UC Santa Barbara

This article draws on the researcher’s training and experience as a certified intimacy coordinator to examine how labour from professional sex work to intimacy coordination necessitates nuanced approaches to consent. What I call consent work – practices of communication, negotiation, and boundary setting – supports bodily autonomy while guiding portrayals of intimacy and nudity in film, television, theatre, and erotic media. I begin by discussing intimacy coordinators’ communication and consent frameworks to create context for my ensuing investigation. Next, utilizing data from interviews with online sex workers, I explore their sophisticated personal and community-oriented harm reduction techniques that, without formal training, dovetail with those in the intimacy coordination industry. Continuing my qualitative analysis, I describe the ways in which my interlocutors’ use of knowledge from consensual BDSM reflects the breadth of practices that inform consent work while illuminating the links between kink and intimacy coordination. Finally, I unpack how consent models remain entangled within systems of inequality and exclusion while owing much to marginalized communities’ contributions to contemporary understandings of bodily autonomy. Overall, consent work and its capacious lineage contribute to the expanding literature on intimacy coordination and highlight the field’s under-researched intersections with adult content creation.