Sodomys Penumbra

Joseph Fischel is an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He received his PhD from the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago in 2011, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center at Brown University in 2011-2012. In 2012, he received the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. His research interests are in normative political theory, feminist and queer studies, public law, and the legal regulation of sex/gender/sexuality. His first book, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (U. of Minn. Press, 2016), interrogates how the figures of the child and the sex offender, and figurations of consent, organize contemporary understandings of sexual harm and freedom in the United States. He is currently working on a second book project, Against Nature, Against Consent: A Solicitation to Sodomitical Justice, which examines the life and afterlife of sodomy law in Louisiana from multiple perspectives: ethnographic, queer theoretic, race critical, and historical.