Virgin Territories

In this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (University of California, San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.

Understanding the Importance of Sexual Consent among University Students

The knowledge about how young people understand sexual consent remains scant. This study aimed to understand how the university students perceived sexual consent and the importance of consent before engaging in sexual related activities with a partner. Using explanatory sequential mixed method approach, an in-depth interview was conducted to five participants following administration of survey questionnaire to obtain a general view on the issues around sexual consent. 102 active university students at the age between 18-25 years old participated in this study. The result of the questionnaire-survey was analysed with descriptive analysis and the in-depth interview data were transcribed and were analysed using the Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA). Integration of data was done to find pattern and relation between quantitative and qualitative data. Findings from this study suggest that young people, both young men and women, perceived sexual consent as important and, therefore, should be obtained before engaging in any sexual contact. While gesture and direct communication were the common techniques on communicating consent between genders, there were still difficulties in conveying the message of consent because of the subjective feeling and norms of the society.

From ignorance to knowledge: Sexual consent and queer stories

The problem of sexual assault has received increasing public attention over the last few years, with an increasing focus on the concept of sexual consent to solve the problem. Education efforts focus on teaching people what consent is and how to explicitly communicate about sex, constructing consent as a knowledge problem. Using the stories of queer adults, this study calls for the development of an epistemology of sexual consent. I argue that the current research and scholarship fail to recognise existing knowledge about sexual consent, relegating sexual consent to an epistemology of ignorance. Queer participants in this study demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of sexual consent through their talk on the role of verbal consent cues and articulating how they “tune in” to their partners during sex. Within their talk, verbal consent was sometimes viewed as essential to consent, while at times was not necessary, and at other times was not enough to understand a partner's sexual consent. Importantly, they described deep knowledge about partners’ comfort, discomfort or hesitation through “tuning in”. Developing an epistemology of sexual consent requires recognising and valuing what participants tell us about what they know about their partners’ willingness to engage in sex.

An intersectional approach to sexual violence prevention?: Young people's experiences in New Zealand

<p>Sexual consent programmes for secondary schools have received more recent attention within New Zealand, yet no in-depth research has examined what an inclusive programme may look like. This project assists in addressing this gap in literature, by exploring the challenges of developing programmes for diverse student populations, between 13-18 years old, which will be meaningful and impactful. This project was guided by an intersectional feminist framework and employed a qualitative approach to this work. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with ten young people who had participated in sexual consent programmes while they were in secondary school. Interviews were conducted with five key informants. All had extensive knowledge of sexual violence and experience developing and/or delivering sexual consent programmes to young people. This study found that mandatory sexual health programmes within secondary schools often maintained risk focussed approach to sexual consent education, which had a detrimental impact on young women in this study, by denying their sexual agency and reinforcing victim blaming attitudes and stereotypical gender roles. These programmes oversimplified consent negotiations and failed to consider how this process becomes more complex through the influence of social and contextual factors. The findings also revealed variation between and within the diverse identity groups of young people. Multiple programmes were found to approach consent education through a dominantly Pakeha lens and were underpinned by the assumption of heterosexuality. There are strategies facilitators could implement, such as incorporating the use of gender fluid language and the inclusion of existing value frameworks into programmes to make the content more relevant to all young people. The findings of this project assists the ongoing development and delivery of consent programmes by drawing attention to considerations facilitators should be aware of when catering to diverse student populations.</p>