Suchergebnisse

"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.

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.