Genre and Gender: Sex Education in Theory and Practice

The interplay between genre and gender in Sex Education is theorised by combining the ideas of British sociologist Anthony Giddens with those of the American philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler. This chapter thus establishes a critical framework that allows for assessment of the interplay between genre and gender throughout the four seasons of Sex Education. Reading Sex Education as a cultural product that revises generic formulas in order to respond to new and evolving ideas of identity, Shaw, Stone and Walters contend that the series has importance for genre studies because it prolongs and updates the teen genre, putting progressive, under-represented and even transgressive characters front and centre, while revising outmoded ideas of sexuality, gender and identity, not least in terms of how the series negotiates the evolution of feminist and queer ideas of equality and diversity over four seasons that constitute an enclosed world of outward-looking characters.