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So, at the last class, which happened after a three-week break, since I was travelling, I broke the ice with a game which involved a lot of movement and body language, which the students clearly appreciated. It got their adrenaline running and helped them to feel more in sync with each other, learning their names better and eventually communicating only with eye contact. It was a form of collective trust-building. Encoding this playful activity into the study plan encouraged them to be vulnerable with each other. At the end of the game, I asked them if they could guess what the subject of the lecture would be, and one student instantly responded with the accurate answer: consent. Instead of ‘lecturing’ them about what it means, I spoke a bit about how the subject only really entered public and private discourse in the light of the #MeToo movements and online activism that made it possible to bring in more nuance to the discussion. While our game had focussed on consent as an enthusiastic assertion of ‘yes’, what if we thought about consent as ‘the right to say no’?

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To be honest, I was myself surprised by this rephrasing. I hadn’t previously anticipated or thought about it. It was just something I articulated in the flow of our session, and it really felt like I had hit the nail on the head. After I spoke a bit about notions of accountability, both to one’s self and to others, I opened the floor to their opinions. I told them a subject like this could only be understood through shared testimonies. When you’re leading a classroom, this is the moment when you find yourself holding your own breath. You feel confident that you have set the scene to the best of your capacities. Now you hope that someone will take the bait and run with it and pass it to others. And I tell you, dear reader, it happened! One by one my students began to open up about their personal experiences around the subject, how they hadn’t really thought about what it means to articulate their lack of approval in a situation, how the only times they found they had ever been asked for their consent in moments of physical intimacy was when they were approached by queer people. We spoke about incidents when they felt their bodies were being policed. One student opened up about a horrible thing that happened to her in her workplace when she was 16. I could see how everyone in the classroom was listening, intently, to each other, and holding each other through their attentiveness. At one moment we were interrupted because I had to bring our child in for a feed, and while he fed, they continued to talk and he, himself, began listening intently as if he was also holding space for them, just like they were holding space for him.

It was a powerful moment. It left me feeling very validated, as a feminist teacher. I thought, in that moment, that it didn’t matter whether they remembered the teachings of Woolf or Lorde or Hooks or Ahmed. It mattered, instead, that they internalised the fact that they had the right to say no in difficult, uncomfortable situations. This was a form of feminist instruction I had to arrive at myself after years of reschooling and reparenting. If this was the only thing I had managed to impart to them through the 18 hours of teaching, the seminar could be considered a success.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.