Consent to Rape? The Ambiguation of Sexual Consent in Contemporary World Literature

This dissertation studies that which divides rape from sex: the unstable line formed by the concept of sexual consent. It combines an exploration of the promises, paradoxes and problems associated with locating the liberal subject’s sexual consent at the heart of rape law with an analysis of contested representations of consent and nonconsent in several key literary texts about rape. These texts include the paradigmatic rape novel of the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and four twentieth century novels from Africa and North America: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. This interdisciplinary and transnational work connecting law and literature draws on the theoretical perspectives of feminism, postcolonialism and trauma theory to fill an important gap in literary analysis of what is constituted as the grey zone of sexual experience between rape and consensual sex. To explore this critical space, I attend to heterosexual representations of sexual violence that cannot be categorized as rape because nonconsent is ambiguous, and to representations that meet definitions of rape, but that critical and cultural commentary identifies as ambiguously consensual sex. Racial, sexual, colonial and national discourses among others overdetermine the female characters whose consent is at stake in these representations, obscuring their nonconsent to sex. An exploration of the problematics of the female subject’s sexual consent reveals that the liberal subject premised by rape law is an unattainable ideal compared to which actual individuals are found to be lacking. What emerges from my analysis is not just the power of rape myths, the rhetoric of seduction, and the denial of female sexual autonomy and desire, but the ambiguating force of narrative itself. The problem of representing rape is not encapsulated by a dialectic of speech and silence. Rather rape appears most indeterminable when it is represented in narrative as a sequence of events over time, for the female subject is treated as though she exists in a state of perpetual consent, and so nonconsent can only ever be a temporary action of no duration and little force.Ph.D.2019-11-03 00:00:0