Jen Gilbert
Biographic Data
| ID | 3920777 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jen Gilbert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jen |
| FAMILY NAME | Gilbert |
| SIGNATURE | GILBERT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3929-3843 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 15 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Reflections on facilitating teen dating violence prevention programming in schools during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper presents lessons learned from the development, adaptation and delivery of ‘It’s Complicated’, a grade 9 school-based teen dating violence prevention programme developed in Ontario, Canada, that addresses equity, diversity and emotional violence. Initially designed as an in-person intervention, the programme underwent adjustments for online and hybrid modalities due to COVID-19. This autoethnographic self-study reflects on implementing …
Adventures in gender and sexualities education
Across her body of work, Kathleen Quinlivan confronted educators’ and students’ failure to teach or to learn as others – conservatives, liberals, parents, policymakers – expect them to. And in the
Adventures in gender and sexualities education
This is the first of two special issues of Sex Education that take as their inspiration Kathleen Quinlivan's wild experiments in gender and sexualities education research.Quinlivan was a professor of education at the University of Canterbury in
Getting dirty and coming clean
This article recounts my experience serving as an expert witness at a Human Rights Tribunal. In 2018–2019, a grade six trans girl, known only as AB, sued the Ontario provincial government in Canada for revoking a progressive sex education curriculum that addressed gender and sexual identity. While working as an advocate for AB, I wrestled with my own relationship to expertise both within the university and beyond its walls. While describing the p…
Tending toward friendship
In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths.…
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development is a carefully curated conversation that brings together the top researchers in child and adolescent sexual development to redefine the issues, conflicts, and debates in the field. The Handbook is organized around three foundational questions: first, what is sexual development? Second, how do we study sexual development? And third, what roles might adults - including the institutions of the media, fami…
Contesting consent in sex education
This paper explores discourses of affirmative consent in sex education curriculum and policy. It traces the ways in which discourses of consent have emerged in sex education debates, focusing first on the activism of two young women in Ontario, Canada who lobbied the provincial government to include discussions of consent in a new Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. Their activism is instructive for the ways in which their lobbying wa…
Naming new realities
As we write this introduction, trans issues in education are never far from the headlines. In the USA, the Trump administration has revoked a number of policies meant to protect trans youth from di
Walking through the school
As university researchers, we face a significant obstacle when we study schools: our lives as researchers began in schools; a condition of our inquiry is that we were ourselves successful in school
Sex is a funny word
Sex education may be controversial, but it is rarely playful. Nor is it usually funny, graphic, or sexy. To mitigate against controversy, most sex education adopts a serious, pseudo-scientific tone
Sexuality in School
"From concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth and battles over sex education to the regulation of sexual activity and the affirmation of queer youth identity, sexuality saturates the school day. Rather than understand these conflicts as an interruption to the work of education, Jen Gilbert explores how sexuality comes to bear on and to enliven teaching and learning. Gilbert investigates the breakdowns, clashes, and controversies that flare up w…
Thinking in sex education
This paper argues that sex education must move beyond a focus on compliance so that we may risk the uncertain work of thinking. How might we understand the work of thinking in sex education if we begin from the assumptions that learning is conflicted, that sexuality resists being educated even as it inspires curiosity, and that the subject of sex education is herself divided and liable to act in her own worst interest? Drawing on theories of thin…
Ambivalence only? Sex education in the age of abstinence
Risking a relation
This paper considers how issues of adolescent development might be brought into conversation with dilemmas in sex education. Here, sex education is larger than information, affirmation or prohibition. In its address to the most intimate aspects of life—love, loss, vulnerability, power, friendship, aggression—sex education is necessarily entangled in the adolescent's efforts to construct a self, find love outside the family, enjoy one's newly adul…
Between Sexuality and Narrative
In a reversal of the usual question of what adults can do to cure the problem of adolescence, a recent art exhibit instead asked what the experiences, identities, and representations of youth can teach us about the problem of being human. In reformulating the terms of adult-adolescent engagement, the curator, Francesco Bonami (2003), calls "the adolescent" the "fourth sex." If the female, male, and homosexual are called the first, second, and thi…
Literature as sex education
This paper begins with a curious tension in sex education: if sex includes some of the most exhilarating, passionate and devastating experiences in a person's life, shouldn't sex education address
Getting dirty and coming clean
