TW: This essay contains mention of sexual assault trends among LGBTQIA+ individuals and mentions of past experiences of sexual assault.
New Series, Vol. 2, No. 5
Sexual minorities, or those who identify as or engage in sex practices outside of the assumed heterosexual majority, are disproportionately impacted by sexual violence. Moreover, sexual minorities are also disadvantaged in their ability to identify sexual assault, especially that which occurs in a non-hetero context, and thus are less likely to report it or seek support resources.
Both legal and academic definitions of consent communication, as well as sex education more broadly, assume heterosexuality and vary widely, making it especially challenging to define among sexual minority individuals. Less than half of states in the U.S. define consent in their statutes, with most focusing on the absence of consent, creating additional confusion. Other challenges around defining consent include whether to reference verbal or nonverbal communication, if consent can or should be characterized as an agreement, and capacity to give consent based on various factors such as age and cognitive ability. This qualitative study sought to understand meanings of consent communication for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals as well as communicative dilemmas that arise from these definitional challenges resulting in multiple meanings of consent communication.
This investigation was framed by Normative Rhetorical Theory (NRT), a theory of meaning-making processes and challenges, which ultimately seeks to understand why interactions are more or less effective and successful than others. NRT views meaning as highly contextual and specific to each speech community (i.e., a group that shares some understanding in conducting and interpreting a common language or dialect) but also assumes that communication has multiple meanings within a given speech community. In turn, communicative challenges arise due to incongruent meanings and effective communication is dependent on successful management of these multiple meanings.
The authors conducted 25 interviews, ranging between 35 and 150 minutes, with LGB individuals between the ages of 18 and 42. Participants were racialized as white (19), African American (4), and Asian American (2) and identified as lesbian (8), bisexual (7), gay (4), queer (3), and pansexual (3). The authors noted their sample’s whiteness and perceived—though not actual—exclusion of transgender individuals in their recruiting materials due to the use of LGB versus LGBT as limitations in this study. Interview transcripts were analyzed using the constant comparative method, in which data are coded in several steps: open coding to identify emergent themes, axial coding to begin grouping the data into categories, and selective coding in which all data are systematically coded and compared based on categories derived in axial coding.
To these participants consent communication meant showing enthusiasm, clearly expressing one’s interests, continual discussion, and coming to an agreement. Enthusiasm was defined as showing visible excitement, expressing happiness or satisfaction with a partner, and participants also emphasized comfort for all parties and the ability to retract consent. Participants mentioned both verbal and nonverbal cues for communicating interests but identified verbal cues as being most essential. Participants also described consent communication as an active dialogue and ongoing process between all parties that began prior to physical content and continued throughout the sexual encounter. Throughout this process, partners would check in with each other and provide each other with the ability and opportunities to speak up should any discomfort or disinterest arise. When consent communication was characterized as an agreement, it was an open-ended agreement that could be renegotiated or reneged and consenting parties had to be sober.
Conversational dilemmas that arose for participants in consent communication included heteronormativity, defining sex itself, unwillingness of partners to discuss consent, and past sexual assault. Participants pointed out that heteronormative social scripts for consent communication are often not applicable and left them unprepared for consent communication in sexual minority encounters. Reasons for this involved sexual and gender expression, how LGBTQIA+ individuals conceptualize and practice sex, and queer bodies and relationships which vastly differ from hetero norms.
Participants also noted that different partners had different ideas about what “counts” as sexual activity and thus warrants consent. In some cases, this made them afraid to speak up, worried about how a partner might react, and feeling uncomfortable asserting their own sexual needs and desires. Interviewees also recounted experiences of resistance from partners to discussing consent and unawareness of its importance, limiting participants’ sexual agency. Some participants also noted that their socialization related to other identities, such as race and gender, further compounded these issues. Moreover, prior victimization was unfortunately common among participants, reflecting disproportionate sexual assault trends among the larger LGTBQIA+ community, and they shared that this both affirmed the importance of consent communication for them but simultaneously complicated consent communication when they felt like their cues to withdraw consent were ignored or their boundaries were not respected by their partners.
Broadly, participants were able to confidently define consent communication, often in ways that reflected broader definitional debate, and were able to articulate different factors contributing to difficulty in the meaning-making process. This study affirmed the need to investigate consent communication in minority communities so that it is not muddied by inapplicable dominant group standards and scripts, increasing their risk of victimization through sexual assault.
Communication Currents Discussion Questions
- Normative Rhetorical Theory has been used to study meaning-making processes and challenges in a variety of contexts, including financial communication, patient-provider communication, family communication, health communication, and sexual communication. Can you think of other communication contexts where conversational dilemmas might arise due to multiple meanings? How might you manage these situations effectively?
- This study demonstrates that heteronormative social scripts for consent often do not apply to LGBTQIA+ individuals, leaving them unprepared. What are other dominant social scripts (beyond consent) that you or others may follow without realizing? How do these scripts shape communication and what are some ways we, as communicators, can challenge dominant social scripts that may be exclusionary or problematic?
- How was consent discussed (or not discussed) in your own sex education? Looking back, do you think the way it was taught was sufficient or problematic and why?
For additional suggestions about how to use this and other Communication Currents in the classroom, see: https://www.natcom.org/publications/communication-currents/integrating-communication-currents-classroom
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Allison Worsdale is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia.
Kami A. Kosenko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University.
This essay, by R. E. Purtell, translates the scholarly journal article, A. Worsdale and K. A. Kosenko. (2024). Meanings and dilemmas of consent communication for sexual minorities. Communication Monographs, 91(4), 503—523. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2024.2304239
The full copyright and private policy link is available at natcom.org/privacy-policy/
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