Consent Pedagogies: Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice

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• Consent Pedagogies:Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice
• Lindsay Brandon Hunter (bio)

In 2023, I took part in a conversation gathered under the title "Decarcerating the Field: Building Abolitionist Networks of Care at ATHE" at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Austin, Texas. Where others entered that conversation from a more explicitly abolitionist perspective, I had proposed to offer something that seemed perhaps less intuitive: I wanted to talk about doing intimacy work in academic theatre, and in particular about how my own training and practice in intimacy choreography for the stage has inflected my pedagogy—including my non-teaching work in helping to administer programs and make policy. Although a connection between intimacy choreography and abolitionist practice may not seem plain at first blush, I wanted to speak about how a sustained focus on consent-based practice in classrooms and rehearsal halls has illuminated for me the extent to which our institutions seek to control students, frequently in ways that uncomfortably resemble policing.

Even as I made this case to the group convening at ATHE, I debated whether it was apt to connect highly professionalized discourses about consent in working and teaching contexts to the fundamental and profound commitments that drive abolition activism. The codification of best practices that has been part of intimacy work's relatively rapid ascendance is quite clearly an investment in progressive reform, and so in some ways is antithetical to an abolitionist mode. To speak more honestly, I was afraid that for some folks who work in theatres and universities, enthusiasm for the reform promised by intimacy and consent work might register primarily as a professional fad, or worse: as itself an exercise in controlling or policing students, in the sense that it could involve drilling them to comply with professional standards. I worried, too, that words like "boundaries" and "consent" might read as liberalist buzzwords, [End Page E-31] or that some audiences might find in them echoes of a carceral feminism aligned with policing even as it co-opts the language of abolition.¹

Still, it remains true that a sustained focus on consent—which I offer here not as a panacea, or a set of rules for disciplining behavior, but specifically as an orientation away from coercion and toward self-determination, one which I continue to interrogate and revise—has quietly remade my teaching in ways that I think resonate with aspects of abolition work. Engagement with intimacy work has catalyzed a significant and continual grappling with the power I wield over students, perhaps similar to the way other developments in the past handful of years have called teachers to contend with and reevaluate the authority they hold in the classroom and the uses to which it is put: a global pandemic and its implications for access and capacity; calls to address structural racism and abolish white supremacy, particularly in the wake of highly visible police killings; and the project of decolonizing syllabi, classrooms, and curricula.² While each of these has affected my teaching, consent work has rendered particularly visible to me how frequently (and how reflexively, as a product of my own training) I have used compliance to mark successful outcomes in the classroom. Working with consent-based practice from within a position of classroom authority has helped to limn how the deeply entrenched interests held by the university and those it empowers—including faculty—manifest themselves in controlling, restricting, monitoring, and disciplining students in ways that can uncomfortably resemble policing. And the practical nature of learning and implementing consent work has helped me adjust my pedagogy to move compliance and control away from its center—at least sometimes, in some ways—in practical, applied ways.

I hope that bringing these two areas of work together serves two purposes: First, to reinforce an understanding of intimacy work itself, particularly when it is put into practice within universities and with students, as invested in disavowing the mechanics and goals of policing and as pointedly disinterested in putting into practice new opportunities to control and surveil others.³ Second, to suggest a way that [End Page E-32] consent-forward practices within our theatres and university departments can inspire...