“Do you feel like your body is yours?”: Reimagining relationships and sex education through a feminist Applied Theatre approach

At a time of heightened public and academic attention on consent, Ofsted’s 2021 review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges highlights the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual violence. The review identifies the importance of carefully sequenced Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) by trained professionals to address the issue. Still, young people detail critical gaps in UK RSE provisions, despite RSE statutory guidance being updated in 2020. In this thesis, I document a Practice-as-Research (PaR) project that explores creating and delivering feminist Applied Theatre (AT) approaches to RSE. The PaR methodology allows the interplay of theory and practice from the fields of feminism and AT to inform the creation and delivery of original and significant creative outputs for RSE. The creative practice consists of a workshop programme, culminating in a student-led performance, and an AT performance, including the script and additional resources. This research fills the gap of not only what RSE should contain but also asks why a feminist AT approach to RSE and how a facilitator can create and deliver that approach. It challenges silence and stigma in RSE around LGBTQ+ identities, female pleasure, and the nuances of consent. I consider how my approach can provide “new possibilities for everyday living”, acknowledging these possibilities are contextually dependent. I explore how a facilitator can be ethical and responsive to multiple groups’ needs and values while supporting measured risks and pushing normative boundaries. Alongside desk-based research, the case studies, interviews, surveys, and reflective journals I conduct create a tapestry of stories regarding the experiences of participants, the facilitator, institutional staff, and RSE practitioners. The implications of this research are for a tangible challenge to silence and stigma in RSE through creative outputs while providing an invaluable opportunity to raise critical questions for further development in feminism, AT and RSE.