Combining theory, practice, and performing arts, this presentation explores the connections between celebration, joy, and autonomy as the basis for building cultures and communities that value the pursuit of gender equity and reproductive justice through education. Using multiple arts practices, and working within a reproductive justice framework, we’ll explore how institutionalized, dominant narratives about women’s and trans people’s reproductive lives and bodies, affect the agency, mobility, and power individuals possess in the public sphere. By eradicating the internalized shame and stigmatization associated with possessing a gender marginalized body through comprehensive, arts-based sex-education, the goals of the reproductive justice movement, which aims to grant full agency and autonomy to all women and individuals of marginalized gender status, can be more easily achieved by providing young people with the tools necessary to make informed, empowered, and autonomous choices.
We’ll discuss FACTS (Freedom, Arts, and Conversation Toward Sex-Education) a new, arts-based sex-ed curriculum that engages an all- inclusive series of workshops that use art as a tool for social change and aims to empower young people by teaching sexual wellness and health through the arts. FACTS addresses the systemic and cultural issues, like the politics of consent, colonial beauty standards, media representation and 2LGBTQ+ issues. By reaching beyond traditional sex-ed programs and teaching young people not only about the important facts of anatomy, but also by empowering them to make their own informed, autonomous choices by encouraging them to develop a strong sense of self through art.
