The text presents and analyses feminist critics to the adjustments between the liberal value of individual free-choice and material and symbolic iniquities that restrain individual autonomy. The focus is primarily a critical analysis of voluntary consent, a basic notion to liberalism. The aspects related to consent and rape are discussed to expose the limits of the liberal duality between coertion and free-choice. Departing from gender relations and the vulnerabilities that concern women's social position, it is possible to have a better understanding of the connections between consent in liberal societies' day-by-day life and consent in liberal-democratic State. These analyses result in a desplacement of the focus, from the expression of preference and choice as voluntary acts, to self-determination as a primary value to democracy. Two sets of issues are, therefore, considered: those emerging from situations in which the differences between consent and non-consent are nullified - nullifying also individual's moral agency - and those emerging from situations in which consent exists, but leads to subordination or deepens individual vulnerability.
consent; free-choice; rape; preferences; feminist political theory