The Future of Evidence: Queerness in Progressive Visions of Sexuality Education

“Evidence” has replaced “abstinence” as the idea with foundational cultural authority in sexuality education debates, policy, and practice. In a move emblematic of this shift, leading sexual health organizations proposed the Future of Sex Education (FoSE), the first national standards for evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education that exemplified the push toward scientific, evidence-based standards. We examine FoSE’s attempts to broaden the scope of traditional evidence-based sexuality education policies and how sociological feminist analyses and queer theory can advance understandings of sexuality education’s capacity to effect social change. FoSE’s reliance on scientific evidence reinforces future-orientated narratives of (queer) youth sexuality and considers the possibilities and limitations these narratives suggest for young people’s sexual subjectivities. A theory of queer utopias complicates FoSE’s understandings of science, education, and the future, generating a queer utopic sexuality education that allows room for ambivalence and ambiguity in young people’s sexualities.