This summer I have explored transformations in sex education practice in a region of southern Senegal officially marked by and popularly stigmatized for sexual violence. In Kolda, Senegal, 68% of young women become pregnant by age 18, according to a 2012 study by the UN Population Fund. The Centre Conseil Ado (CCA) of Kolda -- an incredibly dynamic adolescent health center headed by the straight-talking, Zouk-dancing, world-changing Mr. Babacar Sy – conceives teen or unwanted pregnancy as a form of sexual violence, alongside Female Genital Cutting (FGC), child marriage, and rape. Integral to the CCA’s approach to ending this violence is a new UN Population Fund-sponsered sex ed curriculum, Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE). While not ignoring structural problems such as poverty and educational inequality, Babacar privileges a health model of individual agency. T-Shirts worn by the CCA's teen peer educators proclaim: "Information is a human right." Once "correct information" - conceived as objective and transcendent of culture - is disseminated, teens choose what they want to do with their bodies. "It's not up to me to tell them what to do," Babacar told me at our first meeting in 2015. "They make their own choices." Information must come in particular forms to be considered as such. Intimate life may be intimate, but "open communication" is key; tasoo, often bawdy songs performed at ceremonies, some of which discuss proper sexual and relationship conduct, are considered oblique, coded language. Not only do they fall outside the biomedical fold, they are deemed not "open" enough to be informational. Babacar and his team are confident that the information + choice will decrease violence. At the conclusion of a peer educator training session, a veteran peer educator proclaimed to a group of 15 year olds, "if you tell your friends what you learned here, there will be no more teen pregnancy! Do your jobs!" I first met Babacar and his team of teen peer educators last summer, while working on an eHealth project with one of Babacar's colleagues. Two features of CSE intrigued me, and spurred me to pursue an Innovations for Youth (I4Y) fellowship at CGPH. 1) CSE aims to make parents the #1 resource for sex ed for youth. However, the paternal aunt or bajaan, has long played the central role in sex education. She’s often the one with the joking relations required to talk with nieces and nephews about intimate matters that parents and children are reticent to discuss. Furthermore, CSE’s plan for change relies upon a circular communications model; training young people to inform parents of the importance of informing young people. 2) And as indicated by its title, CSE aims to encompass everything within its reach: not just anatomical diagrams and STDs, but relationships with parents, relationships with friends, gender roles – and, crucially, sexual pleasure and desire. The commitment to "open communication" about desire and pleasure, to use Babacar's term, diverges from many other sex ed programs marked by what anthropologist Shanti Parikh identified in Uganda as the “bifurcation or risk and pleasure” (Cf. Parikh 2012). Fueled by Babacar’s own concern about the CCA’s limited resources for impact studies, I returned to Kolda to assess parents’ responses to CSE. How would it's emphasis on parent-child communication gel with existing intergenerational communication practices? How does one bring questions of intimacy, desire, and pleasure into pedagogy? And what constitutes "open communication" in the first place? Good times with Babacar Sy and Arona Camara These questions are dramatized in animated form on www.clickinfoado.sn, a pedagogical website used in peer educator training sessions at the CCA. (Created by One World UK and Butterfly works, ICT for Development agencies). Clickinfoado.sn’s animated cartoons enact a teleological progress-narrative from the so-called “traditional” preeminanece of the bajaan to “open” communication between parents and children. In tandem, characters learn to express sensuous bodily experience in language. In one cartoon, the upper class highly educated Astou and her friend Balla school an impoverished villagois named Ouzin, who has just arrived to the city: OUZIN: sex? Oh la la! What are you talking about? Sex, only adults have the right to talk about it NARRATOR: In the traditional locale where Ouzin grew up, talking about sex before a certain age is considered impolite, improper, taboo. Only the paternal aunt (bajaan) can speak about sex. [Cut to photo of thatched huts] After teasing Ouzin, "It's like you're not part of the 21st century!," Astou and her friend Balla coax Ouzin into naming his sexual desire aloud. In turn, they advocate free communication between parents and children as co-constitutive of modern, 21st century life. BALLA: Sexual desire, for example, is something that can seize and affect us, and that's natural! Haven't you felt something rise in your body when you see a pretty girl? OUZIN: Uh...yah...I guess; but I have to wait until I have a wife to think about those things Ouzin thinks: It's true that sexual desire overcomes me sometimes. But I hesitate to speak about it; maybe I shouldn't. NARRATOR: To get certain information about sexuality, Ouzin pretends to be ignorant to push his friends to tell him more about it. It is at this point, where Ouzin attempts to translate the visceral feelings that "rise in his body" into words that he is brought into the informational fold, and his modern subjecthood is redeemed. By the end of the clip, Ouzin, Balla and Astou have pledged to not only discuss sexual desire among themselves, but to educate their parents and elders. "No one will do it in our place," Balla says. How do these idealized portrayals of unflinching conversations about visceral sensations, and equally unflinching discussions with grown ups, mesh with actual communication practices? To begin to answer that question, I began accompanying young peer educators, who trained with these cartoons, on their visites à domiciles or home visits – a kind of flash education spree where teens trained by the CCA as “peer educators” launch 10-minute lightening round discussions about the causes, consequences to and solutions for teen pregnancy with whoever they happen to find in each household. The routine was this: Babacar would assemble peer educators aged roughly 15-30 under a tree, all dressed in white T-Shirts with declarations like, “STOP! I am too young to get married” or “Information is a human right” printed on the back. We would split into groups and stride, after abbreviated salutations, into autobody shops, hair salons, and family homes, announcing without preamble that we had come to discuss teen pregnancy. Peer educators on a Visite a Domicile (VAD), or home visit One young woman we met during a home visit stood out from her kin. Unlike her sister and cousin sitting beside her in the stairwell, she did not wear an airy house dress suitable for