Introduction: 2011 Symonds Prize Essay

Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality award the 2011 Symonds Prize to Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, J.D., Ph.D., for “Beyond ‘Consent’: David Mamet's Oleanna and a Hostile Environment for Souls.” Dr. Skerrett is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, Virginia. She is the author of “Sovereignty and Sadness: Tragic Vision and Wisdom's Grief”1 and “Sex, Law, and Other Reasonable Endeavors”2.

Of the many suitable essays entered in this fifth annual competition, Skerrett's is exceptional. With boldness and incisiveness, Skerrett offers for our consideration a profound glimpse into “the life of human souls, conceived as erotic beings, yet bereft of adequate images or practices of desire” (p. 236). Via David Mamet's controversial drama about sex and power, Oleanna, she takes up two complex concepts crucial to life (and to the psychoanalytic encounter): consent and self-respect. As “a concept that migrates from contract theory into the sexual domain,” she argues, “consent” may imprison as much as it liberates (p. 252). Instead, she proposes a particular but nonintuitive and contingent understanding of “self-respect.” Working with a notion of human life as incoherent and incomplete, she says, “freedom is never merely an instrument of choice; freedom must be practiced in light of shared images of reciprocity and self-respect and grace” (p. 244). Against critical approaches to sexuality, for example, the Antioch rules, she asks us to “consider whether the ethics required among sexually vibrant souls should refer not to boundaries, power, or consent but to proximities, reciprocity, and tact” (p. 244).

This essay seemed to me to beg for a discussion, and so Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., gracefully agreed to provide one, to which Skerrett has replied. Finding the concept of self-respect “vexing and problematic” (p. 246), Saketopoulou unpacks it. She then sk