ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish the foundations of a critical-governmentality approach to consent by examining post-Roe America’s contemporary discourses on reproductive rights, more specifically the right to abortion. Moving beyond simplistic binary framings of consent as a matter of the ‘individual’ or the ‘public’, and/or its (un)justified absence or presence, the chapter draws on critical feminist and decolonial approaches to frame consent through a governmentality lens. This enables us to view consent not simply as a means or an end, but as a system, a body of assumptions, processes, and aspirations, inextricably tied to and co-constitutive of (gendered/racial) subjecthood and power, even when it is ‘absent’. Drawing from discursive legal and public justifications and oppositions for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this chapter highlights how several paradoxes imbricated in a liberal democracy and in liberal systems of consent pave the way for circulating logics re Roe v. Wade and its overturning. While complicating consent might have been the epitomising win for #MeToo, the chapter concludes by asserting that to disrupt coloniality and power hierarchies, the goal is not to stop at consent, but to start with it and to continually, systematically, and historically interrogate who (gets to) consent/s, why, to what, when, and how.
