The Joy of Consent

Thought-provoking…Garcia argues that we need an emancipatory sexual politics based on a deeper understanding of how social norms generate sexual injustices. Ultimately, she advocates a contextually sensitive approach to consent, a notion that responds to the specifics of sexual situations and is relational in nature. – Anna Katharina Schaffner * Los Angeles Review of Books *Timely and captivating…advances a powerful critique against the contemporary discourse on consent…offers sharp observations throughout. – Geertje Bol * Times Literary Supplement *From the bedroom to the classroom to the courtroom, ‘consent’ is a key term in our contemporary sexual ethics. In this timely reexamination, Manon Garcia deftly reveals the hidden complexities of consent and proposes how to reconceptualize it as a tool of liberation. – Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to SexA brilliant interrogation of the complexities of consent. Manon Garcia shows us that consent can be liberating—for reasons we might not have expected—in enabling good, joyful sex. A must-read. – Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts WomenNot since Catharine MacKinnon has a thinker so lucidly and compellingly challenged the way we think about women’s sexual oppression. Manon Garcia spells out for us what we already should have known: that our current understanding of consent is not doing the work that we need it to do and that we have the power to ameliorate it. This book is no less than a blueprint for a new feminist revolution. – Nancy Bauer, author of How to Do Things with Pornography

Manon Garcia is the author of We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. A Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a junior professor at Freie Universität Berlin, she has taught at the University of Chicago and Yale University. She received the Prix des Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco for the best book of philosophy published in France in 2022.