Morgan Björö, PhD student at the Division for Human Rights Studies, Department of History, Lund University, presents an article draft.

In 2018 Sweden adopted a Consent Law based on the idea that sexual intercourse ought to be preceded by an expressed consent or voluntarism. These legislative measures replaced the former requisites in the Criminal Code which had, mostly, focused on the presence or absence of physical force, violence, threats and coercion. The operative logic of consent, i.e., what the concept of “consent” actually means, how it is shown to be operational or functional, and the ways consent can be expressed, were espoused in preparatory work between 2014 and 2016. Here consent is taken as the division between sexual intercourse and sexual offense, and the preparatory work’s raison d’être is explicating on what this division means in terms of vulnerability, choices, rights and so on.

 

The aim of this paper is first and foremost a critique, in the Kantian sense, of the preparatory work’s internal logic and how it unfolds. The paper does this through an overview of some feminist critiques of the (liberal) law and consent, ultimately arguing that these critiques overlook the force of legal personae and would thus fail to see how consent is produced by the preparatory work. Instead, the paper turns to a quasi-Arendtian discussion of the function and etymology of the mask. Rather than hiding the reality beneath the mask, this mask produces subjectivities and enables actions, speech and recognizability to sound through the mask itself.