In this workshop we will engage with intimacy as a practice. These four weeks will be an exploration of felt sense, spatial identity, and erotic experience/ language. We will explore our own erotic vocabulary through sense-based exercises, writing prompts, reading, and discussion. We will generate and investigate language that thrums. We will read and write phrases that are long, florid, and gushing. We’ll experiment with balancing rigor and play.

What does it mean to cultivate a practice of awe, wonder, reverence, and critique? And how can that bring us to liberatory aspirations and praxis? We will explore erotic experience and memory with the intention of trying on new lenses and exploring relationships to space, place, identity and labor. We’ll use different modes of making including video and photography as well as poetry, prose, and hybrid forms.

In this workshop we will endeavor to:

Emily Marie Passos Duffy (she/her)

I identify myself as a white-passing, multiethnic, able-bodied, queer, cisgender woman of Portuguese, Afro-Brazilian, and Irish descent. I am U.S.-born and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Brazil. I am a sex worker in a less criminalized area of the industry. My intersecting identities, and the varying degrees to which forms of systemic oppression benefit or impede me, inform my understanding of, and pedagogical approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  

I began my DEI journey as a Bonner Leader, an undergraduate service-learning scholarship. My area of focus in my service was adult education, and I offered ELL classes to our college’s Spanish-speaking custodial staff. I also tutored through a program that offered GED-preparation courses to incarcerated women. Through this Bonner scholarship program, and as a Peace and Social Justice Studies minor, I began to learn about root causes of poverty, sexism, racism, immigration, mass incarceration, and how these social issues were intertwined. I participated in demonstrations and presented at two conferences. My first postgraduate job was in the Office of Service-Learning at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where I experienced working in an international context with students from a variety of cultural and class backgrounds. My journey continued at Naropa University, where I studied Writing Pedagogy with Michelle Naka Pierce, and I deepened my learning on intersectionality and identity with Sarah Richards Graba during the MFA Thesis course. 

In tandem with my experiences within higher education, I have also become involved in sex worker organizing and mutual aid. I am co-founder of Tart Parlor, a reading and performance series by and for sex workers and dedicated allies. I have been trained for and volunteered with Rocky Mountain Street Outreach, which provides direct support to street-based and drug using sex workers in Denver. 

My DEI goals are rooted in consent, self-determination, and collaborative learning. On this path, I am consistently humbled and reminded of how much I have yet to learn about the experiences of others. I try to remember that no identity is a monolith, and we are all to benefit from the liberation of all people and the dismantling of colonial structures and hegemonic forms of oppression.