While "no means no" considers sex as consensual until someone says no, "yes means yes" defines sex only then as consensual when all parties have explicitly agreed. Consent is thus positively determined by the presence of a yes and no longer negatively determined by the absence of a no. "Yes means yes" thus not only sets the limit as to when sex becomes sexual violence, it also tells us how morally "correct" sex should look like. In the first part I will give an insight into debates about affirmative consent in the US and Germany. In the following, I will work out how affirmative consent misjudges the subjectifying functioning of sexual power relations. I will show that the understanding of affirmative consent is based on a gendered giver-receiver grammar of consent, which stabilizes heteronormative notions of female sexuality as passive and male sexuality as active. Based on the results of conversational analytical studies on sexual communication, I will argue that the politics of affirmative consent underestimates the internalization of heteronormative discourses in sexual subjects.

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde's thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls ‘the erotic’ within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde's account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde's account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes.

Claims of sexual violence against female conscripts by military commanders abound in the Eritrean National Service (ENS), but hitherto there has been no attempt to subject these claims to rigorous empirical scrutiny. This article is a partial attempt to fill the gap. Based on data collected through snowball sampling from 190 former conscripts in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa, Kenya, and Sweden who fled from the ENS, supplemented by data from systematically selected key informants who were interviewed in depth, it examines the extent to which female conscripts serving in the ENS were subjected to sexual violence and harassment by their commanders, including at the Sawa military training camp. The extensive data, based on the perceptions and experiences of respondents who served on average about six years, suggest that sexual abuse is rampant throughout the ENS, particularly among female conscripts who are assigned to work at the camp subsequent to the six months of military training.