Sexual Pedagogies and Social Justice
This panel focuses upon emergent creative sexual pedagogies. Formal sex education often emphasizes risk, reproduction, and a cisheteronormative model of sex, seeking to discipline racially marked and low-income populations and often excluding while also pathologizing queer, trans, or gender nonconforming people. Thinking expansively about sexual pedagogies, this panel incorporates scholars, activists, and artists working in or writing about sexual pedagogy through an intersectional lens in contexts such as educational workshops, performance art, music videos, and postpornography. This panel asks: What is the relationship between sexualities education and social justice?
Panelists:
Pamela Alvarez, Pedagogue, Sexologist, Feminist, Lesbian and Pansexual
Pamela Álvarez studied a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, with her Master's focusing on diversity and education, specifically researching sexuality and aging with a gender perspective. She also holds a Specialization in Educational Sexology from the Mexican Institute of Sexology and a Specialization in Sociology of Higher Education from the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Azcapotzalco. Pamela is a graduate of the Doctorate in Leadership and Management in Higher Education at Anáhuac Norte University, where her thesis revolves around the inclusion of sex-gender diversities in university spaces.
She has conducted courses in community centers, schools, and NGOs on topics such as sexuality and education, sexuality in old age, use of menstrual cups, child sexuality, safe and protected sex with adolescents, models in sexuality education, sexualdiversity, relational diversity, polyamory, gender, gender perspective in basic education, LGBT+ and higher education, among others. She has collaborated in designing courses and diplomas to train sexuality educators with a gender perspective. Pamela conducts research on sex-gender diversity, lesbian studies, queer pedagogy, among other topics. She is a member of the Multidisciplinary Network for Research on Discrimination in Mexico City by COPRED and the Specialist Registry in Gender Studies and Feminism at UNAM. She is also a member of the LGBTI+ Parliament 2023 in Mexico City.
Pamela has been an educator at the College of Pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, teaching the Workshop on Educational Guidance, this course was specialized in sexuality and education. Since 2021, she has been teaching the Gender, Violence, and Community Ethics course at the same faculty. Currently, she is a full-time academic at the Iberoamerican University, Mexico City, in the Curriculum Development Program. Her professional experience also includes planning, management, and evaluation in higher education. She engages in academic activism from feminist perspectives and her lesbico-pansexual identity.
Christina J Carney, Assistant Professor, University of Missouri in Columbia
As a scholar, Christina Carney's thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service. Her areas of research specialization include black feminisms, black sexualities, sex work studies, queer of color critique, and US West studies. Her book, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego is forthcoming with the University of California Press (2024). Disreputable Women is a deeply transdisciplinary study on how black women use sex work and place-making to claim economic, bodily and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. Carney distills the production of disreputable women–during two major 20th century urban development processes in downtown San Diego– where municipal police, public health officials, and even activists targeted street-involved sex-workers and the places they congregated as blight. Instead, her intuitive framework of “disreputability” offers a more ethical and workable approach to imagining the built environment and its inhabitants–offering a rich and robust grammar for understanding black women’s lives in the scene of militarization and gendered anti-blackness. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, University of Missouri Research Board, and College of Arts & Science at the University of Missouri.
Kinkinella, Welder & Gynepunk
Technical contortionist, methodological amnesia, hedonistic exhibitionism and hyperlink to the void. This means failed audiovisual technician, deserter of unflexible repetitive disciplines, post-porn sexual dissident, weaver of ephemeral nets. My academic deformations are only fossil waste of my viscera dreamscapes, as hunger, only a reaction to furious gangs of bacterias dancing as digestive tissues and fluids.
Paromita Vohra, Filmmaker, Writer, Founder, Agents of Ishq
Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In 2013 Time Out Mumbai listed her as one of 10 artists who changed the way Indians watch films. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Wellcome Gallery and the National Gallery of Modern Art, broadcast internationally and is taught in universities worldwide.
In 2015 she founded Agents of Ishq, an award-winning digital platform, grounded in art and experience, using multiple media in a lively popular vernacular, which have transformed conversations on sex, love and desire. She is currently its Creative Director.
Her films as director include the documentaries Unlimited Girls, Q2P, Where’s Sandra, Parnters in Crime, Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City and Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale, among others and a series of short musical films including The Amourous Adventurs of Megha and Shakku in the Valley of Consent. She has written the fiction feature Khamosh Pani, the documentaries Skin Deep, Stuntmen of Bollywood, and If You Pause, the play Ishquiya:Dharavi Ishtyle and the comic Priya’s Mirror. She has created two art installations—So Near Yet So Far (on telephones, migration and desire) and A Love Latika: An Electronic Forest of Erotic Poetry. She has been an agony aunty in three different outlets at various times and previously wrote a newspaper column on modern love called How To Find Modern Love. Her fiction and non-fiction especially on the politics of popular culture are widely published and she her weekly newspaper column, Paro-normal Activity is in its 14th year.