What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Consent? Four Conceptual Approaches
Lisa C. Kistler
What the paper says
Rape is increasingly defined as sex without consent in public conversations, advocacy, and law. Yet, historically, feminist scholars have long identified a series of conundrums related to consent across these domains. As a result, it is not always clear what we talk about when we talk about consent. To respond, I present a synthesis of feminist scholarship on the political meanings and legal applications of consent in relation to sexual violence in US history. In this synthesis, several paradoxes emerge. They reveal four distinct but often conflated views of consent, which I term traditional, liberal, radical, and communicative approaches. Interdisciplinary scholars of sexual consent can draw on this typology and the feminist arguments that underlie it to place their own use of consent within the broader history of feminist advocacy and research.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.