Before Consent, After Harm

In many marginalized communities, the idea of a discrete individual sits uncomfortably alongside the ways we are connected to and care for one another. We are our ancestors, we are the people we fuck, we are someone else’s dreams. And yet consent is generally understood as individual, interpersonal (between two or, less often, more individuals), transactional, and private. This framework lends itself to the neoliberal insistence on personal choice as our primary metric of freedom. Understanding consent only as an exchange between individuals also translates social life into a legal frame that reduces our relationships to what is legible to our settler- colonial courts. The language of individual choice and personal preference shows up perhaps most obviously in our erotic lives within the context of online sexual racism on apps like Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, and Tinder, with explicitly structural biases found in comments like “no blacks, no fats, no femmes.” In less obvious ways, this neoliberal notion of consent has wiggled into our current mainstream conversations, which focus not on how systems of power produce harm but on a transactional, additive understanding of individual relationships of consent and harm. Why do we often treat consent and harm in singular ways?