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Abstract

This thesis argues that sex education is a crucial element in the pathway towards building futures beyond the colonial, heteronormative systems that persist today. Colonialism, heteronormativity, and homonormativity are interconnecting systems of oppression that perpetuate injustice, impacting the (sexual) health, lives, and autonomy of those most marginalized by these systems (e.g. racialized queer communities). School-based sex education in Ontario has, in various ways, been used to maintain these systems of oppression. At the same time, scholars and activists continue to advocate for the importance of and need for accessible, anti-oppressive, and intersectional sex education. Drawing on histories of queer of colour/racialized queer activism in Toronto, I interpret how alternative forms of sex education in the 1980s/1990s (during the height of the AIDS epidemic) were used as a strategy in political organizing and an avenue for community building. I argue that these histories illuminate the liberatory potential of sex education as both an act of survival in and resistance to the heteronormative colonial status quo, thus reflecting the practice of queer worldmaking.