Law and Consent

<p>Consent is used in many different social and legal contexts with the pervasive</p><p></p><p>understanding that it is and has always been about autonomy – but has it?</p><p></p><p>Beginning with an overview of consent’s role in law today this book investigates</p><p></p><p>the doctrine’s inseparable association with personal autonomy and its effect</p><p></p><p>in producing both idealised and demonised forms of personhood and agency.</p><p></p><p>This prompts a search for alternative understandings of consent. Through an</p><p></p><p>exploration of sexual offences in Antiquity medical practice in the Middle Ages</p><p></p><p>and the regulation of bodily harm on the present-day sports field this book</p><p></p><p>demonstrates that in contrast to its common sense story of autonomy consent</p><p></p><p>more often operates as an act of submission than as a form of personal freedom</p><p></p><p>or agency. The book explores the implications of this counter-narrative for the</p><p></p><p>law’s contemporary uses of consent arguing that the kind of freedom consent is</p><p></p><p>meant to enact might be foreclosed by the very frame in which we think about</p><p></p><p>autonomy itself.</p><p></p><p>This book will be of interest to scholars of many aspects of law history and</p><p></p><p>feminism as well as students of criminal law bioethics and political theory.</p>