Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice

Joseph J. Fischel argues that the consent paradigm, while necessary for effective sexual assault law, diminishes and perverts our ideas about desire, pleasure, and injury. 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. Fischel proposes instead that sexual justice turns more productively on concepts of sexual autonomy and access.

Bio:
Joseph Fischel is an associate professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. A theorist of sexual justice, his research interests are in normative political theory, feminist and queer studies, and the regulation of sex. His first book, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, came out in 2016 with the University of Minnesota Press and his second book, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice, has just come out with the University of California Press. His current project is on the life and afterlife of sodomy law in New Orleans and beyond.