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Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent

Online ISBN:
9781452954363
Print ISBN:
9780816694754
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
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Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent

Joseph J. Fischel
Joseph J. Fischel
Yale University
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Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
15 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9781452954363
Print ISBN:
9780816694754
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against any premature pride parade for consent as our determinant of sexual freedom, permissible sex, or good sex. Consent is not ethically dispositive, let alone sexy. Consent is a moralized fiction, and churns out the sex offender and the child as figures for its normativity. Fischel queries these figures and the figuration of consent in U.S. law and media culture. He argues that the sex offender and the child are consent’s alibi, its negative space, enabling fictions that allow consent to do the work cut out for it under (neo)liberal sexual politics. Post-Lawrence v. Texas, the consenting adult—the corresponding character of sexual freedom—emerges in and as the homosexual. In our sociolegal imaginary, sexual harm materializes as triptych: the hero is the homosexual, the villain is the sex predator, and the damsel in distress is sometimes a woman, but more often a child. Engaging legal, queer and political theory, case law and statutory law, and media representation, Fischel proposes that we shift our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation, to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and peremption—a term the author defines as the uncontrolled disqualification of possibility. Such a shift would be less damaging for young people, less devastating for sex offenders, and better for sex. It would also spark a move away from the sex offender, the Child, and the homosexual as the constellating characters of sexual harm and freedom, and toward the gendered adolescent.

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