“You will get pregnant”: stylistic constructions of responsibility in secondary school contraception education

School sex education is some of the earliest formal contraception education
adolescents receive, yet young people report that school sex education reinforces
heteronormative ideas of gendered responsibilities for pregnancy prevention (see
Lewis et al. 2021a; Winters et al. 2024). This thesis explores the language of
contraception in the secondary school sex education classroom with a focus on how
stylistic choices made by teachers attribute responsibility for pregnancy prevention.
Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted over the summer of 2022 in three Sheffield
schools where I observed, recorded and transcribed contraception lessons. I present
the results of a quantitative and qualitative corpus-assisted cognitive-stylistic analysis
using corpus software Sketch Engine (Sketch Engine n.d.). I use the stylistic analysis
framework Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) to support the qualitative
aspects of the work. I argue that the teachers’ linguistic choices (including personal
pronoun use, modality, and verb choice) predominantly implicate people with wombs
as responsible for contraception (and their bodies as sites of risk for conception), and
thereby reinforce hegemonic attitudes to contraception responsibility. This has
implications for adolescent sexual and mental health, and I suggest that a shift away
from contraception and towards ‘safe sex’ teaching more broadly could have positive
implications for young women and girls.