During our class on Wednesday with Katie McDonald, we examined notions of sex, agency and consent in our readings through various different methods and questions such as close-reading, questioning language and asking “what are the scholarly implications?”.
Something that really interested me was the convoluted relationship between consent and agency within the context of sexual relations. How do they interact with one another? It’s something that I have struggled with a lot when reading Gavey in particular because I can’t seem to come up with a definite answer.
If consent is absent from a sexual interaction, then the party subjected to unwanted sex has had their agency taken away from them. Then, can agency even exist within a lack of consent, something that is generally understood as the ability to exercise choice and be respected for those choices? It would seem that these two have to go hand in hand and that it is impossible to have one without the other within sex.
Furthermore, Gavey recounts a woman’s explanation that states that when it comes to sex, the belief in gender scripts is “still in your bones” (147). She goes on to say that the “unconscious mind is still powerful enough told rive me in some of these moments” (147). This further complicates agency in ways that have been previously mentioned again and again. Are our decisions truly our decisions or have we been conditioned to make them and believe that they are our own? Can one truly give consent?
With these in mind, it seems that the natural conclusion must be to say that within sexual interactions, it is impossible to have consent without exercising agency and impossible the exercise agency within non-consensual interactions.
However, we can see that this is false. As Gavey has already pointed out to us, consent can be a very passive act. Choices can be “born of actively weighing the pros and cons of alternative courses of action” (155) and not necessarily exercising “full agency” where unlimited options are taken into consideration instead of a select few. Then again, on the other hand, we have seen that agency can be exercised in times when consent is not present. In the Campbell article “From Thinking to Feeling”, a survivor described how she decided to go along with her rapist and pretend to enjoy the act. Arguably, this can be read as an act of agency when she had very little left to exercise in that moment. However, she decided in that moment that she would do what she had to do to take care of herself to the best of her ability.
But I suppose that it all boils down to how we define agency and consent. As questioned in class, does agency mean having unlimited choice and freedom to make decisions? If so, then nobody ever really has agency. Agency is impossible to achieve. Maybe reading agency on a spectrum or scale would be better than saying that someone simply does or doesn’t possess the ability to exercise it?
I like your idea of agency being seen on a spectrum. This weeks papers definitely made things a bit more confusing in terms of agency and how much choice we really have. The personal experiences shared in Gavey's article are important because they take the topic of sex and agency to a practical and personal level. There are no right or wrong answers there because it is about the individual person's experience. When Gavey says that gender scripts are still in our bones(147), I found this to be profoundly accurate. In our daily lives we seem to being doing things that we don't necessarily want to do to keep relationships going or because we think that they are normal and we want to be normal. I found Marilyn's story to be so sad that she would put up with an idiotic boyfriend because this is what she thought she should be doing. She wasn't pressures per se, but social norms dictated that to keep her boyfriend she should give him sex when he wanted it. How do we change this narrative? How do we change these seemingly entrenched gender discourses? Is it even possible? Not only do we have to work against societal norms but the seemingly popular backlash feminists that muddy the waters even more. Unfortunately I find that the opinions of these so called "feminists" are proving to be quite popular. How can we change the script when there isn't even a consensus on what the script is and how and an acceptance of the power of the gender script.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of agency being seen on a spectrum. This weeks papers definitely made things a bit more confusing in terms of agency and how much choice we really have. The personal experiences shared in Gavey's article are important because they take the topic of sex and agency to a practical and personal level. There are no right or wrong answers there because it is about the individual person's experience. When Gavey says that gender scripts are still in our bones(147), I found this to be profoundly accurate. In our daily lives we seem to being doing things that we don't necessarily want to do to keep relationships going or because we think that they are normal and we want to be normal. I found Marilyn's story to be so sad that she would put up with an idiotic boyfriend because this is what she thought she should be doing. She wasn't pressures per se, but social norms dictated that to keep her boyfriend she should give him sex when he wanted it. How do we change this narrative? How do we change these seemingly entrenched gender discourses? Is it even possible? Not only do we have to work against societal norms but the seemingly popular backlash feminists that muddy the waters even more. Unfortunately I find that the opinions of these so called "feminists" are proving to be quite popular. How can we change the script when there isn't even a consensus on what the script is and how and an acceptance of the power of the gender script.
ReplyDeleteI hadn’t thought about agency as something that could be on a spectrum before. Is “gray” rape or consensual unwanted sex mean that consent is on a spectrum as well? Looking at agency as a spectrum, and thinking about the gendered scripts that are “in our bones,” I have a better understanding of how easy it can be to agree to unwanted sex, even after understanding the ways that femininity is constructed as passive. For example, I understand that as a woman, I’m expected to wear makeup and that the reason I personally wear makeup probably has a lot to do with the way I’ve been socialized within a patriarchal system. Wearing makeup might also be something on the “agency” spectrum. It isn’t something we have to do by any means, and many feminine-of-centre folks choose not to at all or choose to wear it in a way that disobeys conventional “beauty” standards. That being said, there are certain situations where it is harder to get away with not wearing makeup, like a fancy dinner, or a professional setting. In those scenarios, can we honestly say we’re freely choosing to wear makeup? Because this is a socially sanctioned act in any sense, can we ever say it’s something we freely choose to do? If this is an aspect of the same spectrum, why is our agency with regard to sex so much more important? Should it be?
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