The Sexual Information Center announced plans last week to host a weeklong series of events designed to replace and reimagine the goals of Safer Sex Week. The event, called Radical Explorations of Sexual Health and Personal Experience, was announced after the organization decided to discontinue Safer Sex Night last spring and undergo an ongoing reconfiguration of the group’s objectives.

“We hope that the RESHAPE event will engage everyone, or at least as many people as possible, in issues and discussions and activities surrounding sex and sexuality and also identity and sexual health,” said College senior and SIC staffer Sophie Meade. “That obviously stands in contrast to the way that Safer Sex Week had been, where it clearly was only serving very specific populations of people.”

RESHAPE will take place during the week of April 6 and, through a variety of speakers, workshops and activities, will address sex from intersectional perspectives.

According to College senior and SIC Event Coordinator Sarah MacFadden, Safer Sex Week and the SIC have historically been dominated by white, cisgender feminists and, as a result, have served only a small subsection of the campus population.

“A lot of [the] issues with Safer Sex Week in the past was it was a pink, fuzzy, super sex-positive way of engaging with the material, whereas we have taken the belief that it requires a more honest approach [by] looking at the way power structures play into [sex] and centering our focus on survivor support [and] the intersection of race, disability, class [and] gender,” said MacFadden.

The SIC plans to collaborate with a variety of College organizations, including OSlam, Students United for Reproductive Freedom, The Grape, the Multicultural Resource Center,

Oberlin Mental Health Alliance, Preventing and Responding to Sexual Misconduct, HIV Peer Testers and several other groups with unconfirmed events. Many events will be workshopor lecture-based, but, according to College senior and SIC staffer Sophie Hess, the SIC also hopes to provide ways for people to engage with the material through discussion, artistic spaces and social events.

“I think a lot of them are going to be events that are fun and still political and still subversive, but not necessarily traditionally academic,” said Hess. “There’s going to be a lot of emphasis on people doing art and performance and having conservational spaces too.”

The coordinators plan to host a Trivia Night at Slow Train Café, as well as to collaborate with FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture on the nationwide Monument Project to construct a quilt that will cover the lawn of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The SIC also plans to invite Amanda Matos, founder of the WomanHOOD Project, an organization focused on empowering young women of color; employees of Preterm, an abortion clinic in Cleveland; and Get Yourself Tested, an organization which plans to provide free STD testing.

Hess said she is excited about the new direction of the SIC and RESHAPE, but also feels that student interest in the events may decrease in the absence of Safer Sex Night — an event which, though problematic, historically served a celebratory role.

“I think without Safer Sex Night, in some ways, [RESHAPE] does also become … another week of action. … I hope that there’s some sort of celebratory event, and I hope that that would be great, because I do think that celebration is a big part of doing activist work and of doing healing,” said Hess.

The SIC hopes to encourage participation through collaboration with the Oberlin Comics Collective by giving participants one page of comics for every event they attend.

Meade, however, doesn’t see the potentially lower attendance of these events as an issue. She said the old system, where students had to attend several Safer Sex Week events to get a ticket to Safer Sex Night, may have brought people into workshops who wouldn’t have otherwise attended, but she was also uncomfortable with forcing people who were uninterested to engage with the events.

“I don’t think we really want to bait people — if that makes sense — into coming to events so they can go to a dance at the ’Sco,” said Hess. “We really want people to come because it’s something they care about and because it’s something that they decided to address in whatever way they decided to do so.”

This is part of the SIC’s move away from a view that exclusively promotes sex positivity and toward an approach that encourages a variety of different lenses and ways to engage with sex and sexuality.

“It’s not that we are trying to say that necessarily those ways of people who did like the dance and people who did like how Safer Sex Week [was] are wrong, or the wrong way to explore your sexuality, or the wrong way to have your relationship with these issues,” said Meade. “It is true, though, that [that] type of approach to sexual health — specifically white feminist sex-positivity — is actually really hurtful … because it erases the histories and lived experiences and realities of so many people.”

Over the past year, the SIC has removed decoration that may be considered offensive from its office, implemented office hours specifically for people of color and started gathering feedback so the organization can provide products for trans people in the future.

The organization hopes to continue improving its services and programming by reaching out to College groups and individuals through personal connections and Facebook.

Although the SIC hopes to design RESHAPE so it will cater to as many people on campus as possible, Hess acknowledges this is just a first iteration. According to Hess, the event is still in the planning process, and the group hopes to gather more feedback through anonymous Google surveys and maybe public forums.

“It’s important for us to be transparent about the fact that though we’re working hard, we’re also still very much open to criticism and always will be,” said Hess. “We certainly [want] people to voice any and all feelings that they have about this.”