User:Eleanorg/thesis/draft1.1/radical grammar

When I interviewed Reclaim The Night organizer and facilitator Clare Cochrane, she emphasised the need for both "simplistic slogans on marches" (Cochrane 2013) at the same time as a deeper, long-term exploration of consent. While defending the continued need for reductionist slogans, she articulated passionately the problems with this conventional model of consent. Of the conventional "B consents to A" grammar, she said,

"as a feminist, I want to scotch that. That's a simplistic notion of consent, which is that... one person says, "I want to do this, will you do it?", and the other person says yes or no. And if they say yes you go ahead and do it, and if they say no you don't. Ok, look, if that's as far as you can get in a certain situation, that's better than nothing. ...But a fuller understanding of consent is not just that one person is agreeing to what the other person wants. ...in the end all you've got is a signature." (Cochrane 2013)

Thomas Millar's (2008) essay "Towards a Performance Model of Sex" gives us a useful introduction to this school of thought. For Millar, our working grammar (what he calls our 'model') of sexual interaction is to blame for the perfunctory signature-seeking of the "get a yes" attitude. As long as sex - and thus consent - are conceptualized as "a substance that can be given, bought, sold or stolen" (p.30), then the logic of the market will define acceptable standards of consent. These will necessarily be impoverished, because "in order for commerce to flourish it is necessary to have rules about when someone is stuck with the bargain they made, even if they regret it or never really liked it in the first place." (p.37). We must accept that "a deal is a deal, however reluctantly, grudgingly, or desperately one side accepts it" (p.37). This grim outlook is lent some support by the tellingly economic logic of Wertheimer's (consent to sexual relations) comment that "by adopting the principle that consent is (ordinarily) /sufficient/ to legitimize interaction, we encourage mutually beneficial interactions" (p.124). More bluntly, "we are not interested in consent as a metaphysical problem, but because it renders it permissible for A to engage in sexual relations with B. [In defining it] we ask 'what could do that'?" (p.146).

Of course, as activists we are free not only to ask what we should render permissible, but what we might render possible in a much broader sense. Getting beyond the conservative grammar of 'permission' opens up exciting possibilities for consent as a more radical model of equal collaboration.

Rachel (Sp?) Kramer-Bussel (2008) titles her contribution to the anthology "Yes Means Yes", "Beyond Yes or No: Consent as a Sexual Process". She claims that "we do everyone a service when we recognize that consent is not simply a legal term, and should encompass more than simply yes or no" (p.44). For her, "'consent' encompasses the ways we ask for sex, and the ways we don't. It's about more than the letter of the law, and... at its heart is communication." (p.43) In opposition to legal pragmatists such as Kleinig and Wertheimer, for Kramer-Bussel, /asking/ (as well as aquiescing) is part of consent. The gendered distiction between asker and consenter is erased here, in favour of "an open dialogue" (p.48) which echoes Millar's call for consent as a "collaboration" based on "affirmative participation" (Millar, 2008 p. 38).

What is most striking about these proposals for a re-worked concept of consent is that consent is no longer an outcome, but must be a process in and of itself. This is not surprising when we think, for example, of the differences between democracy based on voting, and that based on consensus. If the aim is a decision made collectively (instead of a 'yes'/'no' vote), then the 'act' to be consented to can no longer be static and self-evident; it must be modifiable. The process of proposing, discussing and modifying a proposal therefore cannot be divorced from the ultimate confirmation of agreement. The familiar 'wavey hands' which signify consent in commonly-used consensus protocols are not equivalent to the ballot papers signifying consent in a voting system: they are used throughout the process, with 'temperature checks' used in a cyclical, speculative fashion. (seeds for change)

Adopting this approach to consent, then, poses a similar challenge to the one that consensus decision making does. It challenges us to enter a space in which the outcome has not yet been articulated, let alone decided. It demands that we enter a negotiation without either 'seeking' a yes or merely 'giving' one, but creating something cooperatively. (quote D. Sokolov on contracts vs collaboration) When I asked Clare Cochrane what connection (if any) she sees between her work as a consensus facilitator and her feminist work on consent, she said, "it's about making space. ...In all the things I do, what I'm trying to do is make space for dialogue." Why, I asked, is 'making space' so important? "For consent and for consensus, when you've got a safe and held space, you can let go of outcomes."