Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Keywords

Consent, New Materialism, BDSM

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis hopes to provide a framework for a more descriptive, empowering, conception of consent as analyzed through perspectives opened by New Materialist thought. New Materialism provides a valuable lens from which to analyze consent in that it promises to help define the mechanics of consenting, but further it provides a more comprehensive descriptive account of consent. I approach my task by first situating and developing a recognizably New Materialist Framework. I then take up a prominent consent framework in relation to a BDSM discourse, ultimately showing that a “liberal” version of it excludes a large community of people who take themselves to be engaged in mutually consensual activities. This failure to capture lived experience, I argue, points to a lacuna in common approaches to consent that, I argue stems from a conception of persons as always already bounded, rather than interrogating the conditions through which boundaries come into being and can be maintained or willingly transgressed. This is especially salient since in this essay we are speaking about consent to sexual acts, which by their very nature overrun bodily boundaries. New Materialism provides a good framework to think about such processes. My aim in the third chapter then is to create a positive account of consent founded on the version of New Materialism developed in the first chapter. Ultimately, I find that this model offers promising results and does in fact provide a stronger descriptive account of the phenomena of consent and could serve as a useful supplemental lens to the liberal theory as it relates to long term change.

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