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.
