"What is it, though, about a general anesthetic that immediately prompts concerns of violations of bodily integrity-concerns that strip searches, vaginal examinations, and, as we shall see, post-rape medical examinations apparently do not? One answer has to do with the role played by consent in such situations. The passive, inert body of Cardozo's judgment may be more politically active than its physically active counterparts, but only if this political activity is mobilized in support of the liberty of the sovereign citizen him or herself. Liberal individuals consent to medical anesthesia for their own, “individual” greater good. If the passive, inert body is nothing more than a political “setting”, however, a field from which to gather evidence for a common good, then there is no liberal political activity to speak of. The rhetoric of consenting citizenship breaks down. More important than the role of consent in these approaches to general anesthetic, though, is arguably the sexual connotations that have grown up over the past few centuries around medicinal unconsciousness. As Dudley Buxton, writing in 1888 on “the Criminal Use of Chloroform,” noted, many cases have not been reported in which the prosecutrix has affirmed that a dentist or surgeon has violated her person while she was under the influence of anesthetic .. [B]ut it is not only designing, bad women who bring such charges. Modest, virtuous, and refined gentlewomen have been prosecutrices in these cases. The cause for this remarkable and deplorable state of things is fortunately not far to seek. Chloroform, ether, nitrous oxide, gas, cocaine, and possibly other carbon compounds, employed in producing anaesthesia possess the property of exciting sexual emotions and in many cases produce erotic hallucinations. It is undoubted that in certain persons sexual orgasm may occur during the induction of anaesthetic. It is not just the mockery of consent that is at stake in such situations, in other words-it is also involuntary (female) sexual pleasure. It is true that J.P. Payne, commenting on Buxton's assertions 100 years later, argues that such analyses of the effect of chloroform were patently incorrect. But the fact remains that alongside the fear that the physically passive body might slip into sexual activity. General anesthetic thus plays up-as a trope if not as a reality-the fundamentally sexual nature of assaults on bodily integrity. As such, again, it presents the horrifying possibility that sexual behavior or sexual identity might slip outside the bounds of the political, and in the process render legal violations of bodily integrity suddenly illegal. Strip searches, the collection of urine samples, and vaginal examinations are self-consciously modern and humane political and legal processes. All three may “seem” no different from early modern torture-each involving an obvious violation of bodily boundaries performed for the sake of (non-verbal) truth, testimony, and evidence. But they are not “actually” torture in that they do not involve-or are not meant to involve-the undermining of subjectivity, the disordering of the self, or the political and intellectual incoherence that arises from torture (or labor pains) in non-modern contexts. The unconscious orgasm of the anesthetized body, however-whether it happens in reality, or merely hovers as an unrealized possibility (or fantasy) around the passive body-shifts modern, humane violations of bodily integrity into the realm of torture and lawless violence. The basic point of the right to bodily integrity as it was articulated by Cardozo and countless others was that even and especially in an unconscious state, the liberal citizen was a coherent, politically active, self. That a sexual orgasm-"the" manifestation of the shattered, incoherent, loss of subjectivity-might occur in the midst of this unconsciousness completely undermines the very foundation of embodied political rights. In the context of rape legislation, therefore, it becomes particularly frightening, given the very slight difference between the crime of rape-an illegal violation of bodily integrity-and the gathering of forensic evidence following rape-a legal violation of the same bodily integrity."