Consenting in the Grey Area: Towards an Ontology of Sexual Consent
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Clare Darcy Maunder, 'Consenting in the Grey Area: Towards an Ontology of Sexual Consent', [thesis], Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin thesesDownload Item:
Abstract:
The so-termed ‘grey area’ of sexual consent has perplexed culture and critics alike since its initial coinage by journalist Laura Stepp in a 2007 Cosmopolitan article as ‘sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial’. The general disregard it was habitually met with has recently been matured into overt intolerance by the resurgence of the MeToo movement as it forced matters of sexual assault and consent into public discourse. The grey area’s rejection, within a movement whose philosophy espouses support of individuals’ sexual experiences, is puzzling. A contextualisation within a longer lineage of consent studies reveals the grey area’s essence of in-betweeness and ambiguity to challenge the binary mechanism by which consent functions to elucidate between consent and assault. Yet the confluence of personal accounts of the grey area and consent’s long-standing undertheorisation challenge a subscription to a binary of consent, and posit the ‘problem’ of the grey are rather as its potential solution. Elise Woodard, Ann Cahill, and Nicola Gavey are amidst the handful of scholars who, responding to the grey area’s critical paucity, produce works to diagnose the grey area, each citing agency as a crucial and defining metric. Finding, however, consent overly displaced by agency within these accounts, and seeking greater depth on the grey area, I turn to Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short story, ‘Cat Person’, whose virality owes to its novel ability to depict an encounter of sex in the grey area. This analysis reveals a hermeneutics of consent, whereby the act of consenting is separated from the consenter, the consequences of which come to bear upon the characters in the story. The fault of consent, therefore, is revealed to lie in its very concept. To remedy this I propose an ontology of consent undergirded by a philosophical foundation of sex provided by Jean-Luc Nancy in his recent works Sexistence (2017), and The Deconstruction of Sex (2021). Nancy’s ontology, rooted in his principle of ‘being-with’, negotiates a strict self/other boundary, which similarly forms a consent that is co-created by and through sexual participants. This ontology of consent finds intuitive communication through the concept of touch, which figures a consent that is not ‘had’, but enacted, and stamped with the Nancian terminology of ‘consenting-with’. The grey area, accordingly, is the literal and metaphorical place where ‘consenting-with’ occurs.
Author: Maunder, Clare Darcy
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Opelz, HannesQualification name:
Master of PhilosophyPublisher:
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). School of Languages, Literature and Cultural StudiesType of material:
thesisCollections
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Identities and Cultures of EuropeMetadata
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