Please join the Political Theory Colloquium as they host Alisa Kessel, Professor of Politics and Government at University of Puget Sound.
In 2025, Grok, an AI chatbot, began to allow people to generate falsely-sexualized photos of real women and children and publish them on X without consent. In 2026, CNN reported that an online “sleep content” site—where users share videos of Dominique Pelicot-style rape sedation videos—had 62 million visits in February alone. These examples suggest a change in the terrain of sexual consent and in how consent is violated. It may seem that sexual consent is peripheral to pressing concerns about democracy and the rule of law, but I argue that it is central, and that shifts in the navigation of sexual consent can reveal a great deal about how consent is violated in U.S. democracy today. My starting point for this conversation is that rape is a political act and that rape culture identifies who is entitled to dominate via rape and who is dominable. Borrowing from Richard Hofstadter, I suggest that shifts in sexual consent may reveal a different style of domination in politics: an unapologetically nonconsensual politics that allows transgressors to fashion themselves as victims and dominators at the same time.
Alisa Kessel’s research focuses on issues related to gender and race in the U.S. In 2025, she published Rape Fantasies: Rape Culture and the Persistence of Sexual Violence with Oxford University Press. She is currently working on projects on misogyny, fascism, and reproductive justice, which she explores using an intersectional approach.
Ariel Sowers
(847) 491-7454
Email