\"Some of the most profound learning and growth opportunities are the ones that happen outside the classroom,\" states the \"Student Life\" page of the Wesleyan University website. The institution asserts that extracurricular involvement constitutes our education just as much—if not more than—formal schooling. Yet \"outside the classroom\" is an expansive domain. Through friendships and activities, we learn and unlearn and learn again, an incessant assemblage of \"the self\" as we move through campus life. Students of the liberal arts institution are supposed to develop through comprehensive meaning-making, our every experience offering the potential for growth. What happens outside the classroom still falls within university jurisdiction, for it is, after all, part of the learning we are here for. Wesleyan makes explicit this subsummation, advertising it as one significant benefit of a liberal arts degree. The social, cultural, and personal become distinctly pedagogical. We are educated everywhere, all the time. How might sex, a (typically) extracurricular activity, also be understood as a university-sponsored mode of education? This thesis consider how the intimacies of the campus may be ideal sites of subject management in the name of the liberal arts project, through which the student is always and ongoingly educating toward stability, progress, and actualization. I investigate sexual subject formation within the liberal arts university context, exploring what it is that sex is supposed to teach us and make us into. How does sex education occur at the intersection of the campus and the self? I consider these themes through the framework of Abolitionist University Studies, an emerging field of study that interrogates higher education and its investments in capitalism, colonialism, and carceral logics. Abolitionist University Studies not only resists these violent systems as they are institutionally perpetuated, but also generatively speculates as to what might replace them. I contend with sex on Wesleyan's campus as an historical, cultural, and political site of signification, a mode of educating ourselves as we inhabit the institution and it inhabits us. The neoliberalization of American liberal arts colleges creates an ideological hybrid, whereby the ideal student both progressively self-actualizes and exhaustively marketizes. I argue that sex is a foundational mode of this subject formation—students sexually self-invest to accrue value and risk-mitigate to avoid depreciation. In turning to alternative forms of sex education, students can teach and learn sex (and sexual subjectivity) toward different ends. I propose the strategy of \"sexual study,\" a radical, collective, and nondirectional approach to sex within the university. I derive this from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's concept of \"study\" in The Undercommons, a seminal Abolitionist University Studies text that advocates for a fugitive relationship to the university's demands to professionalize, actualize, and accredit. Sexual study offers other ways of being and being together, imagining an affective and relational utopia, not as a way out of the neoliberalized liberal arts institution, but a way through it.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23564