Staging the Limits of Consent: How to Defend Yourself on Campus, and Beyond

Abstract: Liliana Padilla's play How to Defend Yourself takes place in a self-defense class on a college campus in the immediate aftermath of a sexual assault. This essay draws on recent scholarship about campus sexual violence—how to prevent it, how to educate students about it—to better understand why New York Theatre Workshop's 2023 production had such a profound impact on the undergraduate students with whom I saw it. The essay argues that Padilla successfully theatricalizes a paradigm that the students know well – one in which institutional, social and cultural forces erode the efficacy of policies that focus exclusively on individual behavioral changes to keep women safe on campus, and beyond.