Problematising consent: reading first-person testimonies of faculty-student relationships

Despite the proliferation of increasingly stringent policies regulating professor-student sexual relationships, sexualized abuses of power by university faculty remain pervasive. These policies harness a key insight from second-wave feminists: that power structures make it hard for a student to say no to her teacher. We take their insights further, and look into the structures that mediate how women students’ testimonies are dismissed and distorted through the discourse on consent. We employ thick descriptive, feminist phenomenological analyses of two first-person testimonials to show that consent has at least three deleterious effects: 1) the atomisation of students’ experiences, making the sexualised abuse of power appear less public and less severe (atomisation), 2) de-contextualisation of students’ accounts by denuding them of their pedagogical context, thus rendering the inherent power asymmetry invisible (de-contextualisation), and 3) locating the responsibility for any harm with the student-victim, thus making the institution invisible and unaccountable (displacement of responsibility).