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.
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.
"Is consent the feminist holy grail to emancipated sex? This provocative new book argues "no" by focusing on what the politics of consent cannot teach us about the harm of harmful sex. With critical nuance and political nerve, Fischel demonstrates that the future of feminist sexual cultures lies in differentiating the legal utility of consent from feminist understandings of power, desire, and pleasure."—Robyn Wiegman, Duke University
"Fischel wants everybody to have access to the joys of sex, including disabled people rarely acknowledged as the sexual beings we are. Undoing the hyperbolic expectation that consent will tell us everything we need to know about sex, Fischel agitates for 'more feminist and democratically hedonic' sexual cultures and more good sex. Sign me up!"—Christina Crosby, Wesleyan University
280 pp.6 x 9Illus: 17 b/w images and tables
9780520295414$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jan 2019