This full day workshop focuses on socio-political conflicts as they arise in our groups, as well as working with identities and diversity in groups.

NWSA 2024 Conference Panel Presentation: 

Kinship and Body Transformations: Lived Realities of Intersectionality

Presenters use thick, descriptive, emotive narratives to fold the audience into their ponderings, vulnerabilities, and beliefs as they describe their becoming sexuality scholars within the lived realities that are always-already informed by cultural and institutional expectations. Presenters lead us through a journey of self-exploration and -determination within the weaves of hypermasculinity and compulsory heterosexuality. The presenters trace how these prescriptive spaces situated them in positions of privilege and marginalization and informed their conceptions of sexuality, gendered performances, partnerships, familial relationships, and their erotic, sexual, desirable selves. In their resistance to these cultural folds, they explore, reclaim, and reimagine their sexual identities at the intersection of culture, neurodiversity, sexism, body shape, and religiosity. This panel critically examines how embodied intersectional engagement in academia can be envisioned through student reflexive and creative autotheory (Fournier, 2021) as they produce “writing animated by the everyday” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 10) of their sexual identities.

Presenters: Colleen Schoenfeld, Natashia Fuksman, April Webber, Draven Alexander, DDS Dobson-Smith