Session 10: Thinking Sexual Consent and Sexual Citizenship

1st Global Conference

Monday 4th May 2009 – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Consent and Sexual Citizenship
Tom Claes
University of Ghent, Belgium

In his Embattled Eros (1992) Steven Seidman signals a ‘dilemma:’ “How to arrive,” he wonders, “at a sexual ethic that preserves what Gayle Rubin calls ‘benign sexual variation,’ yet articulates norms that allow us to make the kind of moral judgements that are routinely made in everyday life.” (199) Seidman echoes an oft-heard critique of the ‘liberal view’ of sexual ethics in which valid consent is seen as a sufficient condition for moral legitimacy of sexual acts and for the formulation of a sexual morality (Primoratz). According to Seidman, relying solely on what could be called a ‘sexual ethics of consent’ will not suffice, for “as a normative guide, consent (…) does not provide moral guidelines for a range of everyday situations, practices and conflicts that must be addressed by a sexual ethic.”(198) Seidman suggests that the concept of ‘sexual responsibility’ has ‘strategic value’ for formulating such a sexual ethics.
Recently, the concept of ‘sexual citizenship’ has been proffered as a cornerstone for such a sexual ethics of ‘responsibilisation.’ The notion of sexual citizenship “bridges the private and public, and stresses the cultural and political sides of sexual expression,” and aims at promoting “free sexual expression” while having “a society in which diverse people can take responsibility for their own sexual lives” (Hekma, 2004) as its ultimate goal. Feona Attwood, like many others, has high hopes for such an ethics of sexual citizenship, which she sees as an alternative for “outdated moral frameworks of thought” or for “abandon[ing] the question of morality altogether.” (Attwood, 2006: 91)
In my presentation I want to further explore the relation between, on the one hand, a ‘sexual ethics of consent,’ and, on the other hand, this emerging ‘ethics of sexual citizenship.’ Is the notion of sexual citizenship a necessary and welcome complement to the notion of (valid) consent in sexual ethics?

From Sexual Liberty to Sexual Liberation: Why we Bear a Moral Responsibility in Sexuality
Alicja Gescinska
Ghent University, Belgium

Despite the several sexual revolutions of the past decades, it has become increasingly popular to question the freedom we allegedly have gained through these revolutions. Have we become really free and has this freedom been conducive to a better sexual life? A negative answer to these questions can be heard more and more frequently. Apparently (sexual) freedom does not suffice to be really (sexually) free.

The debate on positive and negative liberty is highly relevant to recent debates on the state of contemporary sexuality. I will start my paper by analysing how and why our quest for sexual liberty has failed to set us free. The recent history of our sexuality can be seen as a proof of the deficit of a merely negative concept of liberty. We strove for liberty, but it was liberation we had to aim for.

The first part of my paper will involve an analysis of some of the key aspects of a positive concept of liberty. In the second part of my paper I will connect the notions of literacy and illiteracy in the sexual domain to positive liberty. One of the main benefits of the concept of sexual literacy, at least as I understand it, consists in the fact that it is not only perfectly compatible with a positive concept of liberty, but even necessarily undergirds key aspects of this liberty. I will conclude by arguing – in accordance with a positive perspective on liberty – that sexual illiteracy is a moral problem for which we all (the literate and illiterate) bear an individual and collective responsibility.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Towards Sexual Literacy: Sexual Consent and Sexual Rights
Paul Reynolds
Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill University, Lancashire, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available