Abstract
Consent: Gender, Power and Subjectivity explores the concept of consent in its cultural, legal, and political contexts. Organised into five sections, this collection of 21 essays responds to key concerns regarding cultural representation, shifting meanings, women’s bodies, consent in a digital world, and legal and political issues surrounding consent. As the editors Laurie James-Hawkins and Róisin Ryan-Flood explain in their introduction, they noticed that, in the aftermath of #MeToo, consent was being used predominantly in relation to sexual consent, and with an assumption that its meaning is straightforward and transparent. Yet, fundamental issues of consent go far beyond sex and are more fluid and complicated than contemporary popular discourse allows. Challenging narrow understandings of the concept, this collection constructs and curates an examination of consent in areas such as pregnancy and childbirth, literature, gender-based practices and gender identity, the law, philosophy, the workplace, the online world, education, sex offending and disability, and sex work.
The book’s classification as Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Law should not obscure its contribution to a wide range of disciplinary areas. The essays dialogue with each other across the sectional divisions, presenting wide ranging perspectives without repetition. As a performance studies scholar who works on issues of gender-based violence and theatre practice, for me this collection offers thought-provoking information, useful methodologies to adapt to applied arts work, and information on working with young people on issues of consent. For instance, Samantha Wallace’s analysis of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel My Dark Vanessa (‘Literatures of Consent’) discusses issues of consent and coercion, the resonances between literary fiction and media reporting of sex offences in the United States, and the potential for fiction to represent complex problems in an engaging and relatable story. Wallace’s essay illustrates how the arts can represent complex social questions on a relatable human scale, opening the potential for dialogue and public engagement. 1
The reduction of consent to sexual consent is increasingly visible on social media and in educational settings internationally, particularly in the content of second- and third-level education which emphasises slogans like ‘yes means yes’ and ‘no means no’. While these slogans are an important starting point for discussion, as these essays reveal they do not necessarily respond to the complexity of young people’s lived experiences as they grapple with their emerging adult identities. As the essays reveal, young people’s understanding of consent is entangled with social and cultural beliefs about gender, appropriate sexual behaviour, and alcohol and intoxicants. Usefully, a number of the essays in the anthology address educational research and initiatives that reveal the shortcomings of consent education. Kristen Jozkowski and Carli Hoffacker present their research on sexual consent and alcohol consumption (‘How Drunk is Too Drunk to Consent?’), while James-Hawkins and Veronica Lamarche explore perceptions of intoxicated consent (‘Two Wrongs Make it Right’). The latter reveals that many young women assume that unwanted sexual contact which is not violent, is not really rape, even when one or both participants are too drunk to consent. In both essays, the findings echo international research which points to an erroneous yet widespread assumption among young people: the belief that they can consume large quantities of alcohol and remain able to freely consent. 2 In the same section, Cristyn Davies, Kerry H. Robinson, Melissa Kang with The Wellbeing, Health & Youth (WH&Y) Commission (‘An Approach to Developing Shared Understandings of Consent with Young People’) offer an account of pedagogical practices in Australia aimed at developing an understanding of drunken consent in a project that co-produced knowledge through open dialogue, and partnered with key stakeholders to disseminate the research through practice and policy. Kellie Burns, Suzanne Egan, Hannah Hayes and Victoria Rawlings (‘The mediation of school-based consent education debates in Australia’), while acknowledging that schools should not be expected to solve complex social problems, examine digital feminist activism that has created momentum in Australia for teaching teenagers about consent. Their research points to the potential for digital and social media to ‘re-imagine sexual citizenship’ (p. 276). This essay broadens the readers’ understanding of the nuanced, fluid, and complex nature of sexual consent in lived experience.
