Consent Pedagogies: Classroom Lessons from Intimacy Practice

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, 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 consent-forward practices within our theatres and university departments can inspire pedagogues and administrators to contend with and reshape the interest in enforcing compliance and in controlling students that often undergirds our larger policies, practices, and pedagogies. I hasten to acknowledge that any goal to professionalize, or even to train students, is difficult to disentangle from the project of compliance; a credentialing university can, for example, only offer its imprimatur to those who have complied fully enough to earn the credential. Still, in the interest of making compliance an object of scrutiny rather than an inevitable goal—and of attempting to recognize and eliminate instances in which our programs might rely on controlling students when they could do otherwise—I offer here a version of what I delivered at that ATHE conference session: fairly plainspoken examples of practices (or shifts in practice) that mark subtle but meaningful changes inside my academic department and my own classes. These are small moves away from models that resemble coercion or rely on control and toward more collaborative ones, which work to prioritize, even if only quite gently, more humane ways of working together.

The first set of examples consists of changes to departmental policies around curricular theatrical productions that were the result of substantial effort from many people, and are not achievements of my own.4 Describing the changes here is not an attempt to place credit for them under my name, but rather to identify and share them as instances whereby collaborative work to institute consent-forward practices also began to attenuate the role of enforcement in educating and professionalizing students. A partial list of adjustments made inside the department5 in recent years includes:

Ending a mandate that students must accept roles in curricular theatrical productions as cast, and the requirement that students must audition each semester.

Providing space on our audition form for students to suggest which parts they'd like to read for, and for them to opt out of roles or content they do not agree to embody.

Looking critically at curricular requirements that mandate students accept and perform roles in the season in order to graduate—and in the meantime, expanding the type of experiences that might fit that requirement (for instance, to include student-directed work, original work, and productions with fewer technical requirements or lower support that rehearse according to a seminar class schedule instead of at night).

Providing robust synopses (including content notes) and character descriptions for plays in the season in advance of auditions, as well as scripts, in order to help students make informed decisions about what they want to embody. The synopses and descriptions are provided in part as an acknowledgement that students may still be learning to read plays effectively and, without a guide, could miss or misconstrue important content; it also mimics in part a professional reality in which actors may have access only to breakdowns and descriptions rather than full scripts (although these descriptions can avoid being prescriptive in the way industry breakdowns often are).

Revising the way our audition form asks about schedule conflicts for the rehearsal process. A previous version separated student schedule needs into "legitimate" ("religious holidays, jury duty, previously scheduled surgery, and department approved outside performance") and "non-legitimate" categories. We now ask students to provide information about their weekly schedules in advance and offer the following as a note: "We respect students' good faith efforts to make themselves available once they commit to a rehearsal process, and the department commits to working collaboratively with students to schedule rehearsals so they are as accessible as possible."6

Removing a previously explicit requirement that, after being cast, students not change their appearance (cutting or coloring hair, etc.) without permission from a director.

While not all of these changes expressly invoke consent as it is conventionally defined, together they mark a perceptible shift away from attempts to control or restrict student actions in order to gain compliance and toward a more collaborative stance that holds student agency in greater esteem.

The second list of practices consists of quite simple, unspectacular adjustments to my own classroom pedagogy that I first learned from other, more experienced intimacy professionals while in training to do intimacy work, and which have translated, in straightforward ways, to contexts that do not use instructional touch or require specific physical work of students—seminars and discussion sections, for example. In many cases, these techniques have been notably useful in my long-term, aspirational project to make my teaching more responsive to bell hooks's call for an engaged pedagogy that frames education as the practice of freedom.7 I want to stress that these practices are noted here not because they represent my own innovation, but because of the ways I have noticed them effectively transforming the classrooms in which I teach.

