Corporeality and Consent: Navigating the Erotic and Its Boundaries

What can happen between people when touch is off-limits but attention is shared? This workshop treats consent as a practice that shapes how desire, vulnerability, power, and care are negotiated between bodies. Consent is also considered in relation to safety and unequal vulnerability. In a society shaped by sexism, racism, and xenophobia, the freedom to set boundaries, refuse an encounter, or feel safe in a shared space is not experienced in the same way by everyone. The workshop therefore asks whose bodies are expected to accommodate others, whose boundaries are questioned, and what conditions are needed for consent to be meaningful. Consent considers sexual self-determination: the possibility of making decisions about one’s own sexual and embodied life, including whether, how, and with whom to engage. How might intimacy arise through attention, and what changes when the right to stop is made explicit? The workshop investigates into how corporeality is sensed and imagined before physical contact takes place.

A philosophical introduction to sexuality, recognition, and feminist sexual ethics leads into guided exercises involving posture, proprioception, and eye contact. There is no touch or nudity, and no physical contact between participants is required. Every exercise is optional, and participants may pause or withdraw at any time. The workshop is led by two facilitators. Together, they connect philosophical discussion with somatic practice and ask what happens when ideas about consent, sexual self-determination, and desire are tested through shared attention, restraint, and refusal.

Tobias Wieland is an academic philosopher whose work connects critical theory, feminist thought, and questions of gender and sexuality. He is also associated with the IKSK and teaches philosophy and ethics in relation to kink.

A second facilitator [tbc] contributes perspectives from [sex work and/or the curation of sexually permissive and kink spaces, such as AWARES’ work, artistic research, dance, choreography, or performance].