South African women’s constructions of sexual consent

ABSTRACT

Current understandings of sexual consent do not always acknowledge the effect of overarching social norms and ideals on how sexual consent is constructed. This research explored how women construct sexual consent using a feminist framework that focused on the use of discourses to analyse how power shapes these understandings. We aimed to gain insight into how women talk about sexual consent and the forces they identified as influencing their understandings. Five focus group discussions were conducted with female students from a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The analysis yielded three primary discourses in women’s talk of sexual consent: Consent as a Woman’s Call, Consent Without Desire, and Consent as Willingness. This work contributes to the existing literature on sexual consent by highlighting the context-specific nature of sexual consent and the ways in which power shapes women’s constructions of sexual consent in the context of heterosexual relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterosex
• heterosexual negotiation
• sexual consent
• sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kayla Beare

Kayla Beare is a Masters student at University College London who studies Women's Health and specializes in women’s understandings of sexual consent and how broader social contexts inform these understandings. She is an Advancing Womxn scholar and has worked with the Disrupting Gender Based Violence group.

Floretta Boonzaier

Floretta Boonzaier is Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town, Co-Director of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa and Co-Chair of the Global Africa Group of the Worldwide Universities Network. She teaches in feminist, critical, social and decolonial psychologies, with special interests in intersectional subjectivities, youth subjectivites, gendered and sexual identifications, participatory methodologies and sexual and gender-based violence all areas in which she has published.