I use open-ended questions. Rather than asking students yes-or-no questions, such as if they understand what I'm saying, if they could use more time for discussion or help with a thorny concept, or if they need more time to finish group work, I instead ask, for example, what their experience of a reading or an assignment is, how something we're doing in the classroom is working for them, or how it would be for them if the schedule changed. Using these kinds of open questions has not meant that students can always articulate their confusions, questions, or concerns, or that they agree with me more frequently, or even that we understand each other. It has, however, reduced the number of times in any given class that I've placed students in a position where honestly answering my questions requires a risky response. By a "risky" response, I mean one that might show their vulnerabilities, or betray them as somehow not belonging in the space—as in saying yes to a question like "Do you need more time?" or no to the question "Is that clearer now?" I had been trained to avoid yes/no questions while navigating consent in intimacy settings, in part because they seem to present a clear and free choice, available to all, but fail to account for ways that disparities in the room—in positional and institutional power, in available freedoms, in access—are already affecting and constraining which responses emerge. The same dynamic attends in seminar, and given the unknown complexities students bring into the room, I cannot always intuit which questions feel risky to them, so it has made sense to phrase whichever ones I can in an open-ended fashion. Open-ended questions create space in our communication—space for pondering, space to navigate and find their meaning, space in which to consider a range of responses beyond the plain binary of yes and no. It might even do some of the work prompted by the deeply useful and beautifully apt guiding question posed by our colleague Koritha Mitchell: "How can we make this place [academia, the classroom, the theatre, the humanities] less hostile for more people?"8 The use of open-ended questions has helped make more room for more kinds of communicating, and therefore to subtly relax my insistence that students enter classroom discourse on my terms and the control I exert over how it unfolds.

I work on maintaining a deep attention to and respect for participants' affective responses when teaching. My students seem more anxious, fearful, and tired now than I have ever noted before; perhaps because of that, reading the room—or just a person—while teaching feels like more of my job now than it used to be. Training in consent-forward practices sharpened my attention to affect, since that work calls practitioners to attend not just to participants' words but to the many dynamics and realities at play inside a room. That sort of attention might make particular sense in intimacy work, but it also is helpful across the curriculum, especially when contemporary realities are weighing heavily or classroom content is loaded. I should also make clear that attending to affect is not the same as nurturing students, or bearing responsibility for their feelings, or otherwise taking on emotional labor that may disproportionately accrue to women and femme folks who lead classrooms (or rehearsals). I'm not eager to add these duties to my remit as a teacher or an intimacy professional, although I acknowledge the importance of practicing care and compassion in both roles. I do, however, find considerable value and utility in an awareness and openness to more of the information held in in the room, including whatever observations about affect I can make; this kind of awareness feels not like an obligation to caretake, but like a functional precondition for pedagogy. I also find that curiosity about and respect for students' states of being can helpfully redirect my own efforts away from trying to muscle or maneuver students into receiving something I'm eager for them to "get" and reorients me toward thoughtful exploration with students in all their complexity.

I go slower.  Going slow is a quotidian strategy, but it can feel potent as a tactic brought to bear on difficult or uncertain terrain in classroom conversations. When I encounter something unexpected or loaded and am unsure what to do next—especially when voices in class are unaligned or in conflict—sometimes going slow helps the work of the classroom to continue at precisely the moment when I'm afraid it will stall or flame out. Experience with intimacy work has emphasized the importance of taking a breath inside the moments in which next steps seem uncertain, so that the folks involved can gather what they need to move forward. Moving with a deliberately low tempo helps when different parts of the room have differing responses—for instance, some want to celebrate a notion, while some want to interrogate it; some relate intimately to an idea, while others are disposed to hold it at arms' length—and it can help when things get heated. In the moment of teaching, disharmony or tension often feel to me urgent problems to solve, even when they aren't dangerous; committing to slowness in the face of that perceived urgency makes me less inclined to solve classroom difficulty by making a snappy call from the front of the room. In that sense, "going slow" doesn't always mean the classroom itself goes slow, but rather that I do. In doing so, I attempt to avoid reflexively authoritative moves and make space and time for other insights to emerge—including students' own methods for negotiating conflict or uncertainty.

