Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sociol.
Sec. Gender, Sex and Sexualities
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1468173
This article is part of the Research Topic Reframing Gender Dialogues: Exploring Feminism in the Dialogic Society View all 3 articles

From Speech Acts to Communicative Acts. Social Network Debates about Sexual Consent

Provisionally accepted
Elisabeth Torras-Gómez Elisabeth Torras-Gómez 1,2Arja Krauchenberg Arja Krauchenberg 3Victor Petuya Victor Petuya 3,4Rebeca Marcos Rebeca Marcos 5Olga SERRADELL PUMAREDA Olga SERRADELL PUMAREDA 2Marta Soler-Gallart Marta Soler-Gallart 5*
  • 1 Vicerectorat de Recerca, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
  • 2 Department of Sociology, Faculty of Political Science and Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
  • 3 European Parents' Association, Brussels, Belgium
  • 4 Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain
  • 5 Departament of Sociology, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Understanding consent is essential to combat sexual violence, a deeply rooted social problem. Amidst its complexities, the scientific literature has emphasized the shortcomings of only considering the speech actwhether the victim-survivor said "yes" or not. Instead, sociological research underscores the need to analyze the whole communicative act where different elements lead to either a power relationship where there is no consent or a dialogic relationship where freedom is granted. Although some research has been conducted on citizens' social media debates on consent, how such debates include the concept of communicative acts to discuss it has not been analyzed yet. To this end, 55 gender-related Instagram and Twitter (now known as X) posts -published and extracted over the course of 14 days -were analyzed. Results reveal that most posts refer to Power Communicative Acts as a hindrance for consent due to hierarchical power imbalances or to coercion, and called for the need to establish elements of Dialogic Communicative Acts to achieve consent and construct more egalitarian environments. Finally, most posts that considered ethics spoke about the need for perpetrators to be held accountable or offered similar takes on consequentialism. These findings help illustrate how several social media debates about consent successfully fall into the Communicative Acts framework.

    Keywords: Dialogic communicative acts, Power communicative acts, Consent, Social media analytics, gender violence, Sociology

    Received: 21 Jul 2024; Accepted: 04 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Torras-Gómez, Krauchenberg, Petuya, Marcos, SERRADELL PUMAREDA and Soler-Gallart. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Marta Soler-Gallart, Departament of Sociology, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, 08034, Catalonia, Spain

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.