Author Meets Critics: Joseph Fischel's Screw Consent

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Joseph Fischel's 2019 book, Screw Consent, foregrounds sex on the social margins (bestial, necrophilic, cannibalistic, and other atypical practices),to demonstrate how a sexual politics focused on consent can often obscure, rather than clarify, what is wrong about wrongful sex. 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.
Fischel’s work weaves together critical theory, legal thought, and a feminist and queer politics adeptly to produce utterly original encounters with the law. The book should be of interest to queer theorists, feminist theorists, and scholars of the law and courts.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 47: Sexuality and Politics

Chair

• Claire C. McKinney William & Mary

Presenters

• Joseph Fischel Yale University

• Samuel A. Chambers Johns Hopkins University

• Ainsley Nicole LeSure Occidental College

• Jennifer Nedelsky York University

• Claire C. McKinney William & Mary