He said, she said

Abstract

In recent years, popular feminist discourse has increasingly associated feminism with a cultural concept of consent. My reflection in this special section of Cultural Commons: ‘#(No)SeAcabó / It is (not) over’ discusses the Rubiales/Hermoso kiss through the lens of consent by enquiring into how the words ‘he said, she said’ attend to particular kinds of gender injustice. I suggest that ‘he said, she said’ acts as a form of representation that has the effect of reifying the cultural experience of nonconsent as an experience of relations of power. By critically assessing ‘he said, she said’ as a narrative device, we can further understand the role of representation in obscuring our encounter with and critical enquiry into the event, which I suggest we foreground in our discussions of what ‘she said’.