MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

My paper engages with the idea that consent is taught to us at a young age- from birth, really- and that the messages we receive about bodily autonomy and access to our own bodies affect how we view consent, related and unrelated to sex, later in and throughout our lives. By the point that most consent education is taught (late high-school into college), we have already internalized dominant, frequently harmful messages about bodies, autonomy, and consent. This is due to the social mores around sex being unsuitable for children. However, this restriction of knowledge causes more problems than it attempts to fix. My research engages with a selection of best-selling children’s books and analyzes what kinds of messages they are sending about a child’s body and about consent and how the messages they are sending either uphold or undermine the concept of bodily autonomy. This paper shows that childhood is a key time for interrupting the harmful ideas we are taught about our and others’ bodies and consent before we absorb them and reproduce the same behaviors and systems of oppression that currently exist. Additionally, using feminist, queer, and critical race studies scholarship, I will analyze how these books uphold or work to break down systems of oppression and how this affects a child’s relationship to their own body and to themselves. Specifically, this research will look at the ideas of self-ownership and possessive individualism, how these concepts affect liberal notions of the family and the state, how the primary sources engage with this subject matter, how these ideas intersect with oppressive systems such as antiblackness, transphobia, and gender essentialism, and how this affects how people navigate society in relation to consent and their bodies.