Sex Education and the Dichotomies of Identity Representation. A Case Study on Republica

At the foundation of this research paper lays the notion of “identity” which comes to show how postmodernism and digimodernism can, in fact, coexist in a post-postmodern world where the problem of sex education is more actual than ever. The objective of this paper is to show how in this context full of dualities, a narrow topic such as sex education can reinforce the construction and representation of an identity. In this way, this paper analyzes how the Romanian media outlet Republica tackles this topic and how, when covering it, it manages to construct the Romanian group identity. The main hypothesis of this paper is that this media outlet relies a lot on religious principles when covering this topic. Moreover, a subsidiary hypothesis is that this publication correlates sex education with politics, since the politicians are the ones who take important decisions for this country. For the methodology, this paper uses the qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Discussing about some of the main results, it can be said that the analysis highlighted how sex education is correlated massively with politics and religion, but also with the issue of gender identity. Consequently, the Romanian identity is defined by some strong dichotomies present in the society (men versus women, science versus religion, parents versus authorities), showing many of the vulnerabilities to which different social categories are exposed.