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This essay argues that the "consenting adult," while politically seductive and exonerative, is ultimately a perverted figure for progressive sexual politics. Valorized, the "consenting adult" generates a moralized portraiture of good and bad sexual personae rather than propelling political engagement. The author proposes supplanting (temporarily, partially) the consenting adult with comparatively unsexy, less parsimonious elucidations of fairness and debility as provisional first principles of progressive sexual politics. Taking fairness and debility seriously would rightly extend our political sympathies and energies without triggering the quarantining moralism—the liberal logic—of the figure of the consenting adult. The first part of this essay, "Offending Sex in Orleans Parish," describes a legal peculiarity and its ensuing politicization that is the motivating case study of the project. The second part, "The Political Perversity of the Consenting Adult," more carefully contemplates how and to what effect the sexual politics and rhetorics of sexuality observed in New Orleans are contoured by an apotheosis of the consenting adult. The final section, "Fairness, Debility, and Sexual Justice Politics," considers how sex workers (or persons convicted of soliciting sex), sex offenders, and other queers might find points of political solidarity irreducible to sexual identities subsumed under the consenting adult. Fairness and debility, the author submits, could hold out more promising political visions and arrangements.

"When we think of sex--good sex, bad sex, sexual assault, rape law, or university sexual misconduct policies--we so often turn to consent as both our moral and erotic savior. What counts as sexual consent? How can we make consent sexy? How do we teach consent to impressionable youth, potential predators, and victims alike? What if these are all the wrong questions? Screw Consent is a provocative take on consent and whether its place at the center of sexual politics and sex law is warranted. The book takes aim at sex imagined at the center of our moral universe: adult, coupled, consensual. By spotlighting sex on the periphery--bestial, necrophilic, kinky, cannibalistic--Screw Consent shows that sex on the margins confounds the ethical force of consent much further than we anticipate. Author Joseph J. Fischel fervently argues that the consent paradigm of sexual politics is profoundly flawed. In addition to the criticisms against consent leveled by feminist theorists of earlier generations, Fischel elevates three more: consent is insufficient, inapposite, and riddled with scope contradictions for regulating and imagining sex. We can do so much better than consent in our sexual politics. Fischel contends that sexual justice turns more productively on concepts of autonomy and access rather than consent. Cleverly humorous and adeptly researched, Screw Consent will have a significant impact on how we understand consent, sexuality, and law in the U.S. today"--Provided by publisher

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution forbids legal discrimination against same-sex marriage. The decision sent shock waves throughout the country, with both supporters and opponents regarding it as signal of dramatic shifts in public opinion and a revolutionary development on the road to sex-gender equality. Just two days earlier, on June 24, 2015, Stephen Macedo's Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage was published. Macedo has always worked at the intersection of legal theory, normative theory, and public policy, and Just Married offers a nuanced liberal democratic defense of marriage equality with striking resonance in light of Obergefell. We have thus invited a range of scholars on LGBT rights, and LGBT politics more generally, to comment on his book.

Legal and queer theoretic critics charge that the myth of "childhood innocence" perverts and propagates the unwarranted expansion of child pornography law, and mischaracterizes sources of and solutions to sexual violence. This article spells out these criticisms and synthesizes them with recent scholarship on the racialization of innocence. In thinking these literatures together, we are able to survey the complexities of "innocence" as a political idiom for the promotion of social and sexual welfare. I conclude with the reminder that no idiom – whether "innocence," "harm," or "agency" – is purified of normative judgment.

Provides a variety of queer, interdisciplinary interventions upon the social and legal regulation of sex,gender, reproduction, and family.In Enticements, an exceptional group of interdisciplinary scholars comes together to contribute to the field of Queer Legal Studies. The essays investigate a wildly proliferating assortment of genders, sexualities, and intimacies, questioning how they have been regulated, criminalized, or privileged by law and other regulatory forces.Enticements expands and expounds on the discipline of queer legal studies. Contributors focus on a wide range of sex/gender regulatory regimes, interrogating the use and abuse of queer history for impact litigation and social change, colonial and postcolonial sex laws otherwise obscured by the modern LGBT paradigm of sexual identity, and the policing of trans and cis men. Moving beyond a focus on LGBT identities, contributors consider limits to reproductive freedom, the Christianization of social justice movements, and the politicization of care within and across Black and feminist studies. Accessible and forward-looking, Enticements consolidates and emboldens queer legal studies as a critical, necessary field for the historical present.With noted contributions from Libby Adler, Chris Ashford, Matthew Ball, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Brenda Cossman, Joseph J. Fischel, Janet Halley, Zachary Herz, Ratna Kapur, Ido Katri, Evelyn Kessler, Ummni Khan, Kyle Kirkup, Jennifer C. Nash, Senthorun Raj, and Matthew Waites

Does a right to sexual autonomy criminalize the embellished pick-up line? Or does a right to sexual autonomy permit each and every consensual sex act, however life- threatening, or even life-ending? This Article defends (by reconstructing) sexual autonomy as the governing principle of modern rape law. Powerful criticisms of sexual autonomy otherwise normatively opposed share an antecedent assumption: that sexual autonomy can be read off and as first person present active (or passive) consent (Part I). This Article argues against the conflation of sexual autonomy with sexual consent. Instead, and in conversation with competing liberal and feminist political theoretic accounts of sexual autonomy, this Article defines sexual autonomy as the capability to codetermine sexual relations (Part II). By interfacing a revised concept of sexual autonomy against and alongside State v. Fourtin, a 2012 Connecticut Supreme Court decision overturning a conviction of sexual assault against a severely mentally and physically disabled woman (Part III), the Article proposes three possibilities for statutory reform: refurbishing consent; expanding restrictions on status relations; and applying an accommodation model of disability entitlements to sexual relations (Part IV). After synopsizing our interventions, the Conclusion reminds readers that our brief for sexual autonomy, relationally reconstructed, presumes and propounds the ordinariness, not the extraordinariness, of sex.