Problematizing Consent Campaigns in the #METOO Era

For decades, feminists have intervened in a sexually violent culture. Many public health professionals, educators, and activists who design these interventions have called for complex conceptualizations of communication, yet communication studies scholars have not written extensively on consent. Moreover, researchers outside the field rarely rely on insights from the discipline. Accordingly, I offer a critical review of consent activism and research, and I highlight disciplinary assumptions that could enhance existing knowledge. I argue that many feminist academic/activist interventions use false ideas about communication, what I call communication myths: discourse merely reflects reality, and local discourse is disconnected from larger social Discourse. I show how these communication myths resonate with rape-supportive arguments. By suggesting communication should be unambiguous during consent, anti- violence educators/activists lower the standard for communicative competence, disconnect it from historical-cultural context, and miss opportunities to politicize consent. I argue feminists can challenge communication myths to build on existing interventions while more fully dismantling rape culture.

2023

Young women are retelling and reshaping stories of sexual assault and consent through testimonial accounts in the online space. In the wake of the global #metoo movement, women shared their stories both on and offline, as issues of sexual violence and consent education were forced onto national and international agendas. One of these online spaces was the Teach Us Consent website. Drawing on almost 3300 testimonies from the Australian Teach Us Consent website and the close reading of a random sample, this chapter considers the way these testimonies, which focus on breaches of sexual consent amongst high school students, reveal that future consent education programs must focus on the nuance and ambiguity within communication around consent and sexual interaction. Education about consent communication may involve acknowledging that which appears (initially at least) invisible or ambiguous. The Teach Us Consent website reveals discourse around consent does not necessarily support affirmative consent strategies such as the long-held mantras of "yes means yes" and "no means no" (Harris, Journal of Applied Communication Research, 46:158, 2018). Instead, the Teach Us Consent testimonies emphasise the complexities of consent, refusing to situate silence as a signal of acquiescence. Sexual consent • Consent communication • Testimonies • Rape culture • Consent education In early 2021, almost a decade after being sexually assaulted by another student who attended an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, Chanel Contos posted a question to her Instagram account. It read: 'If you live in Sydney: have you or has anyone close to you ever experienced sexual assault

Sexuality, Gender, and Policy, 2021

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 possibili-ties for alternative forms of justice, inclusive of prison aboli-tion and restorative justice as they relate to sexual violence, and the kinds of feminism(s) they see developing from this.

2017

This creative Master's thesis project records a set of experiences of a graduate teaching assistant's engagement with student, faculty, and staff activists in sexual assault on a Southeastern university campus during the academic years of 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. Using literature, interviews, dialogic engagement, and participant observation, I document, discuss, and analyze discursive norms and campus interventions, specifically in the context of campus rape culture. I outline my philosophical commitments, relate my experiences meeting with members of the university community, and offer my findings and reflections in a thematic report. The implications make a strong case for the importance of dialogic interventions as the preferred method to address assault, assert the need for collaboration among campus entities, and assess the nature of current models of campus activism.

Communication, Culture and Critique, 2018

This article examines the movement organizing and media activist work university students do to address sexual violence, the problem of faculty/student relationships, and the failures of some institutional response. It notes, in particular, how students make sexual violence public through the use of open letters; how they create anonymous and informal online reporting platforms for students to disclose sexual violence; and how they model practices of accountability and survivor-centred care. This article notes the essential work student activists do to address, and redress, the problem of sexual assault on university campuses, and how they make their work visible. Students bear a lot of the burden for addressing the problem of sexual assault and faculty sexual misconduct on our campuses; it is a burden many faculty bear too as those who support and advocate for this change. We see how this burden gets articulated in the stories many students are telling and sharing with each other via blogs and social media posts, and the work they do drafting policy and building cross-campus student movements. Contemporary student activism, I suggest , models what responsibility and accountability for sexual violence might look like. With students Ayesha Vemuri and Arianne Kent, I am conducting a research project that examines how student activists use media to intervene in campus cultures of sexual assault, and provide new models of redress and activist imaginations for violence-free campuses. We historicize contemporary feminist student activism against rape culture in the context of longer local genealogies of shared forms of student activist practice in Canada, doing what we call a " media history of student activism. "

2018

Sexual assault remains a pervasive public health issue, particularly among college students in North America. Sexual assault prevention education programs focused on consent promotion are ubiquitous on college campuses. Such programming emphasizes the clear communication of sexual consent and sexual refusals in order to promote consensual sexual encounters and reduce sexual assault occurrences. However, the extent to which consent promotion-based programming is effective remains questionable. For this reason, researchers have begun to focus attention on how sexual consent is negotiated between college students and young adults. In the current article, we provide a brief review of recent empirical research related to sexual consent, particularly among college students and young adults. We offer critiques of the sexual consent promotion-based framework and provide suggestions for future sexual assault prevention education programming aimed at reducing sexual assault on college campuses.

Journal of Campus Title IX Compliance and Best Practices, 2016

This study examined institutional definitions of "sexual assault" and "consent" in a sample of four-year residential institutions in one state. Findings were promising in some regards and discouraging in others. Almost all campuses were compliant with the Clery Act. Many defined "sexual assault" more broadly than statutes, and also defined "consent" in progressive ways. But, information remained scattered across documents and regressive Uniform Crime Report (UCR) language was not uncommon.

Family Relations, 2017

In 1994, the feminist journalist Katie Roiphe published a book titled The Morning After in which she argues that the women's movement had become obsessed with victimization. With many of her case examples centered on campus sexual politics, Roiphe laments college women's demands for the very forms of patriarchal protections that second-wave feminists fought to overturn. In the two decades since the publication of this book, campus activists have gained considerable ground in bringing sexual assault into public awareness, insisting (contra Roiphe) that victims have been all too silent. This article presents an appraisal of this historical legacy and draws out key lessons to be learned from the history of feminist organizing around sexual assault on campuses. The author explains how radical, liberal, and socialist feminist politics offer different lenses for framing sexual assault and discusses the value of a psychoanalytic feminist optics for thinking through dilemmas at the level of political practice. In her 1994 polemic on campus sexual politics, the journalist Katie Roiphe reflected on the decade following second-wave feminism and argued that college-aged women had become obsessed with victimization. Provocatively titled

Contribution to JFSR, Short Takes: Politics in the Classroom and Beyond. Roundtable organized jointly with Meredith Minister and Beatrice Lawrence.