Bialystok, LaurenWright, JJ (Jessica)2024-01-242024-01-242019Lauren Bialystok & Jessica Wright (2019) ‘Just Say No’: public dissent over sexuality education and the Canadian national imaginary, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40:3, 343-357, https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1333085https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/3393Scholars of sexuality have argued that ‘moral panics’ about sexuality often stand in for broader conflicts over nationality and belonging. Canada has spent decades cultivating a national image founded on multiculturalism and democratic equality. The Ontario sexuality education curriculum introduced in 2015 drew audible condemnation from a variety of groups. Drawing from Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Race Theory, we argue that the public discourse surrounding these protests exposed the limits of Canadian pluralism, fuelling a meta-debate about the ‘Canadianness’ of recent immigrants and the incompatibility of liberal values with those of non-Westerners, especially Muslims. We explain this in terms of contextual factors such as Ontario’s publicly funded Catholic school system and anti-Muslim xenophobia in the post-9/11 era. Our analysis speaks to the importance of intersectional social justice efforts as part of the movement for comprehensive sex education.enAll Rights Reservedsex educationnational identitypublic discoursecritical discourse analysiscritical race theorymulticulturalismOntario CanadaArticlehttps://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1333085