Center for the Humanities

Fall 2021

Consent & Subjection

Where and when did the notion of consent―so crucial for law and politics today―emerge?  Rooted in the concept of the social contract, consent affirms ideas of individual liberty and proprietary rights central to liberalism in the West, but emerged in an age of international trade in humans as commodities for capitalist exploitation and profit.  Consent has thus long served as an instrument of subjectivity and its attendant freedoms, and as a weapon of dehumanization, subjection, and coercion. This semester’s theme queries the construct of consent, an area of inquiry reinvigorated by recent debates in a variety of sectors, including:  sexual consent in corporate and university structures; revenge porn and digital privacy rights; and biomedical authority and involuntary treatment. Such debates have often centered the concerns of white liberalism, producing idealized subjects of victimhood through transactional narratives of consent. But recent scholarship in a range of fields has insisted on reframing the supposed universality of consent by asking:  how does consent emerge as an ambivalent or even pernicious property, a fetishized object that liberalism teaches us to desire, inextricably tied to the judicial right to privacy? We invite inquiries into (and beyond) the formation of consent across the disciplines, including but not limited to historical analyses of the shifting terrains of racialization and consent; legal reframings of consent outside the domain of liberalism; investigations of coercive consent within capitalist structures of participation and consumption; reworkings of seduction and subjection in critical sex work, kink and porn studies; and interrogations of involuntary consent and carcerality.

Lectures 

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted.  Locations vary by date.