A New Concourse for Consent Research & Writing
The field of intimacy specializations related to performance—choreography in live performance, and coordination in filmed performance—is growing.
For this reason, I have worked with the California State University Pollack Library at Fullerton, and with Theatrical Intimacy Education, to found the first academic, peer-reviewed journal focused on the research behind, philosophy of, and approaches to consent-based performance.
This means that we are reckoning with a few things as the field grows, becomes more aware of itself and its blind spots, and evolves for the better.
We’re reckoning with the cult of celebrity that rapidly emerged around a few white women who were doing this work during the 2017 popularizing of the #MeToo movement (which originated earlier in the work of Tarana Burke).
We’re reckoning with the erasure of people and voices who have been doing and speaking about this work since before it was popularized and written about in attention-grabbing news cycles.
We’re reckoning with the fact that there is no governing board that upholds practitioners of this work to ethical standards, leading to a vast range of practices and approaches to crafting intimacy for stage and screen.
And, finally, we’re reckoning with the gatekeeping that has emerged in this young field as certain organizations and individuals sought to create costly certifications—and to minimize the access to and sharing of their ideas and approaches.
This field is young. It will remain flawed, especially if new thoughts, experiments, approaches, and discoveries are not shared.
I’m not the only one who feels this way.
For this reason, I have worked with the California State University Pollack Library at Fullerton, and with Theatrical Intimacy Education, to found the first academic, peer-reviewed journal focused on the research behind, philosophy of, and approaches to consent-based performance.
I introduce to you: The Journal of Consent-Based Performance (which is forthcoming).
Therefore, we need to create a gathering place for new, emerging ideas and for criticism or questioning of existing ideas. We need a location for ideas to gather, and inspiration to take off. We need a concourse for consent-focused writing and research.
To those of you already familiar with academic publishing, “peer-reviewed journal” may conjure thoughts about unpaid and unacknowledged labor. But part of the purpose behind this new publication is to disrupt gatekeeping practices; therefore, we will be compensating our peer reviewers, editors, and published authors. At the same time, the journal will remain open-source, free to everyone, forever.
We are interrupting current practices within peer-reviewed open-source publishing in that there will be no publication fees for authors, and in that we will work to compensate contributors.
Why is this important to us?
We acknowledge that many people have been developing and doing this work for many years, and that ideas can come from anywhere—not only from those with terminal degrees and research funding. Therefore, we want to invite anyone and everyone to share their discoveries related to consent-based performance, so that we can all learn from and grow with one another, rather than continuing to promote gatekeeping and silos within the field of intimacy specializations within performance. We hope that by offering compensation, authors who otherwise would be unable to tackle unpaid labor—students, freelance artists, contingent faculty—will be encouraged to contribute.
We believe that consent is the responsibility of every creative collaborator in the room. Therefore, knowledge of creating consent-based spaces belongs to all artists, not sequestered behind paywalls and costly certifications. Creating a journal, we hope, will help all artists have access to needed information, while those who desire specific certifications or trainings that are more keenly honed on certain practices will remain motivated to seek those specialized trainings.
We believe that praxis—informed action, or the use of theory and philosophy in reflecting upon and continually improving our practice—requires conversation, critical reflection, feedback, and input from others whose perspectives are different from our own lived experiences. Therefore, we need to create a gathering place for new, emerging ideas and for criticism or questioning of existing ideas. We need a location for ideas to gather, and inspiration to take off. We need a concourse for consent-focused writing and research, so that all of us as individual artists, and this field as it continues to grow and evolve, can share our contributions to fuel the future developments in this work.
Therefore, I’m excited to introduce you to the upcoming Journal of Consent-Based Performance. We will publish all articles through CSU Fullerton libraries, and also on a more accessible-to-the-public website. Our first issue will be published in January of 2022.
Keep an eye out for future announcements.