These practical adjustments to policy and pedagogy—the latter of which can be accompanied by more formal adjustments to policies around attendance, participation, and grading9—are not particularly revolutionary, but taken altogether, they represent useful ways to subtly and gradually dismantle mechanics of control and coercion in curricular spaces, including those in which theatrical intimacy may never occur. In particular, intimacy work's insistence that we attend to how power functions in the rooms in which we work can attune pedagogues to the ways they may have been encouraged to instrumentalize power and compliance, and how so doing risks approximating the same structures we often critique elsewhere. I hope that the ascendancy of those practices can catalyze—across many curricular spaces—an investment in the shaping of more collaborative classrooms and departments.


Footnotes

1. Mimi Kim describes "carceral feminism" as a term "developed to articulate the active mobilization of the criminal justice system as a response to sex trafficking," but "now used more generally … [to point] to decades of feminist anti-violence collaboration with the carceral state or that part of the government most associated with the institutions of police, prosecution, courts, and the system of jails, prisons, probation, and parole." Mimi E. Kim, "From Carceral Feminism to Transformative Justice: Women-of-Color Feminism and Alternatives to Incarceration," Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work 27, no. 3 (2018): 220, https://doi.org/10.1080/15313204.2018.1474827. See also Elizabeth Bernstein, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism,'" differences 18, no. 3 (2007): 128-51, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2007-013; Bernstein, "Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The 'Traffic in Women' and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights," Theory and Society 41, no. 3 (2012): 233-59; Angela Y. Davis et al., Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).

2. While myriad resources on how to "decolonize your syllabus" populate the internet, see la paper-son, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) for an extensive consideration of how to go about uncovering "the decolonizing ghost [with]in the colonizing machine." See also Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's critique in "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.

3. In 2023, film director Mia Hansen-Løve described intimacy coordinators in film and television as "some kind of virtue police on set." Her word choice highlights the potential for intimacy professionals to be understood as involved primarily in policing behavior: for example, monitoring compliance and issuing sanctions. I'm grateful to those teachers and mentors (including Laura Rikard, Kaja Dunn, and Chelsea Pace) who have repeatedly emphasized the importance of intimacy professionals resisting and rejecting the reenactment of policing's interest in surveillance, control, and punishment in their work. Christian Zilko, "Mia Hansen-Løve Says Intimacy Coordinators 'Aren't Necessary': I'd Rather Not Have 'Virtue Police' on Set," IndieWire, April 16, 2023, https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/mia-hansen-love-intimacy-coordinators-virtue-police-1234828896.

4. It is difficult to list the stakeholders who contributed to this process; the changes were departmental in scope and in that sense involved almost the entire faculty (and many staff). However, I would be especially remiss not to mention having worked alongside Meredith Conti, Anne Burnidge, Eero Laine, Ariel Nereson, and Danielle Rosvally at various times inside the University at Buffalo's Department of Theatre and Dance while that department essayed the kinds of revisions listed here. Any citation of department-wide changes in policy or procedure described here should credit the university's Department of Theatre and Dance.

5. I teach within a department that stages a robust season of performance that includes both dance and theatre. Our efforts to put in place ethical production practices are department-wide, but my familiarity with the department's theatrical production work, and not with dance, means that this work reflects primarily theatre-focused processes and policies.

6. This is, admittedly, somewhat vague, and I have not been in every rehearsal room to see how the changes to handling student schedule conflicts are working. However, while rehearsal reports do indicate absences from rehearsal that would previously have been disallowed, nothing major seems to have collapsed.

7. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994), https://www.routledge.com/Teaching-to-Transgress-Education-as-the-Practice-of-Freedom/hooks/p/book/9780415908085.

8. @ProfKori, Twitter/X post, July 28, 2022, 8:01 a.m., https://twitter.com/ProfKori/status/1552640290820857857.

9. I use a version of specs grading (one that is, on the balance, less time-consuming than conventional grading in my experience) almost exclusively in both graduate and undergraduate teaching, a change I instituted after reading one of Jesse Stommel's blog posts during an early phase of the pandemic, and finding it quite persuasive. In general, students have been relieved at the transparency of this approach. See Jesse Stommel, "Compassionate Grading Policies," January 3, 2022, https://www.jessestommel.com/compassionate-grading-policies.