Jessamyn Fitzpatrick

Jessamyn Fitzpatrick is a theatre artist, educator and pleasure seeker working at the intersections of sexuality, reproductive justice, and performance. Jessamyn spent several years touring nationally in Sex Signals, an interactive show about gender, sexual violence and consent. She was a company member with For Youth Inquiry (FYI) for the Illinois Caucus of Adolescent Health (ICAH) from 2017-2022 – developing and performing participatory theatre surrounding reproductive justice issues. With FYI she produced and co-wrote FIRST, a play about virginity in 2017 and she co-wrote This Boat Called My Body, in 2018, a participatory, call to action play about youth abortion access in Illinois. Jessamyn is an actor, devising artist, and writer working to activate art as a means of erasing stigma surrounding sex and sexuality, and rewrite sexual scripts to allow for greater pleasure equity. She is the creator of Sex Positivity Tarot – a tarot-inspired practice designed to facilitate curious, shame-free conversations about sex. Most recently she co-conceived, produced and performed in Meeting Our Desires, an immersive, site-specific theatre piece exploring how the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has impacted folks’ relationships to sexuality, intimacy and relationship.

Title of Project

Talk About It: an interview project exploring sexual scripts and the erotic imaginary

Description of Project

This presentation is a snapshot of an emergent theatre project that explores what it might mean to engage in collective spaces of sexual inquiry and exploration as a gesture of refuge and refusal. Built on a series of one on one interviews surrounding the sexual scripts people inherited, what they do with these scripts and what new translations might yet be possible, this project attempts to create permissive, curious space for sexual imagination and expression.

Areas of Academic Interest

Pleasure & Sexuality, Participatory Theatre & Reproductive Justice, Cultural productions of sex, gender and desire