Student Autonomy in Sex and Gender History: How Personal Freedom Shapes Sexual Identity

When we talk about student autonomy, the right of individuals to make independent decisions about their own learning, behavior, and personal boundaries. Also known as personal agency, it’s the quiet force behind every person who dared to say no to shame, demand respect, or claim their own pleasure—even when the world told them to stay quiet. This isn’t just about choosing which class to take. It’s about who gets to decide what happens to their body, who they love, how they express desire, and whether their voice matters in spaces designed to control them.

Bodily autonomy, the right to make decisions about one’s own physical self without coercion or external control. Also known as self-determination over the body, it’s the bedrock of every post here—from Anne Koedt’s fight to prove the clitoris matters, to the women who used steam vibrators in secret to escape "female hysteria" diagnoses. It’s why LGBTQ+ students in the 1970s risked arrest to gather in gay bars, and why today’s teens are learning consent not just as a legal term, but as a daily practice of respect. Without autonomy, consent is just a word. With it, it becomes power. And that power doesn’t come from laws alone. It grows from classrooms where kids aren’t punished for asking questions, from families that stop assigning gender roles at birth, and from histories that stop erasing female pleasure, bisexual identity, or queer resistance.

Gender socialization, the process by which society teaches people how to behave according to expected gender norms. Also known as gender training, it’s the invisible curriculum that tells girls to be quiet, boys to be tough, and everyone to hide their curiosity. But student autonomy flips that script. It’s the student who reads Nashe’s banned dildo poem and realizes sexuality was never meant to be silenced. It’s the young person who discovers Etruscan tomb art showing pleasure as sacred, and wonders why their school teaches shame instead. It’s the student who learns that medieval marriages were economic deals—not love stories—and starts asking: if my body was once traded like land, who gets to own it now?

These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re lived experiences. Every article in this collection shows how autonomy was stolen, fought for, and reclaimed—from Victorian doctors labeling masturbation as madness, to modern HIV patients demanding access to life-saving drugs. You’ll find stories of women who used vibrators to reclaim their orgasms, of bisexual teens erased even in queer spaces, of students who learned consent not from a pamphlet, but from a moment when they said no—and were believed.

There’s no textbook that tells you how to be free. But there are these stories. They show you how autonomy isn’t given. It’s taken. And it starts with one person asking: why not me?