The Ambivalence of Consent
Short summary
It is a depressing certainty that you will never be short of examples if you write about consent. From the Kavanaugh hearings to the trials of Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump and publication of Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name, consent is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Much like pornography, most people feel that they can identify consent when they see – or hear – it. If that were the case, then the ongoing debates that have plagued public life, and particularly college campuses, would seem overwrought and self-indulgent, as they are often accused of being. Yet scholars of sexual consent have long held that identifying consent is not so simple as listening for the word ‘yes’ or watching for an enthusiastic nod. For one thing, people’s minds may change before, during, and after sexual encounters. For another, power differentials between partners may render even the most enthusiastic ‘yes’ problematic. To counter this simplification, much academic writing on consent addresses so-called “limit cases”: relationships in which one partner has suffered cognitive decline due to dementia, for example, or BDSM relationships purportedly grounded in one party’s abjection. These encounters challenge the ordinary view of consent as obvious or self-evident – but, I suggest, do so by playing at the fringes of sexual behavior. The Ambivalence of Consent proposes, in turn, that relationships ostensibly characterized by relative equality between parties often prove to be the most dangerous of minefields, where more subtle inequalities - of responsibilities such as child- and elder-care - often end up posing the most difficulties, precisely because of the presumption of equality. Ultimately, it is “ordinary” sex, including sexual assault and rape, that is more likely to force a revealing confrontation with the many ambivalences and dependencies folded into any sexual relationship around questions of consent. In other words, the illumination offered by limit cases does not spread their light far beyond themselves. The more mundane cases tend to be the more revealing.
The Ambivalence of Consent is an attempt to rethink sexual consent, not by attending to the fringes (as some political theoretical accounts do) or in a vacuum (as some philosophical accounts tend to do), but by taking social norms and practices seriously. The book makes three specific contributions to debates about sexual consent. First, the introduction argues in favor of treating sexual consent as a unique case within larger debates about consent. Sexual consent is significantly distinct from, for example, medical or political consent. Second, chapters one through three offer comprehensive overviews and evaluations of debates about consent that currently dominate scholarly discourse. I identify three key theories of consent – the liberal individual model, the affirmative consent model, and the kink model – and demonstrate their shortcomings. Third and finally, the fourth chapter of The Ambivalence of Consent offers a new paradigm for consent, grounded in what is known as “relational autonomy,” a theory of agency that highlights our dependence on, rather than independence from, one another. Shifting to dependence as the foundational condition of sexual relationships allows us to move away from traditional notions of consent as a contract between individuals. Relational autonomy is capable of accommodating what I refer to as consent’s ambivalences, or the inequalities and constant negotiations that characterize all relationships. Ultimately, a relational autonomy approach to consent proves most useful in approaching the dimensions of inequality that characterize nearly all sexual relationships, if we are willing to tolerate the discomforts of ambivalence.