More Than Words: Co-creating Engagement with Sexual Justice

Creative projects can further student engagement with sexual ethics education that understands sexual justice as a social project, not merely a series of prohibitions on individuals. This paper describes assignments I have used in my Christian Perspectives on Sexual Ethics, Intro to Social Justice Studies, and Menstruating Bodies classes with undergraduate general education students. These assignments further learning objectives through creative action: they perform intersectional analysis of the risk of sexual violence, they create examples of how opportunities promoting sexual justice can be socially produced and/or hindered, and they orient students to democratic action for a sexual health and sexual justice-informed approach to public education.

These assignments were project-based and ungraded. The overarching pedagogical strategy of the assignments was to advance student learning by having students move from recalling, explaining, and analyzing ideas presented in readings and lectures to applying, evaluating, and creating in ways that drew upon their lived experience and their immediate social and political context.

In general, I take an orientation to teaching sexual ethics which is transparent, non-punitive, and “achievement” ambivalent. My goal is to orient all of us towards aspirations for a community that facilitates just sexual relationships.

My primary objective for these assignments is not academic excellence (traditionally construed), but for students to gather resources and practices that will allow them to practice and advocate for sexual justice in their lives and communities. My paper will discuss several assignments: describing the rationale and learning objectives of the assignments, offering lesson plans and assignment handouts for examination/reuse, reflecting on how the assignments were received, and noting how I would adapt them in the future iterations.

Mapping Sexual Geographies
Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens (2020) uses a public health approach to sexual violence that inspired this assignment. Students worked individually to create maps of the student “domain” (campus and near campus) they inhabited. They identified areas where they believed risk of sexual injustice was higher or lower. They included factors such as “territorial control” created by different forms of social or institutional power, accessibility/transportation challenges, and other factors that identified as worth including (e.g. access to alcohol, access to barrier birth control, and privacy). Students then brought their maps to class where a collaborative map was made and discussed that took into account the multiple perspectives of students with different social identities and experiences.

(Re)writing Social Scripts
Jennifer Beste’s ethnographic study College Hookup Culture and Christian Ethics (2017) and Bryan Massingale’s “The Erotic Life of Anti-Blackness” (in Lloyd, Prevot, eds. Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics 2017) drew the class to a discussion of “social scripts.” Reflecting on how media (from Christian romance novels to mainstream tv shows to pornography) shapes our expectations and mediates our desires around sexual and romantic encounters, students co-wrote scripts that represented encounters between prospective or current sexual partners. Preparing for this assignment the class analyzed scenes from mainstream media for their implicit expressions of the meaning or non-meaning of sex, signs of racialized or gendered power imbalances, heteronormativity, and different forms of communicating or failing to communicate about consent and pleasure. Then characters were given with described ethical orientations to the meaning and purpose of sex, sexual projects, and some facts about gender presentation and sexuality and students wrote a “meet cute.” They matched up their characters with setting, dialogue, and stage directions. Some partnerships could not be scripted under certain ethical frameworks, while other frameworks left students dissatisfied with their results.

Roleplaying Policy Strategists 
Students learned to search state billbooks and legislation trackers for the current session. They checked the status of bills and what legislators had taken action on them. Students worked in small groups to identify bills that limited or prohibited teachers and librarians from using language, books, or topics deemed “inappropriate” for the classroom for sexual content or gender ideology. They also looked at bills which prohibited the distribution of the Human Papillomavirus Vaccine to minors or by school nurses. They then looked for information about how each bill was being discussed in news and on popular media. Students gained practical knowledge of how bills were sponsored, how some “local” bills were promoted through strategies devised by national organizations (such as Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom, and Parents’ Rights in Education), and how bills used language to identify opponents, obscure intent, and present their own perspectives on sexual health, autonomy, and gender identity as normative. Students identified possible social and political actions that could be taken to reframe the issues presented by legislation in public discourse, to propose counter-legislation, or to campaign representatives who were not vocal or active on the issues, while identifying groups that were already active or could be brought in to create a larger coalition.

Designing Rituals
Menstrual shame and period stigma can increase the vulnerability of people with menstruating bodies to sexual and gender-based violence. In communities where women’s sexuality is taboo or negatively coded, menstruation is often sexualized and apprehension about sexual activity is transferred to and/or from apprehension about menstrual hygiene/exclusion practices. In the context of critical menstruation studies Catherine Bell’s discussion of ritual invention (Ritual, 2009) offered an opportunity to invite students into reflection on what community or household responses to menstruation and/or menarche “could” be and how rituals provide an opportunity to re-frame the significations, meanings (or meaninglessness), and experience of times of menstruation away from shame, impurity, and social expulsion. Group work on ritual invention helped to draw out differences in students’ lived experiences of menstruating and general comfort with rituals in other contexts. While many student rituals were self-consciously silly or fanciful, students reflections revealed that they struggled to impart meaning through signification or to be comfortable with crafting tools of “social control” to what they felt should be both “purely practical” and “rationally motivated” practices.