ABSTRACT
Building on the previous chapter’s suggestion that contemporary uses of consent function within a frame where the ‘rational’ subject is one who employs (and suffers) violence for the sake of economic and cultural capital, this chapter examines the consent-as-autonomy story from within the contemporary period’s capitalist logic. Specifically, it investigates the meaning of ‘social utility’ within a neoliberal world and, consequently, how freedom or autonomy should be understood when envisioned as dispositions of commodities. Consent cases from both criminal and medical law are reviewed for evidence of this neoliberal rationality at work. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the consent-as-autonomy narrative emerged as an ideological component of contemporary capitalism and has obscured the wider universe of consent’s history and functions. Moreover, this autonomy story belies the ways in which these historical functions of consent continue to resonate in judicial treatments of consent today.
