Envisaging a Critical Sexuality Education in Indonesia: A Poststructuralist Offer

The current chapter engages with sexuality education in Indonesia, which currently is virtually non-existent. Based on my research on Indonesian young people’s sexual subjectivity, in this chapter, I argue that decisions regarding how young people should be educated about sexuality must consider young people’s own ways of being a sexual subject. As the study reveals, tensions between discourses of (religious) sexual morality, sexual health, sexual orientation, and sexual violence have characterized everyday socio-political-sexual practices in contemporary Indonesia. Following the current study’s findings about how Indonesian young people have engaged with, negotiated, and resisted these discourses in their ways of understanding sexuality, the chapter proposes a sexuality education approach that might be connected with the ways contemporary Indonesian young people understand themselves as a sexual being—one that recognizes Indonesian young people’s agency, is critical of the discursive operation of power, and therefore, may promote social and sexual justice.