The significance of violence and force as necessary evidence for lack of consent, reported by James-Hawkins and Lamarche, recurs in a number of the papers. Several essays explore the persistent, often unconscious assumption pervading public attitudes that consider that women’s consent can be taken for granted unless they scream or fight back. Such assumptions do not take account of unwilling ‘consent’, as Jordan Pascoe points out in the opening essay (‘The Whiteness of Consent’), which exposes some of the thinking that underpins ‘rape myths’ and common misapprehensions about rape and consent. Patricia Palacios Zuloaga’s essay (‘Unlearning Agreement: Imagining the Law without Consent’), reflecting upon the author’s legal training in Chile, clearly delineates the gap between legal conceptions of consent and women’s lived reality. The author explores the issue of coercion in its multiple guises, and its many impacts upon the lives of those who are poor, minoritised, or marginalised. The gendered operation of power, and the role of misogyny in normalising violence against women and girls, also underpins Sarah Molisso’s report on an epidemic of spy-cameras in South Korea (‘Molka: Consent, Resistance, and the Spy-Cam Epidemic in South Korea’), and Claire Meehan’s work on image-based sexual abuse of teenagers (‘Consent isn’t just a girl’s thing: consent and image based sexual abuse’). Both explicitly excavate the double-standards that facilitate sexual violence and exploitation, and that enable sexually coercive behaviours, including against young teenagers and sometimes by young teenagers.
Other essays explore coercion and consent in relation to pregnancy and childbirth, stressing the transformative importance of medical and legal respect for the autonomy and bodily integrity of the one carrying and birthing the child. Patricia Lewis (‘Consent and Work: A Postfeminist Analysis of Women’s Acquiescence to long working hours’) draws on post-feminist theory to interrogate consent in the workplace, arguing that systemic and gendered work practices can be obscured by appearing under the guise of choice. The issues of sexual identity and violence in relation to consent recur across the anthology. Alexandra Gromilund’s paper (‘SM, the law & an opaque sexual consent narrative’) opens up some of the complexities of consent within the BDSM community in criminal cases that result from police raids on bondage clubs, pointing to a widespread misunderstanding of BDSM, the lack of education about it, and the complexity of sexual desire. The essay unfolds some of the layers of consent in relation to harm, and questions about safe sexual practices within and especially beyond ‘mainstream’ heteronormativity. The essays authored by Brooke de Heer (‘What do I Call This?’: The Role of Consent in LGBTQA+ Sexual Practices and Victimization Experiences), Liam Wignall and Mark McCormack (‘Negotiating consent in online kinky spaces’), Panteá Farvid, Rebekah Nathan, Juliana Riccardi and Abigail Whitmer (‘Negotiating power, pleasure and agency in online sex work: Unpacking what “consent” means in the context of “camming”’), Helen Rand and Jessica Simpson (‘Sex work politics and consent: The consequences of sexual morality’), and Alexandra Fanghanel (‘Sex games gone wrong: Consent in the Courts’) all explore sexualities that are criminalised or marginalised and excluded from heteronormative models and educational practices around consent. These exclusions create a wide range of harms with social, health, and legal implications: sexually minoritised people globally are known to be vulnerable to gender-based and sexual violence. De Heer’s conclusion resonates with many of these essays: she points out that because understandings of sexual consent ‘have been socially constructed around cisgender, heterosexual norms’ (here might be added, heteronormative, non-disabled, neurotypical) ‘we expect LGBTQIA+ people to find the destination (a consensual, mutually enjoyable sexual experience) without providing them with a map to get there’ (p. 84). Meanwhile, in a reflective and compassionate essay (‘Crossing Boundaries and Consent: sex offending and criminalised disabled adults’), Chrissie Rogers describes the experiences of her adult learning-disabled daughter, who was raped by a learning-disabled man who was subsequently criminalised, arguing that targeted interventions by health and social services might have protected both the perpetrator and the victim.
In addition to the essays, this anthology details a wide range of social science research methodologies supported by extensive bibliographies, statistics, and references to studies to support further research. The topic of consent remains an urgent one, as governments increasingly recognise the enormous impact of coercion and sexual violence in society, and seek to devise strategies to counter it. The pervasiveness of the problem is evident in the misogyny recorded by many contributions to this anthology. Hence, alongside De Heer’s plea for education that addresses LGBTQIA+ people and other sexual minorities, is a need for initiatives that assert women’s rights to agency and bodily autonomy.
