Let me show you how it’s done. Navigating the grey areas of sexual consent education in queer-feminist, sex-positive spaces
Contemporary perspectives on ethical sex frame consent as a linchpin: Anything goes, as long as everybody involved agrees. However, what seems simple at first presents its own set of challenges: How exactly does one do consent? What does it enable and what are its limits? Sex is intertwined with normative scripts, opaque subconscious drives and involuntary reactions of the nervous system – all informed by intersectional power dynamics. These factors diverge from rational and contractual frameworks of consent, which require equal and autonomous subjects who are able of transparent decision-making. Ultimately, recent studies point to the ineffectiveness of common consent education, and feminists call for more nuanced concepts (N. K. Jeffrey, 2022). In search for lived practices that take into account the ambivalence of sex and consent I turn to emancipatory grassroots movements of queer-feminist sexpositivity, BDSM spaces and Live Action Role Play. Here, in order to enable ‘safer and braver’ encounters, participants have to “workshop” consent: they rehearse, reflect and adapt specific gestures, speech acts and calibration mechanics to create an “atmosphere of consent” (J. Kern, 2022). As consent is not only a matter of good will, but of dismantling oppression and enabling the self-determination of everybody involved, present imbalances need to be taken into account: How can the person more advantaged due to experience, function, appearance, ability etc. act responsibly and give enough space for the less advantaged person to make use of their agency and co-determine the further course of events in a significant way (A. J. Cahill, 2016)? By applying methods of Participatory Action Research (PAR) – in which the people being studied are collaboratively involved in the research, in order to seize their situated expertise and experiential knowledge to envision ways out of context-specific inequalities – I explore the value of embodied attempts to consent through the lenses of feminist theory and phenomenological reflection. My thick descriptions focus on peer-designed consent education in manuals (such as zines or guide books) and specific workshop exercises (such as training to say “no”, expressing appreciation when receiving rejection, or establishing sophisticated verbal and nonverbal code systems in order to opt-in and -out of interactions). What kind of identities are addressed and offered in those practices and artifacts? How are the alternative scenes situated in a context of power defined by commodity culture, neoliberal culture and therapy culture? How does the interplay of resistance against and cooptation through hegemonic forces manifest itself in the workshops and their participants? Through my research, I’ve observed that the consent didactics not only address and re-imagine power dynamics in and around them, but also prompt participants to bear the chiasm of both: empowerment and self-shattering, management and overwhelm, liberation and prescription. With this comes a peculiar disillusionment with consent policies that I wish to discuss further, as it paves a way beyond consent, underscoring the importance of succor, solace and humor when witnessing each other in sexuality’s clutter.

Keywords: sexual consent · aesthetics · new materialism · feminist activism · PAR