Navigating Sociocultural Constraints in Online Non-Formal Sexuality Education: A Critical Discourse Study from Georgia

Implementation of school-based sexuality education often becomes an ideological battlefield, with various stakeholders competing to determine what knowledge should be available to adolescents. As a result, out-of-school education often functions to fill the gaps left by the curriculum. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies and feminist theoretical frameworks, this study critically analyses a single website-based Georgian civic education platform covering sexuality education topics, aiming to identify key narratives and the discursive mechanisms through which they are constructed. Situated within Georgia’s conservative sociocultural context, where nationalism, Orthodox Christianity, and post-Soviet legacies intersect to shape norms around gender and sexuality, the findings reveal a complex discursive pattern: while the text operates within liberal discourses and critiques conservative and patriarchal structures, it constructs its own normativity through binary oppositions and oversimplified framings, implicitly marginalizing cultural diversity and the actual experiences of people living in these contexts. Through the silencing, briefly addressing, or sometimes moralizing of “sensitive” topics, the text attempts to remain aligned with dominant sociocultural norms—paradoxically, even as it critiques them. This research contributes to the limited body of scholarship on non-formal sexuality education, offering insights into how non-formal providers navigate sociocultural constraints within a conservative context.