| Year | 2025 |
Sex Ed: A Pleasure and Queer Centered Study in Epistemic Empowerment is a book emerging from an intensive program at the School for Poetic Computation that asked how sex education could look different. Centering pleasure and queer experience, the program reconsidered both what gets taught about sex and how people learn with one another.
The school began with a collective refusal of the defaults participants had been taught about sex. Fantasy, revelation, pain, and ecstasy were treated as legitimate forms of knowledge. Teachers could arrive as learners, offering rigor alongside lived experience and opening space for ways of learning that traditional educational settings often discourage or forbid.
Across workshops, conversations, and experiments, the effort to define sex became an invitation to examine the limits of any definition. Participants offered imperfect understandings shaped by their own experiences, leaving room for uncertainty, disagreement, and discovery. One of these definitions proposed that “sex is the domain of remaining alive to ourselves and to others.”
The book brings together writing and descriptions of material taught throughout the program, extending its questions about sex, knowledge, and learning beyond the school.
Program co-organization: Melanie Hoff (lead) & Neta Bomani
Published by: School for Poetic Computation
With writing by: Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Bitter Kalli