Entertainment media, specifically television, plays a big part in the construction of ideas and thoughts within a society. Television is a form of popular culture which can be used as a source of entertainment but can also promote certain ideologies and values to its audience. Sex Education is a Netflix series released in 2019 with a primary focus on knowledge around sexuality. This study aims to investigate how the Netflix-show Sex Education constructs knowledge around sexuality and how it conveys values and ideologies through this construction of knowledge. The study is different from other studies about the show as it focuses explicitly on the knowledge and conversations around sexuality, not how the knowledge is constructed in sex scenes or through other relations and characterizations in the show. The study specifically interests itself with the conversational and articulated elements of sex education. It is important to study how Sex Education portrays knowledge about sexuality as it reflects values and ideologies within a western society, and can be helpful in exploring the discourse around sex education that prevails within this type of society. This construction will have an effect on the audience which consumes it and will showcase the boundaries which sex education presents and articulates itself within. The discourse within the show sets the grounds for how the topic of sex education is spoken about within their given culture. The study uses a poststructuralist discourse analysis to approach the research and finds similar elements within twelve selected scenes from the show to explore how knowledge about sexuality is constructed in the material. Important factors of the analysis are power, ideology, status and values. These are explored in connection to characters' subject positions and the context in which the factors exist: a fictional exaggerated version of western society. The study finds that the selected scenes create a power struggle between a hegemonic, traditional and progressive discourse around sex education. The suggested discourse in their fictional world is the progressive discourse which includes a positive attitude towards diversity and social aspects of sex education. It also highlights a difference in characters' attitudes depending on their subject positions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:oru-111085 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Le Faucheur, Lina, Göthberg, Josefine |
| Publisher | Örebro universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, utbildnings- och samhällsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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