This article recounts my experience serving as an expert witness at a Human Rights Tribunal. In 2018–2019, a grade six trans girl, known only as AB, sued the Ontario provincial government in Canada for revoking a progressive sex education curriculum that addressed gender and sexual identity. While working as an advocate for AB, I wrestled with my own relationship to expertise both within the university and beyond its walls. While describing the p…
Between Sexuality and Narrative
In a reversal of the usual question of what adults can do to cure the problem of adolescence, a recent art exhibit instead asked what the experiences, identities, and representations of youth can teach us about the problem of being human. In reformulating the terms of adult-adolescent engagement, the curator, Francesco Bonami (2003), calls "the adolescent" the "fourth sex." If the female, male, and homosexual are called the first, second, and thi…
Literature as sex education
This paper begins with a curious tension in sex education: if sex includes some of the most exhilarating, passionate and devastating experiences in a person's life, shouldn't sex education address
Risking a relation
This paper considers how issues of adolescent development might be brought into conversation with dilemmas in sex education. Here, sex education is larger than information, affirmation or prohibition. In its address to the most intimate aspects of life—love, loss, vulnerability, power, friendship, aggression—sex education is necessarily entangled in the adolescent's efforts to construct a self, find love outside the family, enjoy one's newly adul…
Ambivalence only? Sex education in the age of abstinence
Thinking in sex education
This paper argues that sex education must move beyond a focus on compliance so that we may risk the uncertain work of thinking. How might we understand the work of thinking in sex education if we begin from the assumptions that learning is conflicted, that sexuality resists being educated even as it inspires curiosity, and that the subject of sex education is herself divided and liable to act in her own worst interest? Drawing on theories of thin…
Sexuality in School
"From concerns over the bullying of LGBTQ youth and battles over sex education to the regulation of sexual activity and the affirmation of queer youth identity, sexuality saturates the school day. Rather than understand these conflicts as an interruption to the work of education, Jen Gilbert explores how sexuality comes to bear on and to enliven teaching and learning. Gilbert investigates the breakdowns, clashes, and controversies that flare up w…
Walking through the school
As university researchers, we face a significant obstacle when we study schools: our lives as researchers began in schools; a condition of our inquiry is that we were ourselves successful in school
Sex is a funny word
Sex education may be controversial, but it is rarely playful. Nor is it usually funny, graphic, or sexy. To mitigate against controversy, most sex education adopts a serious, pseudo-scientific tone
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development is a carefully curated conversation that brings together the top researchers in child and adolescent sexual development to redefine the issues, conflicts, and debates in the field. The Handbook is organized around three foundational questions: first, what is sexual development? Second, how do we study sexual development? And third, what roles might adults - including the institutions of the media, fami…
Contesting consent in sex education
This paper explores discourses of affirmative consent in sex education curriculum and policy. It traces the ways in which discourses of consent have emerged in sex education debates, focusing first on the activism of two young women in Ontario, Canada who lobbied the provincial government to include discussions of consent in a new Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. Their activism is instructive for the ways in which their lobbying wa…
Naming new realities
As we write this introduction, trans issues in education are never far from the headlines. In the USA, the Trump administration has revoked a number of policies meant to protect trans youth from di
Tending toward friendship
In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths.…
Getting dirty and coming clean
This article recounts my experience serving as an expert witness at a Human Rights Tribunal. In 2018–2019, a grade six trans girl, known only as AB, sued the Ontario provincial government in Canada for revoking a progressive sex education curriculum that addressed gender and sexual identity. While working as an advocate for AB, I wrestled with my own relationship to expertise both within the university and beyond its walls. While describing the p…
Adventures in gender and sexualities education
Across her body of work, Kathleen Quinlivan confronted educators’ and students’ failure to teach or to learn as others – conservatives, liberals, parents, policymakers – expect them to. And in the
Adventures in gender and sexualities education
This is the first of two special issues of Sex Education that take as their inspiration Kathleen Quinlivan's wild experiments in gender and sexualities education research.Quinlivan was a professor of education at the University of Canterbury in
Reflections on facilitating teen dating violence prevention programming in schools during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper presents lessons learned from the development, adaptation and delivery of ‘It’s Complicated’, a grade 9 school-based teen dating violence prevention programme developed in Ontario, Canada, that addresses equity, diversity and emotional violence. Initially designed as an in-person intervention, the programme underwent adjustments for online and hybrid modalities due to COVID-19. This autoethnographic self-study reflects on implementing …
Sociology (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Human sexuality (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (8 works) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (6 works) · Sex education (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (5 works)