"I would like to consider some further aspects of the role of consent in the early twentieth century legislation. First of all, when we conceive of consent theory as a theory absent of any choice-operating as a means of delimiting borders rather than of defining behavior-the problems and contradictions that occur when it runs up against “reality”begin to make more sense. When Pateman, for instance, notes that, “consent as an ideology cannot be distinguished from habitual acquiscence, assent, silent dissent, submission, or even enforced submission. Unless refusal of consent or withdrawal of consent are real possibilities, we can no longer speak of “consent” in any genuine sense,”104 she is clearly understanding consent as something linked to juridical freedom or, more basically, to choice. Likewise, when Agamben, in his discussion of medical experimentation on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps or in United States prisons that that, The final criterion, which elicited general agreement, was the necessity of an explicit and voluntary consent on the part of the subject who was to be submitted to the experiment .. [T]he obvious hypocrisy of such documents cannot fail to leave one perplexed. To speak of free will and consent in the case of a person sentenced to death or of a detained person who must pay serious penalties is, at the very least, questionable, he is operating within the same framework. If, however, we understand consent as no more and no less than means of defining sovereign space-of collapsing political and biological borders and boundaries-the seemingly perverse or at least disingenuous insistence on consent in such situations becomes more reasonable. The question is not whether the individual “really” consented to what is, for all intents and purposes, sexual, social, reproductive, political, biological, or medical enslavement. It is instead the extent to which the consensual relationship has successfully defined both political and biological space. Indeed, we can see in these early approaches to reproduction, experimentation, and execution important precursors to the humane reliance on lethal injection-rather than, say, beheading, hanging, or electrocution-as a means of eliminating criminals in the modern United States. Above all a spectacle of consent, the lethal injection-absent any wound or executioner-plays out first and foremost as a doctor/patient relationship, the physician eliminating the biologically passive, juridically consenting citizen in the end for his own good."