What to do about #MeToo? Consent, autonomy, and restorative justice: A case study

Abstract

This article asks: Is it possible to craft a form of engaged, anti‐carceral, feminist political practice that carves out a space for sexual negotiation, exploration, sex positivity, and changing conceptions of consent in an era shaped by hypermediation and, for the purposes of this paper, #MeToo? Five British based academics working in the areas of sexuality studies, law, media studies, and sociology were interviewed on this topic so as to better understand contemporary scholarly attitudes and where current research stands. Each scholar was asked a series of questions around consent as a legal and normative regulator of sexual relations—including its drawbacks, their views on other models of consent—including communicative consent, embodied consent, sexual autonomy—the possibilities for alternative forms of justice, inclusive of prison abolition and restorative justice as they relate to sexual violence, and the kinds of feminism(s) they see developing from this.

The limits of limit cases: Sexual ethics and graduate student–staff relationships

“…Taken together, this article has drawn on a specific case study—an ethical limit case as it relates to sexual ethics—to demonstrate the limits of the consent model and the potential for the pleasure and care‐centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness approach to offer an alternative way forward. By focusing on the themes of Otherness, care, pleasure, transgression, embodiment, and communication, a more capacious understanding of intimate relations is able to attend to some of the structural and interpersonal inequities (misogyny, heteropatriarchy, and sex‐gender stereotypes) that work to either dismiss or naturalize expectations and gendered norms around sex and relationships (Manne, 2017; Sikka, 2021, 2022). The dual cases taken up here, beginning with Avital Ronell, represent a clear case of crossed boundaries and harassment and bring to the fore many of the concerns taken up by #MeToo as it relates to power, labor, and entrenched institutional inequities that persist even when the respective subject positions of those involved are unexpected (i.e., a queer woman and gay man).…”

Redefining consent: rape law reform, reasonable belief, and communicative responsibility

“…Many of the principal debates concerning affirmative or communicative conceptions of consent and law reform as discussed earlier were evident in the interviews. These relate to the perceived unevenness of the current law in terms of attributions of responsibility, 70 the intimate and at times implicit nature of sexual interactions, 71 the role of gendered norms and stereotypes in normalizing sexual violence, 72 the potential for the law to act as a catalyst for social and cultural change, 73 longstanding tensions around the potential for the law to be both over-and under-inclusive, 74 and the difficulties associated with having 'too much law' or a 'legal terrain marked by uncertainty' due to a lack of specification in relation to what consent or key terms within the definition mean. 75 As such, this section is framed around three key themes from the primary data: the law's (in)ability to capture the complexity of human interactions, societal ambivalence around consent and rape, and consent confusion.…”