This project is a philosophical, cultural and community enquiry into cultures of consent as a case study of feminist form. The focus on feminist form brings to fruition my longstanding enquiry into the relationship between forms of expression, social change, and the purview of theoretical knowledge. In particular, the project undertakes a deep examination of the aesthetics of writing and audio-visual culture to further longstanding debates in feminist epistemology about the relations between knowledge, power and feminist liberation, as well as uses of feminist, queer and critical immanent theory to understand the specific relationships among writing, media, and the structures of feeling agitated by feminist movement. Consent is a major emergent cultural category whose politics require urgent understanding from a critical feminist perspective. This project offers a set of innovative interventions into the cultural concept of consent in three ways: through the production of (1) new theoretical knowledge, (2) media and cultural analysis, and (3) community action research.

(1) Theoretical Knowledge – Reconceptualising Consent as a Cultural Concept

This project takes a fresh look at consent through moving beyond single-discipline thinking in political theory and law and the overarching Western metaphysics that imagines the ‘presence’ of consent as a thing that can be established, engaging with postcolonial, decolonial, queer and feminist literature to produce a new genealogy of the non- and inter-disciplinary antecedents and underpinnings of the contemporary cultural concept of consent. Incorporating a theorisation of consent through media theory, including the conceptualisation of the technicity and automation of digital consent, and the transformation to cultural consent shaped by digital media culture, the project produces a new account of what is at stake consent. Locating consent as a structure and infrastructure of feeling (Berlant) radically reimagines the political basis of consent, claiming an alternative, radical philosophy for consent that revises key concepts of agency, experience and the political. The research builds on my examination of feminist concepts through cultural and affect theory, e.g.,
• ‘Feminist Aesthetics of Resistance,’ The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect (2022)

Outputs in the public domain
• ‘Is Consent a Retroactive Formation? Temporalising Consent in Contemporary Feminist Culture,’ Console-ing Passions (2022)
• ‘Stupid in the Moment: Excavating the Patriarchal Nonconscious of Humiliation,’ Affect and Social Media #4, University of East London (2019)

Planned Outputs
• Monograph chapter: ‘Consent.’ Aesthetics of Obligation: Essays on the Feeling of Being Obliged
• Article: ‘Between Representation and Ethics: Consent as Radical Philosophy.’ Radical Philosophy

(2) Media & Cultural Analysis – Consent as a Media & Cultural Practice

The project offers a new account of consent’s vernacular—the stories consent tells, its genres, and their politics. Through media and cultural analysis of consent’s aesthetics, the project reveals the 'consent scripts' that guide expectations of intimate life, and how these are shaped jointly by consent’s institutionalisation (e.g. through policy), technologisation (e.g. through digital media infrastructures) and discursive representation (i.e. through neoliberal governmentality). This work offers an account of the everyday affective experience of commonsense perceptions of consent and how they are produced by relations among jurisprudence, media discourses, and technology as material and affective infrastructures, revealing the politics of consent as a media and cultural practice.

Outputs in the public domain
• 'Consent’s Data Cultures' / 'Gender, Digital Culture and Consent,' Workshop & Symposium at The University of Queensland (2022)
• ‘Tracking the Con in Con-sent: Reflections on the Hyper-Aesthetics of Sex in Consent Culture,’ Bodies in Flux, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022)
• ‘Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture,’ Goldsmiths & Birkbeck (2022), funded by the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths
• ‘Content after content warnings: Notes on the trigger,’ Digital Intimacies #7, University of Queensland (2021)

Planned Outputs
• Cefai, S. (submitted) 'Consent-Deception in the Hyper-Aesthetic Present: A Feminist Cultural Media Theory of Commonsense Consent'
• Cefai, S. (ed.) (in progress) Consent: A New Cultural Concept
• Cefai, S. ‘The Capacious Cultural Politics of Consent.’ Social Media + Society (SAGE)

I have submitted an application for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-4) pursuant to supporting (1) and (2).

(3) Community Action Research – Stories We Can’t Tell

Through undertaking Community Action Research I develop an applied approach to the aesthetics of consent, using experimentation with feminist form to examine the mediation of consent as a site of social experience and political struggle. I draw on my expertise in feminist life writing and theoretical storytelling to make available new accounts of how cultural mediations of consent mobilise affect and feed the mediated forms of expression (e.g. entitlement, permissibility, trust and mistrust) that shape consent’s affective structure. As Community Action Research, the project targets what is referred to as the “culture of silence” around rape, sexual assault, harassment, and other abuses of power in the university, disrupting, problematising and reworking from within, the language of institutionalised intimacy. An innovative, participatory interview methodology in combination with an aesthetic-affective practice that works across journalism, theoretical fiction, feminist theory and cultural critique, will tell university stories that their subjects alone can’t tell and/or that the university subject alone can't hear. The research builds on aesthetic experiments in theoretical storytelling:
• ‘Exit Wounds of Feminist Theory,’ The Future of Media (2022)
• ‘The Flood,’ After Progress (2022)
• ‘The Humiliation of “Sex with Optimism”: Fieldnotes from Tinder,’ Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Enquiry (2018)

Outputs in the public domain
• ‘Why Men Cry Rape: Notes on the Failures of Modesty,’ The Feminist Post, https://sarahcefai.substack.com/ (2022)

Planned Outputs
• Non-discipline specific monograph: Stories We Can’t Tell

• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. Do We Consent To This? Lessons from Contemporary Media on the Cultural Concept of Consent. Unpublished. [Other] (Submitted)
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Consent-Deception in the Hyper-Aesthetic Present: A Feminist Cultural Media Theory of Commonsense Consent'. In: Postdigital Intimacies and the Networked Public-Private. Coventry University, United Kingdom 24 - 25 November 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Social media and the feeling of being obliged: Aesthetics of consent-deception and the crisis of trust'. In: School of the Arts and Media Seminar Series 2022. University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 29 July 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Aesthetics of consent: Reflections on the illiberal freedoms of consent culture'. In: Gender, Digital Culture and Consent. University of Queensland, Australia 14 July 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Workshopping Consent’s Data Cultures'. In: Gender, Digital Culture and Consent. University of Queensland, Australia 14 July 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Tracking the con in con-sent: Reflections on the hyper-aesthetics of sex in consent culture'. In: Bodies in Flux. Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference. Edith Cowan University, Australia 28-30 June 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2022. 'Is consent a retroactive formation? Temporalising consent in contemporary feminist culture'. In: Console-ing Passions 2022. Panel "Sex, Consent and Intimacy". University of Central Florida, United States 23-25 June 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah; Dymock, Alex and Serisier, Tanya. 2022. 'Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture'. In: Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture. Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom 17 June 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]
• Cefai, Sarah. 2021. 'Content after content warnings: Notes on the trigger'. In: Digital Intimacies #7. University of Queensland, Australia 6-7 December 2021. [Conference or Workshop Item]

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/32636