Description

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When we talk about sex—whether great, good, bad, or unlawful—we often turn to consent as both our erotic and moral savior. We ask questions like, What counts as sexual consent? How do we teach consent to impressionable youth, potential predators, and victims? How can we make consent sexy?
 
What if these are all the wrong questions? What if our preoccupation with consent is hindering a safer and better sexual culture? By foregrounding sex on the social margins (bestial, necrophilic, cannibalistic, and other atypical practices), Screw Consent shows how a sexual politics focused on consent can often obscure, rather than clarify, what is wrong about wrongful sex.
 
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. Clever, witty, and adeptly researched, Screw Consent promises to change how we understand consent, sexuality, and law in the United States today.
 

About the Author

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Joseph J. Fischel is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent. 

Praise For…

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“Powerful and provoking. . . . Screw Consent is a must-read for those vested in better understanding of sexuality, sexual violence, and sexual justice.”
— CHOICE

"Drawing from case law and written in an engaging manner, Screw Consent explores the meanings of giving consent to sexual relations in unusual arenas where the definition and even the possibility that a traditionally defined affirmative, active, vocalized consent, legal or not, may be at best limited."

— GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies