Digital Technologies of Consent

• In Event: Media Studies Interruptions of STS - II

Abstract

This paper interrogates how conceptions of consent, as mediated by both popular discourses as well as digital consumer technologies, elide key structural differences among subjects and, thus, argues for reimagining consent itself. Both technologies that facilitate fantasies of violating consent (robotic sex dolls like Frigid Farrah) or fantasies of safeguarding consent through computational means (apps documenting consent like LegalFling) rehearse longstanding conceptions of consent itself as a deterministic technology of social governance—imagined as a clear binary of consent/non-consent between possessive individuals of Western liberal humanism and contract law. As feminist, intersectional, and queer critiques (Catherine MacKinnon; Andrea Dworkin; Joseph Fischel; Michael Gill) demonstrate, however, not all subjects have equitable or just access to the autonomy and agency afforded to possessive individuality baked into contemporary understandings of consent. Moreover, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests, consent is itself a constructed and situated technology that only exists in tension with technologies of control. Extending this critical scholarship, this paper explores how feminist and queer games—such as Robert Yang’s "Hurt Me Plenty," Jimmy Andrews and Lauren Schmidt’s "Realistic Kissing Simulator," and Naomi Clark’s "Consentacle"—propose alternative understandings of consent as on-going cooperative negotiations of embodied intimacy in contrast to a contract between suspicious possessive individuals. Rather than treat consent as something deterministic that can be recorded or evaluated solely through technological design, then, this paper argues that designers crafting technologies should strive toward mediating and maintaining consent as on-going collaborative care work.

Author

• Josef Nguyen, The University of Texas at Dallas