Troubling Issues of Consent in Dawn

Given that questions of consent are central to Butler’s Dawn, the first novel of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Burnett is surprised that most of the scholarship on the novel or on the trilogy does not directly broach the question of consent. Burnett seeks to address that critical absence by reading Dawn as a text that offers us critical and troubling questions about the nature of consent that were addressed by Antioch College’s Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, known colloquially as the “Antioch rules.” Burnett wants us to examine the complex relationship between consent and desire that Butler weaves in Dawn because the novel can be read as a parable for the need for affirmative consent in sexual encounters, a need championed by the Antioch rules.