Consent

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.

"This book troubles the concept of consent in a wide variety of contexts. Using multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, it offers a significant intervention in the contemporary public and academic conversations on the use of consent.Focusing on interpersonal relations, institutions, and social structures, from the public toilets in South Korea, to kink and BDSM communities, to workers in the City working long hours, to the law in different nation states, these scholarly approaches work together so that consent also becomes a prism to make sense of regimes of power and their intersection with intimate experience.Each chapter builds upon and talks to each other unpacking the concept and the often reductive ways consent has been deployed – for example to reproduce intersecting axes of oppression – and ways that it can be extended to support individuals’ and communities’ rights. There are a wide range of methodologies including ethnographic, autoethnographic and theoretical approaches.This book is politically driven with the aim to intervene in real world contexts. Extremely readable, exciting, and constructed through an ethics of care, this book is a cohesive set of essays showcasing distinctive voices."Alison Winch, Goldsmiths University of London, UK

• Introduction; Part I: Cultural Representations of Consent; 1. The Whiteness of Consent; 2. Literatures of Consent; 3. SM, the law & an opaque sexual consent narrative; 4. What’s in a Name (or Even Pronoun)?; Part II: Shifting Meanings of Consent; 5. “What do I Call This?”: The Role of Consent in LGBTQA+ Sexual Practices and Victimization Experiences; 6. How Drunk is “Too Drunk” to Consent? A Summary of Research on Alcohol Intoxication and Sexual Consent; 7. Two Wrongs Make it Right: Perceptions of Intoxicated Consent; 8. An Approach to Developing Shared Understandings of Consent with Young People; Part III: Women's Bodies and the Narrative of Consent; 9. The Right to Withdraw Consent to Continuing an Unwanted Pregnancy; 10. Unlearning Agreement: Imagining the Law without Consent; 11. Consent work: Facilitating Informed Consent in Labour and Childbirth; 12. Consent and Work: A Postfeminist Analysis of Women’s Acquiescence to long working hours; Part IV: Consent in a Digital World; 13. Consent isn’t just a girl’s thing: consent and image based sexual abuse; 14. Negotiating consent in online kinky spaces; 15. Molka: Consent, Resistance, and the Spy-Cam Epidemic in South Korea; 16. Negotiating power, pleasure and agency in online sex work: Unpacking what “consent” means in the context of “camming”; Part V: Legal and Political Representations of Consent; 17. Sex games gone wrong: Consent in the Courts; 18. The mediation of school-based consent education debates in Australia; 19. Sex work politics and consent: The consequences of sexual morality; 20. Victim and Perpetrator: reflecting upon sexual consent, autism and/or learning difficulties; 21. Whose Consent?: Donor Conception, Anonymity and Rights