Twice Told Tales: Transformation, Recuperation and Emergence in the Age of Consent Debates 1998

Abstract

In this article we explore the narratives and discursive frameworks which were deployed in the second Age of Consent debate in the British House of Commons in order to identify shifts, continuities and emergent elements in sexual politics in the late 1990s. In the first section we will be looking at questions of theory and method. Here we will draw, particularly, on ideas of narrative and discourse, exploring their relation to each other and how stories provide the warp and weave of discourse. The next section is concerned with the House of Commons as a discursive space. The third section identifies the sexual stories told in the course of the debate. The final two sections of the paper focus on the discursive specificity of Blairism and its characteristic grand narratives of civilization and progress and discourses of rationality.