about sex is sex. In particular, according to this claim sexual speech itself enacts an emotionally abusive type of sex.7 These two interpretive repertoires now perform their own unsettling effects in the already unsettled space of sex education culture wars.

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The extent to which speech performs that which is spoken is a subject of considerable academic debate. As literary critic Shoshana Felman poses the question, "To speak an act: can this be done?"27 Is, for example, burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family a legally protected speech act or a hate crime? How is it similar to, or different from, hurling a racist epithet at someone on the street? What is the nature of the harm effected by either? Pornography has been the subject of similar contention. Countering decades of loosening obscenity laws and increased legal protection of sexual speech, some feminists argue that pornography is not speech but a discriminatory act of domination and terrorism.28 Speech enacting such allegedly horrific crimes is, of course, vulnerable to sanctions. Campus speech codes, civil laws against pornography, and restrictions on sexual speech in the workplace are all measures, albeit wildly controversial ones, designed to redress or protect from harmful speech. These broader cultural developments inflected Christian Right activists' allegations that sex education speech actually performs harmful sex.

1. Abraham Kaplan, "Obscenity as an Esthetic Category," Law and Contemporary Problems 20 (Autumn 1955): 550; quoted in Felice Flanery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity, and Law (Carbondale, Ill., 1976), p. 245.

6. See Marc Steinberg, "Tilting the Frame: Considerations on Collective Action Framing from a Discursive Turn," Theory and Society 6 (1998): 1Ð28. See also M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1986).

7. See, for example, J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983); and Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York, 1997). These two strategies correspond to Austin's two dimensions of performatives, the perlocutionary and illocutionary, which have been further amplified and debated by scholars.

27. Felman, The Literary Speech Act, p. 12. 28. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).