Learning to say no sometimes

I broke the ice with a game which involved a lot of movement and body language at the last class. Representation pic

There's a very specific kind of high you experience when you've managed to lead a fabulous lecture. I'd been anticipating it this semester, but I had to wait for at least four lectures until I was graced with it. Last year was strangely easier, even though my first lecture happened two months postpartum, at the height of my sleep deprivation. It has a lot to do with the students who make up the class. I teach what is known as a seminar class called Gender Equity: Equality in Working Life Situations to Bachelor's and Master's students of art and design at the Free University of Bolzano. It encompasses a total teaching time of 18 hours, which is not little, but isn't a lot, either. Mid-way through the semester last year I had that alarming feeling in the pit of my belly when I learned that my primarily white students had never heard of Virginia Woolf. I thought you really had to be living under a rock to be white, female, and ignorant like that. Still, last year's class had some forms of previous engagement with feminism and it showed in our conversations. This year I was better prepared to contend with the whiteness of my classroom, mostly composed of cisgender women, and asked them from the very beginning about their familiarity with feminism. When we did our round of introductions I'd asked them to name their privileges and their oppressor(s). They participated enthusiastically and I felt like I had earned their trust.

Over the next few sessions I decided to focus on building their foundation in feminist ideology, so we focussed on reading Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed and I encouraged group discussions in order to get them to open up to each other, teaching them about concepts like wilful ignorance and feminist killjoy and what encompasses the master's house. I was preparing the groundwork for approaching a more difficult topic that was vital to discussing workplace equality and conflict: consent.

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So, at the last class, which happened after a three-week break, since I was travelling, I broke the ice with a game which involved a lot of movement and body language, which the students clearly appreciated. It got their adrenaline running and helped them to feel more in sync with each other, learning their names better and eventually communicating only with eye contact. It was a form of collective trust-building. Encoding this playful activity into the study plan encouraged them to be vulnerable with each other. At the end of the game, I asked them if they could guess what the subject of the lecture would be, and one student instantly responded with the accurate answer: consent. Instead of ‘lecturing' them about what it means, I spoke a bit about how the subject only really entered public and private discourse in the light of the #MeToo movements and online activism that made it possible to bring in more nuance to the discussion. While our game had focussed on consent as an enthusiastic assertion of ‘yes', what if we thought about consent as ‘the right to say no'?

To be honest, I was myself surprised by this rephrasing. I hadn't previously anticipated or thought about it. It was just something I articulated in the flow of our session, and it really felt like I had hit the nail on the head. After I spoke a bit about notions of accountability, both to one's self and to others, I opened the floor to their opinions. I told them a subject like this could only be understood through shared testimonies. When you're leading a classroom, this is the moment when you find yourself holding your own breath. You feel confident that you have set the scene to the best of your capacities. Now you hope that someone will take the bait and run with it and pass it to others. And I tell you, dear reader, it happened! One by one my students began to open up about their personal experiences around the subject, how they hadn't really thought about what it means to articulate their lack of approval in a situation, how the only times they found they had ever been asked for their consent in moments of physical intimacy was when they were approached by queer people. We spoke about incidents when they felt their bodies were being policed. One student opened up about a horrible thing that happened to her in her workplace when she was 16. I could see how everyone in the classroom was listening, intently, to each other, and holding each other through their attentiveness. At one moment we were interrupted because I had to bring our child in for a feed, and while he fed, they continued to talk and he, himself, began listening intently as if he was also holding space for them, just like they were holding space for him.

It was a powerful moment. It left me feeling very validated, as a feminist teacher. I thought, in that moment, that it didn't matter whether they remembered the teachings of Woolf or Lorde or Hooks or Ahmed. It mattered, instead, that they internalised the fact that they had the right to say no in difficult, uncomfortable situations. This was a form of feminist instruction I had to arrive at myself after years of reschooling and reparenting. If this was the only thing I had managed to impart to them through the 18 hours of teaching, the seminar could be considered a success.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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