cooking, or alternately, a smart outfit for circulating in the neighborhood. She wore a baseball cap, baggy carpenter pants, and a loose-fitting collared shirt. A baby slept on a blanket beside her. Lamine, a veteran CCA peer educator, elicited various points of view on the issue, then synthesized the consequences of premature pregnancy (stigmatization, obsttegric fistula, STDs, educational rupture….), The woman continually buttoned and unbuttoned her shirt. She remained silent throughout the conversation, buttoning, unbuttoning, buttoning again. When Lamine transitionned to the "solutions" part of the session, the woman looked up; "If my mother had talked to me about sex when I was young, I would not have gotten pregnant." The peer educators did not press her for details. Taking this statement as evidence we had “sent the right message,” we took down our interlocutors’ names and phone numbers, shook hands, and moved on to the next house, the next family, the next story. A friend told me later that this woman’s statement was not a unique position. Nor was the embrace of parent-child communication limited to young mothers. Indeed, though I have not finished conducting surveys, responses of older parents to this youth leadership initiative has not been nearly as frosty as I had predicted…at least on the level of explicit discourse. Many parents celebrate the push to “break the taboo,” in common parlance, on discussing sexuality between parents and children in general, and mothers and daughters in particular. One mother in a peripheral neighborhood described her delight when a group of her daughter’s 15-year old friends came to discuss teen pregnancy. “It’s time that children take their health into their own hands,” she told me. “They woke us up.” Of course, narratives about communication practices, and actual communication practices between mothers and daughters, may diverge. They interrelate, but are rarely a one-to-one match. We all have uneven perceptual access to how we use language and why. This poses methodological challenges, and analytical opportunities, in all ethnographic fieldwork. But I would argue especially in the anthropology of sexuality; discussing intimacy is, well, intimate. Furthermore, as I am closely associated with the CCA, responses to survey questions and informal conversations alike may be tweaked to echo what people think I want to hear. The risk is to dismiss self-description as an inconsequential paraphenomena, a misleading veneer to strip away in search of what people really do, how they really communicate about sexuality. Not only does this position devalue everyday forms of narrative and negate the co-production of ethnographic knowledge, but it also deploys an oft-critiqued language ideology that privileges reference. Language does not simply reflect (or, alternately, conceal) social life. It shapes social life in fundamental ways. As many anthropologists of language and sexuality have long asserted, silences, dissumulations, coded language should not be uncritically taken as dissimulations of meaning, but as meaningful gestures in themselves. Purinama Mankekar, for example, attends to her interlocutor's "silences, hesitations, and discursive detours," arguing that this “non-logocentric approach” to communication may reveal "surreptitious commentaries" on sexuality and ethical life that she might have otherwise overlooked (Mankekar 2012). Much work has been conducted on claims of silence and taboo attributed to sexualities in Africa; the attribution of a silence often ignores other forms of embodied knowledge through which people communicate about sexuality(Cf. Arnfred 2004). IN this case, silence is the stuff of explicit discussion. Alongside celebrations of open communication come claims that sexuality is “taboo” throughout Senegal. “Parents don’t talk to their children about sex,” agreed staff member Fatou, “because there’s a taboo.” This statement is interesting on a number of levels. First, it works as a classic performative: by stating “sexuality is taboo,” one in effect breaks the very prohibition one cites. Second, what happens to claims of taboo when one looks at poetic engagements with sexuality through songs called “tasoo,” performed at weddings and other ceremonies? Songs that often explicitly discuss not only marriage and proper conduct but also the sensory pleasures of touch? While continuing to shadow teens on their VADs, I decided to analyze “taboo-breaking” as a meta-discourse – a discourse deployed by animated cartoon characters, teens and parents. I vowed to attend to these practices of speech and silence, and speech about silence. Silences, detours, and embodied knowledge that may not fit into CSE’s approach. Things that may or may not emerge on a two-page survey. Combining surveys, interviews, and participant observation, I thought, might grant me a fuller picture of the intergenerational communication practices that reflect and shape youth sexuality. However, studying discourses of taboo-breaking led to deploying that discourse myself… Lamine and other peer educators have taken it upon themselves to train me as a peer educator, and shape me in their image. By June, I was explaining the menstrual cycle in Wolof. By July I was leading my own causeries (chat sessions) with groups of fifteen year old girls about teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and most interestingly, a sweeping lesson entitled simply, "sexuality.” This lesson explicitly addresses questions of sexual desire and pleasure. An underlying assumption of these lessons is that the peer educator must "break the taboo" on sexuality. This meant that I would be deploying some of the language ideologies and notions of silence that I wanted to study. My job was to get beyond teens' reluctance to discuss their bodies, their boyfriends, their desires, their fantasies. I must "Break the silence," said Sylvie, a 17-year old star at the CCA, as part of her pre-causerie pep talk. But I hesitated to adopt the unflinching, no holds barred approach of the veteran peer educator, which involves shocking young women out of their shyness with provocations like: “I know you have boyfriends. Admit it!” “What parts of your body have your boyfriends touched. Tell me!” “If you don’t speak, how will your parents speak?” or simply, “Tell the truth!” The CCA staff and peer educator cohort has been so generous with their time and expertise. But this meant deploying some of the same linguistic ideologies that I want to study. End the dissimulation, straighten the detours, get the "truth" of youth experience and tailor the lesson accordingly. The biggest methodological challenge, and analytical opportunity, of this summer has been navigating the dissonance between my training as an anthropologist and my training as a sex educator. In the next post, I will recount some successful and not-so-successful stints as a sex educator in Kolda. Until then! Juliana Friend
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