Dis/Consent: Persepectives on Sexual Consent and Sexual Violence

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S everal books on the Canadian realities of rape cul ture and sexual violence have been released in the last four years (Busby and Birenbaum 2020;Craig 2018;Quinlan, Quinlan, Fogel, and Taylor 2017). KelleyAnne Malinen's (2019) Dis/Consent joins this important body of work by taking aim at the multifa ceted ways that power and oppression are tangled up with rape culture, sexual violence, and erotophobia. e volume particularly excels in its fearless dive into the heart of the contradictions, messiness, and com plexities of thinking through consent, survivor activ ism, agency, and autonomy typically absent in popular discourse surrounding sexualized violence and consent. e innovative title concept of dis/consent embraces this messiness and complexity and at the same time signals a politics of dissent and discontent. In the in troduction to the volume Malinen argues: e prefix 'dis' indicates a reversal or contrary force. 'Dis/Consent' can also be read as a cri tique of the notion of consent as it commonly presented in popular culture. Too often, consent is understood as a kind of currency, typically passed from women to men, in decontextualized exchanges. In reality, moments of consent or nonconsent always occur in a social context, where power is at play. (8) Here we find the clearly articulated point of departure from which the book reintroduces the very complex ity, power relations, and context that are often flattened out or missing entirely in scholarly writing on the top ic.
e book is inclusive of a wide range of perspectives, styles, methodologies, and politics embracing a demo cratic ethos that encourages the reader to be open to diverse and dissenting voices. By "wrapping" the volume in two chapters written by Mi'kmaw scholar Sherry Pictou, Malinen attempts to resist linear and colonialist conceptions of space/time by embracing cyclical thinking, to uncover "relationships of in . en, in Chapter 6, Mandi Gray, Laura Pin, and Annelies Cooper elucid ate the ways that socalled "student consultation" is used by postsecondary institutions responding to sexual violence on campus to "appease stakeholders without substantively addressing their concerns" (65). By delving into their experiences advocating for sur vivors during the creating of York University's govern mentmandated sexual violence policy, Gray, Pin, and Cooper argue that universities gain legitimacy for their policy decisions through processes of "student con sultation." However, these same processes are often public relations exercises designed to manufacture con sent for prewritten policies rather than genuine at tempts at consultation made in good faith early enough in the process to gather and incorporate this feedback in any meaningful way. In this sense, students and survivors on campus are not positioned as know ledgeable subjects who can provide valuable input to the policy but rather as gatekeepers. is is similar to the feminized subject in traditional heterosexual scripts whose power is limited to the ability to grant or refuse the actions authored by the masculinized sexual actor.
e second half of this volume invites us to reimagine agency and autonomy for differently positioned sur vivor subjectivities. In Chapter 8, Malinen gives voice to survivors of "womantowoman sexual assault" (84). While in Chapter 9, Alan Santinele Martino advocates for the sexual decisionmaking rights of individuals with intellectual disabilities (98). Chapter 12, coau thored by activists, poets, and academics El Jones and Ardath Whynacht, is especially timely in the context of current activist movements denouncing police violence and advocating to defund the police. Jones and Whynacht welcome the reader into a dialogue on the "intersection of antirape activism and prison aboli tionism" (142). Jones and Whynacht's discussion is in structive in its exploration of how a carceral response to harm does not allow us to "resist rape culture be cause it avoids social responsibility in favour of indi vidual blame" (148). At the same time they acknowledge and affirm that "those who have experi enced harm should be free to be angry, to be resentful, to never forgive if that doesn't feel right for them" (143). ey powerfully assert: "Confronting sexual violence should be messy and disorienting, and we need to prioritize understanding lived experiences so that we can better our approaches to healing" (151). Jones and Whynacht's discussion is a welcome depar ture from liberal feminist approaches that rely upon rates of incarceration as "a measure of how seriously society takes sexual assault" (143).
is book offers a fresh perspective on the structural, cultural, and institutional frameworks of consent, demonstrating the conditions of possibility and im possibility that shape sexual autonomy for differently

Atlantis Journal
Issue 41.1 / 2020 84 positioned agents in Canadian society. e book's biggest strength, the heterogenous texture and multi plicity of voices, is also its greatest weakness in failing to articulate a clear, overarching theoretical frame work. Without this framework to tie the diverse per spectives and approaches together, the reader may be left wondering: Where to go from here? However, there is plenty in this book to spark important conver sations and transformative thought for many readers.