Form‐Made Persons: Consent Forms as Consent's Blind Spot

Abstract

In this paper, I take seriously informed consent's material form: the paper form. I pursue two objectives: I first tackle different meanings that have been attributed to the fabrication of document forms themselves, and demonstrate how this fabrication process forces us to rethink the category of consent and, further, that of personhood. Second, I examine the consenting person as a new ethnographic subject and show how her submission to consent forms, in the context of hospital bureaucracies, enacts new forms of agency. Given the fact that patients and research subjects generally do not read consent documents, I conclude by offering the illegible consent form, rather than the meticulously designed consent form, as the exemplary artifact of hospital bureaucracies.