Consent

Consent
Book Chapter
Elizabeth Groeneveld, Carrie Rentschler
Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, 2023 [Routledge]
Abstract
This chapter examines liberal, affirmative, and critical consent frameworks that inform constructions of this term, after a review of the circulation of consent as a keyword in Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS). Feminist theory starts from the premise that social relationships are, by-and-large, unequal, critiquing liberal models of consent precisely for their failures to address power. Many feminists have critiqued the liberal model of consent for its failures to address structural conditions of oppression along the axes of gender, race, class, age, and ability, all of which shape the very conditions. The focus of the affirmative consent model on the negotiation of mutual pleasure and the setting of limits in sexual situations—an ideal many of us do invest in—when codified into law may serve the criminal justice system more than anyone else. In contrast to affirmative consent, critical, ethical, and trauma-informed consent practice reveals power as something that is both always present and something that can be negotiated in relationship.