CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Rizvi, Rameeza |
|---|---|
| Title | Beyond Yes & No: Navigating Sexual Consent and the Politics of Intimacy in Lahore |
| Summary | This thesis examines how sexual consent is understood and negotiated within heterosexual intimate relationships in Lahore, Pakistan. Moving beyond legalistic and binary frameworks of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, it conceptualizes consent as a relational, emotionally embedded practice shaped by socio-cultural norms, legal silences, and everyday emotional labor. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study highlights the ‘grey zones’ of consent, where consent is often performed through compliance, hesitation, or silence. While global feminist discourses advocate for enthusiastic and affirmative consent, these ideals often clash with local realities marked by gendered expectations, religious obligations, and silence around sexuality. Grounded in feminist qualitative methodology and informed by critical theories of power, gender and subjectivity, the thesis explores how power, subjectivity, and social norms shape intimate negotiations of consent. By centering lived experiences and emotional contradictions, this study contributes to a more nuanced, contextually grounded understanding of sexual consent in Pakistan – one that resists simplification and foregrounds both the emotional realities and systemic constraints of intimate negotiations. Keywords: Sexual Consent, Gendered Intimacy, Cultural Norms, Subjectivity, Power Dynamics, Consent Negotiations, Agency, Marital Rape, Lahore |
| Supervisor | Qubaiova, Adriana |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/rizvi_rameeza.pdf |
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