Sexual consent and sexual violence

Sexual consent and sexual violence form a recurring concern in Queenie Jenkins’s experiences: the novel distinguishes between a person’s expressed limits and another person’s demands, while showing how racialized objectification and fear of being alone can complicate the ability to resist. Its account follows not only encounters themselves but also Queenie’s later difficulty naming what happened and a nurse’s recognition that her injuries may indicate sexual violence.

Boundaries and Pressure

During an encounter with Adi in a parked car, Queenie initially responds to his demand by offering to go home instead. He dismisses that suggestion, and she proceeds despite her hesitation. The distinction between her actions and her wishes matters: the scene presents compliance under pressure, not uncomplicated agreement. Adi frames his sexual interest through a preference for Black women’s bodies, reducing Queenie to a racialized feature rather than attending to her as a person.

The pressure continues when Adi requests a sexual act that Queenie does not want. She refuses and then tries to make clear that his repeated requests are making her uncomfortable. He responds with a racial insult and redirects the encounter. Queenie’s attempt to state a limit is therefore met not with respect for that limit but with further pressure. The episode establishes a pattern in which her discomfort is visible, yet the other person’s desire governs what happens next.

A Second Encounter and Compromised Agency

With another man, a Welshman she meets while out, Queenie tells herself that the encounter can be a fling without personal attachments, partly because going home alone to an empty bed and sleeping in Tom’s T-shirt feels unbearable. That expectation of a bounded, temporary connection is unsettled when he bites her cheek and forces a kiss in the car. She punches his leg to make him stop and tells him she cannot breathe, asking him to ease off. Her attempt to set a limit is clear, even as she remains caught between wanting the encounter to continue and wanting its intensity to change.

At home, the man’s forcefulness goes beyond what Queenie can tolerate. She stays silent at first, then cries out in pain, but does not ask him to stop; she later explains this to herself through the belief that pushing love away leaves her with this instead. When he asks whether she likes what is happening, she says that she does, while privately wondering whether she might. The contrast between her spoken reassurance and her pain, uncertainty, and earlier request to ease off makes the encounter’s apparent agreement difficult to separate from pressure and emotional self-punishment. Her response is not presented as a simple, settled expression of desire: she is trying to interpret what she can bear while the other person continues to direct the encounter.

Medical Recognition and Denial

The consequences become legible during Queenie’s later sexual-health examination, when a nurse identifies injuries that she has not yet fully named or interpreted. A female nurse is present as a chaperone; after examining Queenie, the clinician explains that the bruising is severe and that continuing the examination with a speculum would be too painful. Asked how the injuries occurred, Queenie offers rough sex as an explanation. The clinical encounter shifts the question from what she can endure to what may have been done to her.

The nurse tells Queenie that the injuries are largely consistent with sexual violence and places victim-support information within reach. His concern does not compel her to accept that description. Queenie insists that she is not concealing an abusive boyfriend and deflects the possibility with an uncomfortable joke about being unable to get anyone to take her on a date. The denial leaves a sharp gap between the clinician’s reading of the evidence and Queenie’s account of herself: she can acknowledge physical harm while resisting the language and implications of victimization.

This scene makes recognition itself part of the subject. The examination supplies an outside witness and a route toward support, but Queenie does not yet take up either as a clear explanation of her experience. Her response echoes the earlier difficulty of distinguishing what she agrees to from what she tolerates under pressure; here, that uncertainty meets a medical professional prepared to name a possibility she cannot readily accept. The book thus presents disclosure not as an immediate revelation that resolves the encounter, but as a contested step shaped by discomfort, self-protection, and the limits of what Queenie is ready to say.

Race, Boundaries, and Uneven Agency

A later encounter with Guy presents a markedly clearer assertion of sexual boundaries. When he comes into her bed and presses himself against her, Queenie moves away and tells him she does not want sex. She asks him to sleep instead and sets out a consequence if he keeps pushing: she will order him an Uber home and find his postcode on his phone. Guy calls her a spoilsport, then turns away and falls asleep almost immediately. The episode does not erase the earlier ambiguity and pressure; it shows Queenie naming her refusal directly and making a practical plan to enforce it.

In therapy, Queenie connects sexual attention to the racialized terms on which she is seen and approached. She describes how men may offer her friends dinner while directing sexual propositions and unwanted touching toward her, and how being treated as desirable in this way does not make her feel loved. She links that disparity to a fear that she will be rejected for being who she is, and to difficulty imagining a loving relationship untouched by that fear. The distinction at stake is not simply between receiving and refusing attention: the novel places consent alongside recognition, showing how racialized sexualization can make attention feel less like mutual intimacy than a reduction of Queenie to her body.