Abstract
This article analyzes the category “consent” by shifting the debate on sexual rights to lives and intimate relationships. In this scenario of everyday affections, it is possible to glimpse the vicissitudes in which consent is experienced in the midst of the various negotiations of symbolic and moral boundaries. Hence, the efforts to understand the limitations in the interpretation of consent as an exercise in autonomy and reason, lays in the torsions that intimacy imprints on it, enabling other dynamics of consent and highlighting its porose, ambivalent, repetitive character. To this end, we will present three ethnographies that are committed to a phenomenological view of everyday life: trans and transvestite (“travesti”) women who seek stable relationships and marriages, ‘nervous’ mothers and their ‘open bodies’ in territories of social precariousness, and the complicated negotiations regarding the insertion of a family member convicted of rape.
Keywords:
consent; intimacy; affection; autonomy; relationality