1st Edition
Consent Gender, Power and Subjectivity
This book considers the concept of consent in different contexts with the aim of exploring the nuances of what consent means to different people and in different situations. While it is generally agreed that consent is a fluid concept, legal and social attempts to explain its meaning often centre on overly simplistic, narrow and binary definitions, viewing consent as something that occurs at a specific point in time.
This book examines the nuances of consent and how it is enacted and re-enacted in different settings (including online spaces) and across time. Consent is most often connected to the idea of sexual assault and is often viewed as a straight-forward concept and one that can be easily explained. Yet there is confusion among the public, as well as among academics and professionals as to what consent truly is and even the degree to which individuals conceptualise and act on their own ideas about consent within their own lives.
Topics covered include: consent in digital and online interactions, consent in education, consent in legal settings and the legal boundaries of consent, and consent in sexual situations including sex under the influence of substances, BDSM, and kinky sex. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in issues of consent from the social sciences, gender theory, feminist studies, law, psychology, public health, and sexuality studies.
Foreword
Rosalind Gill
Introduction
Laurie James-Hawkins and Róisín Ryan-Flood
Part I: Cultural Representations of Consent
1. The Whiteness of Consent
Jordan Pascoe
2. Literatures of Consent
Samantha Wallace
3. SM, the law & an opaque sexual consent narrative
Alexandra Grolimund
4. What’s in a Name (or Even Pronoun)?
EJ Francis Caris-Hamer
Part II: Shifting Meanings of Consent
5. “What do I Call This?”: The Role of Consent in LGBTQA+ Sexual Practices and Victimization Experiences
Brooke de Heer
6. How Drunk is “Too Drunk” to Consent? A Summary of Research on Alcohol Intoxication and Sexual Consent
Kristen Jozkowski and Carli Hoffacker
7. Two Wrongs Make it Right: Perceptions of Intoxicated Consent
Laurie James-Hawkins and Veronica Lamarche
8. An Approach to Developing Shared Understandings of Consent with Young People
Cristyn Davies, Kerry H. Robinson, Melissa Kang with The Wellbeing, Health & Youth (WH&Y) Commission
Part III: Women's Bodies and the Narrative of Consent
9. The Right to Withdraw Consent to Continuing an Unwanted Pregnancy
Aoife Duffy
10. Unlearning Agreement: Imagining the Law without Consent
Patricia Palacios Zuloaga
11. Consent work: Facilitating Informed Consent in Labour and Childbirth
Laura Pascoe
12. Consent and Work: A Postfeminist Analysis of Women’s Acquiescence to long working hours
Patricia Lewis
Part IV: Consent in a Digital World
13. Consent isn’t just a girl’s thing: consent and image based sexual abuse
Claire Meehan
14. Negotiating consent in online kinky spaces
Liam Wignall and Mark McCormack
15. Molka: Consent, Resistance, and the Spy-Cam Epidemic in South Korea
Sarah Molisso
16. Negotiating power, pleasure and agency in online sex work: Unpacking what “consent” means in the context of “camming”
Panteá Farvid, Rebekah Nathan, Juliana Riccardi and Abigail Whitmer
Part V: Legal and Political Representations of Consent
17. Sex games gone wrong: Consent in the Courts
Alexandra Fanghanel
18. The mediation of school-based consent education debates in Australia
Kellie Burns, Suzanne Egan, Hannah Hayes and Victoria Rawlings
19. Sex work politics and consent: The consequences of sexual morality
Helen Rand and Jessica Simpson
20. Crossing Boundaries and Consent: sex offending and criminalised disabled adults
Chrissie Rogers
21. Whose Consent?: Donor Conception, Anonymity and Rights
Róisín Ryan-Flood
Biography
Laurie James-Hawkins is the Social Science Faculty Dean for Undergraduate Education, a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Sociology, and Deputy Director for the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex. She is a Sociologist of health and gender, and her research interests include sexual consent, reproductive health, contraception, abortion, gender, sexuality, and hookup culture among emerging adults. In the last several years she has been studying the impact of alcohol on university student definitions of sexual consent. Her recent publications include "Just one shot? The contextual effects of matched and unmatched intoxication on perceptions of consent in ambiguous alcohol-fuelled sexual encounters."
Róisín Ryan-Flood is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, kinship, digital intimacies, and feminist epistemology. She is the author of Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship (2009), and co-editor of Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process (2010) and Transnationalising Reproduction (2018). She is also co-editor of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society.
