Theorizing Alienated Sexual Consent

In recent years, feminist theorists have given renewed attention to grey sex—sex that is legally permissible, but has a coercive, violating, or unsettling character. In distinguishing grey sex from rape and sexual assault, some theorists have focused on the role of agency: whereas rape involves a total overriding or denial of agency, grey sex involves a distortion in agency, in which consent occurs alongside ambivalence and reluctance. Many theorists have depicted the experience of acquiescence in the language typically associated with alienation— whether in terms of a “loss of self,” or an agency that was not “entirely our own,” or “a failure of cognition or will” (Kogl 2025). However, they have not explicitly theorized this phenomenon in terms of alienation. In this talk, I draw on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2010) influential account of alienation to develop a theoretical account of what I call alienated sexual consent. I argue that while Jaeggi’s account illuminates grey sex as an instance of alienated consent, she insufficiently articulates the critical resources to diagnose why it arises or how to resolve it. This is because grey sex is more intersubjective than Jaeggi’s examples of alienated desire suggests, because Jaeggi’s arguments around social roles do not translate well when applied to the roles of survivor or victim, and because Jaeggi places more emphasis on an agent’s self-understanding rather than the norms, institutions, and practices that give rise to it. The talk develops a more critical understanding of alienated consent that arises in the context of grey sex, one that can better articulate what it is, why it arises, how it can compromise sexual agency going forward, and what possible paths ahead might be.