Scrutiny and Use: Contending with Consent in University Performance

Abstract: This essay argues that universities that stage performance and train students in its practice bear a responsibility to contend with and scrutinize consent rather than merely aim to institute professionalized norms for consent-based practice. Committing to critical examination of consent and its tenets, even when or as consent-based performance work is practiced, could better illuminate the limits of consent frameworks, making consent's troubling histories, its infelicitous promises, its hopeful and its vexing implications available for exploration, confrontation, imagination, and invention.