"Each of these theorists, in other words, links the failure of neutral or equal citizenship to the creation of the private sphere, to the placement of women into this sphere, and to the indeed dangerous way in which women's bodies personify it. Consent-a public, political act-becomes meaningless in such a frameowrk. Indeed, as MacKinnon argues with reference to rape law, consent is simply assumed in the private, that “arena of choice;” it is a metaphysical quality rather than a political act. Women carry the private around with them. And it is a result of their empathatically private nature that consent theory cannot serve them as citizens in the end. My purpose over the next few pages will be to challenge this analysis. More specifically, I will try to demonstrate that to the extent that sexual legislation-and more basically, sexual identity-became central to political identity over the first few decades of the twentieth century, women, sexualized, increasingly became actors within the rhetorical public, rather than within the rhetorical private. Indeed, rape and adultery law trendered women essential, prototypical, biopolitical subjects, their bodies representative of a new, relentless concept of the political. Moreover, I will argue that it was the thetoric of consent in particular that transformed women citizens in this way. Far from meaningless or irrelevant, consent instead served as a foundation for an interwar reinterpretation of both sexual and political identity. The paradox of both the biologically passive, politically active consenting individual"