The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the centrality of children and young people in the learning process and identify educational approaches that emphasise the importance of ‘learner voice’. Opening avenues for consultation, participation and collaboration with learners in the design of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment can be significant in enhancing their engagement, achievement and wellbeing. That is, attention to the humanistic, agentic and cognitive attributes of learners, understanding their culture and lifeworlds, empowering learners to exercise agency and valuing their knowledge and skills contributes to the co-creation of meaningful learning experiences (Morrison et al., 2019; Price et al., 2020).

The postmodern moment was both important and turbulent in both anthropology and gender studies. This chapter focuses on how postmodern thought, which is described as being ant-foundational, engaged with thinking about gender and sexuality in gender studies and in anthropology, both in conjunction with each other as disciplines and in conjunction with feminist (and gay and lesbian) movements, which were influential during the same period. As an intellectual trend, the postmodern moment never attracted sufficient advocates to become a majority approach, and its time in the limelight was quickly over; nevertheless, the authors argue that the moment had lasting effects, particularly in terms of thinking about gender and sexuality. More specifically, they suggest that the introduction of postmodern thought affected the politicization of thought about gender and sexuality in the academy. In gender studies, it coincided with the founding of the discipline; in anthropology, it initially most notably came through the route of feminist-inspired kinship studies, and later through the influence of queer on studies of sexuality and embodiment.

Lionel Johnson is more famous now for his life (and death) than his work – for his alcoholism and insomnia, conversion to Catholicism, erroneous claims to Irish heritage, and death by severe brain haemorrhage at the age of thirty-five. As a founding member of the Rhymers’ Club and contributor to the notorious Yellow Book, he is frequently referred to as a major figure of British Decadence, but his work is rarely considered in any detail. This chapter looks at Johnson’s criticism, poetry, and letters as expressive of a religious humanism heavily influenced by Pater’s sensuously continent aestheticism. No one was more excited by the world than Johnson, by the crowds of London as much as by the wonders of nature, and the continence he described was hardly a cloistered retreat. But sex was at the heart of what he saw as wrong in the modern world: its lack of respect for tradition; its bad manners; the haste that led people to look to their own uncultivated selves for a guide to right and wrong. Like Pater, Johnson portrayed continence as a sociable practice, leading to better relationships with people, objects, and the past.

For many in the late nineteenth-century Pater was a by-word for sensual pleasure and sexual licence, and it is this Pater that dominates Decadent Studies today. But many Victorians read Pater as recommending austere discipline and sensuous continence. Restraint can be read as central to Pater’s attempt to base a practical ethic on sceptical, aesthetic principles. Sense experience was crucially important to this ethic. But Pater repeatedly distinguishes between healthy, productive sensuousness, and a harmful sensuality that he associates with an excess of transience, disease, and death. He represents continence as evidence of the personal discipline that allows the aesthete to effectively filter the good from the bad, the healthy from the unhealthy, in objects or periods or people; as he put it, to make ‘use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless or poisonous’. And although Pater always leaves interpretative space for continent eroticism, especially homoeroticism, in his texts, attending to restraint is crucial for understanding his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

George Moore spent a large portion of his career writing joyously and explicitly about sex. Sex meant everything to Moore, and he occasionally mused that it was a ‘fluid’ or ‘rhythm’ that connected and vitalized all things in the world. But at the end of his three-volume autobiography Hail and Farewell (1911–14) he not only declared the onset of age-related sexual impotence, but also claimed that it was this that was finally going to make him a great artist. His newly imposed continence was going to make him intellectually and artistically strong and would give him the authority and charisma of a prophet. He had said similar things elsewhere, and his descriptions of the dangers of excessive sexuality closely follow those of Victorian medical texts. This chapter teases out this line of thinking in Moore’s writing about art and artists, and particularly his connection of this potently continent art with Walter Pater. The chapter shows how different sexual ideas can exist side by side in the work of a single person or even a single text, and how productive continence can often be found in surprising places.

What can a model of continence based in male physiology have to offer female writers? This chapter argues that the strong opinions that Vernon Lee expressed about sex and its relation to art in her early writing should not be dismissed as the result of repression or parental indoctrination, as they have been by previous critics. Lee, like Johnson, combined Paterian sensuous continence with other nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discussions of sexual health by New Women writers, and the result is central to her theorizing about life, social ethics, and art. She insisted on the harmfulness of sex to both individuals and society, and that those who felt otherwise were suffering from ‘logical misconception’. But Lee was also an aesthete, for whom sensuous experience was extremely important. She worried that continent aestheticism would limit an aesthete’s experience and lead to solipsism and waste. Her answer was a Paterian disciplined love, a reaching out to what is unhealthy and corrupt, whether people, places, or artworks, and learning to filter the good from the bad, to ‘cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion’.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.