Silence is not consent.

For our CSL project this week Brett and I interrupted public space by projecting the message that “silence is not consent” out of a window in CAB that faced quad. Although it was only a trial run, working on projecting this one message for over an hour made me ponder the role of silence in relation to this week’s readings on heterosexuality and unwanted sex. It also made me reflect on standards of consent. In particular, in “Unsexy Sex: Unwanted Sex, Sexual Coercion, and Rape”, Nicola Gavey importantly brings up the influence that gendered norms of monogamous heterosexual couples have on fostering unwanted sex and rape. As we have learned this week, Gavey’s article shows how insidious forms of sexual coercion exist within the structural foundations of the heterosexual couple. Within this institution, accordingly, unwanted sex and rape are fostered through invisible networks of power. 

        It is here, by focusing on the invisible networks of power that exist within the normalizing practices of the heterosexual couple, that I came to reflect on the role of silence in these social scripts.  Silence, then, is a subtle form of these invisible networks of power and functions through the omission of communication. Silence is also intwined with the institution of the heterosexual couple and functions as a normalized practice, where by not ‘saying’ or ‘doing’ anything those who partake in these practices are insidiously reinforcing the patriarchal structures of oppression: where women are passive and men are active. These networks appear explicitly in Gavey’s article when she recalls Chloe and Pat’s stories of obligatory sex, stating that “Both Chloe and Pat describe patterns of sex in these relationships in which their bodies / their selves became objectified as they acted - under a sense of obligation - to be the body / the woman that they understood their partner wanted and expected. Within these rational dynamics, and the sexual moments more particularly, are clear indicators of the lack of necessity of women’s desire and pleasure, because its absence was able to go unquestioned and unnoticed” (my italics, 141).

       In regard to my CSL placement, as Brett and I were working on formatting the message that “silence is not consent,” I began to question how consent factors into these rather gendered (and essentialist) social scripts. If the dominant narrative of heterosexuality compels us not to question instances of silence, then we are inherently conditioned to think that silence in relationships is consent. As obvious and problematic as that is, it made me reflect on how the very act of projecting the message that silence is not consent in a public space interrupts the social script that silence is consent. This interruption clearly projects a message that gets us to question what have come to be habituated routines of everyday life and re-embody our social scripts in a way that resists the dominant narrative of the heterosexual couple.