Sex­-Ed is centered on the means by which we give and receive pleasure and the ways in which we understand intimacy. This pilot program aims to produce a communication-based, pleasure-oriented, and politically engaged course at BHQFU. Monthly workshops will explore concepts relating to sexuality and intimacy. In order to activate a productive and radical sexual discourse, part of each session will be spent workshopping communication structures and developing specific protocols for self-expression and desire.

Workshops will be fun, rigorous, safe, and sexy. Each theme will be an attempt to make sense of—in critical terms—sexual relations on a social or cultural scale. While there will be “theory” involved—and some theories more than others—our approaches will be propelled by the ways in which we can translate concepts into questions, and from questions into practices. How can we orient our sex lives around pleasure and intimacy, rather than capitalist structured patterns of gains and losses? How can we undo not just the structures of domination aimed at our own bodies, but also t​hose aimed at repressing the possibilities between bodies? How can we be more deliberate with one another? And more responsible for one another? 

Visiting guests will include artists, public intellectuals, mothers, and whores.

Ideally, through this program, we hope to have a better idea of how students relate to their sexuality in a group setting as well as how to make communication visible in a classroom. By the end of the sessions, we hope to advance a course—and a practice—that gives everyone an opportunity to imagine the kinds of relationships that live up to their desires across all relationships, and across all desires.

Workshops will take place on the last Thursday of the month. 

6:45-7ish: Andrea or one of us passes out name tags for the evening. everyone remembers - and befriends! - the people they touched. 

Intro: Hi, thanks for coming to our second Sex-Ed research session. Tonight Chloé Rossetti will stage two performances that we're going to use as learning games and discussion prompts. This will be a longer session, officially from 7-10, but we hope to address our material and experiences tonight very thoroughly and experientially and in-depth. 3 hours might not contain us - we hope your evening is flexible ! 

We passed out name tags tonight so we can get to know each other and start becoming a community. We were disappointed not to have gotten to know you last time. 

Ask the class: would you like to do a short round of introductions, or jump right into the games and get to know each other that way? (Hand show, majority rules)

Performances: 

Chloé introduces performance #1.

Sex-Ed: After each performance we will have a short discussion. Keep in mind your idea of response and responsibility. You are responsible for letting your body respond as well as communicating your body's response. You are responsible for listening to and interpreting the physical response of another body. Interpreting also means communicating back. We're not asking you to translate the body's experience into language- as if language were proof of experience or reality- but to notice the relationship between communication and experience as two separate, interlaced dimensions. 

1. We're going to begin, like we talked about, with affirming experiences. What did you feel? Where? When? If you felt nervous, what in your body communicated to you that you were nervous? Please don't say, "I felt weird/excited/etc." Please say, "I felt a burning sensation in my face that I associate with excitement," or, "I felt tension in my knees that I associate with danger." 

2. How did it feel to be a giver/to be a receiver? What did power feel like here? Play? 

3. How, in the context of Sex-Ed at BHQFU as both a research seminar and class-in-progress, would you find it most helpful to talk about the relationship between giver and receiver, communication and consent, power and play? Is there anything we haven't talked about that you would like to talk about? 

Final question/break: How did you feel about this session? We will break here, so please feel free to come talk to any of us now, write to us with your thoughts & feelings - do both. 

Language is not proof of experience. A consensual — "feeling together" — encounter is established in the body and in physical response. Verbal "consent" exists separately of this experience. Language and experience are non-hierarchal: words don't refer "back" to an experience, but are another element of experience. Language does not prove experience anymore than verbal consent proves it isn't rape.