ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, the concept of consent was anything but universal and transparent. This essay shows that while theorists of civil society imagined consent as a pivotal entry point into political, social, and marital relations, literary texts regularly elided concrete utterances of consent, especially for people who were not the European, property-owning men centered in philosophy. In contexts of sexual violence, gender hierarchy, colonization, and enslavement, consent is absent, suspended, figurative, or inferred for subjugated people, suggesting that this definitive attribute of the political subject was heavily restricted and accessible only to the socially empowered.
