Sexual Futures and Creative Practice: Engagements in World-Building

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper outlines the inception, process, and key findings of five creative arts workshop held with 28 students in 2022 at Newcastle University. Participants engaged in crafting exercises and semi-structured discussions about sexual ethics grounded in lived experience. Sexual consent and novel models of sexual ethics were discussed, as well as an approach called a pleasure and care-centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness. Using an iterative form of thematic analysis, four core themes were identified: namely, culture and ethnocentrism, gendered sexual scripts/sexual-gendered scripts, heteronormativity, and pleasure. Analysis of the art objects also yielded findings related to anger, gendered norms, communication, and obligation. This project examined how university students felt about consent as the dominant model of sexual ethics and explored other possibilities using discourse and crafting to engage with lived experience. This article aims to capture these findings while also placing the workshops and its findings in methodological and socio-cultural context.