The sexual economy of consent: cruel optimism, capitalism and an alternative

This article critically examines the failures of consent as the dominant form of contemporary sexual ethics by drawing on feminist new materialism and Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism using a political economic lens. The researcher makes the case that sexual consent is built on capitalist property relations that are raced, gendered and classed and thus needs to be challenged. 

Drawing on formative critique, historical analysis and case studies, and engagement with media coverage, this article makes the case for change and offers two possible ways forward, one rooted in Lauren Berlant’s work on sexual relationality and another in the form of a pleasure and care-centred ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness.

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