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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Lutz Sauerteig
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2020.
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This paper explores the changing concepts of sexual health under which German sex education operated during the twentieth century. The four main, at times tough overlapping concepts defined sexuality as sinful, as a danger to public health, as a controllable risk to the individual, or as something that can be negotiated and managed. Using discourses about contraception for young people as an example, I investigate how these concepts operated in sex education material published for young people between c. 1900 and c. 1980. I argue that assumptions about a “liberalisation” of sexuality are not useful to understand changes in sexual morality, access to sexual knowledge, and sexual practices of young people. Rather, from the late 1960s sex education became part of a neoliberal governmentality strategy and contraception an important technology of the self that was mediated in sex education material. Young people had to learn these sexual technologies of the self and negotiate their sexual activities with their partner.
Author(s): Sauerteig L
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Virus. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Medizin
Year: 2020
Volume: 18
Pages: 213-245
Online publication date: 09/07/2020
Acceptance date: 16/06/2019
Date deposited: 03/07/2019
ISSN (print): 1605-7066
Publisher: Leipziger Universitätsverlag
URL: https://doi.org/10.1553/virus18s213
DOI: 10.1553/virus18s213
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