Overview

Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are too easily eclipsed by our collective focus on marginalized identities.   The political stories narrated in Sodomy’s Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problems-and political possibilities. Fischel indicts U.S. sex offender regulatory regimes as state-sponsored sexual violence; offers a qualified defense for sexual expression in public; and argues that animal sexual abuse laws, with their exemptions for industrial agricultural practices, authorize the suffering they were enacted to deter. He also makes the case that laws criminalizing the exchange of sex for money are unconstitutional, and proposes that the best way to protect trans and queer children might just be to enfranchise them. Sodomy’s Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formations-a right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism. In the series Sexuality Studies

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9781439915851

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Reviews

""Fischel has undertaken a detailed examination of the ways that legislative changes such as those in Louisiana undermine a long line of precedents celebrated for their expansion of sexual liberty and bodily autonomy. Given our current political moment, Sodomy's Solicitations should have been published yesterday.""--Joe Rollins, Professor of Political Science at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York ""In this groundbreaking work on queer sexual politics, Joseph Fischel shifts the focus from marginalized identities to state machineries of sexual control. From sex work to park cruising, from abortion restrictions to laws governing animal sexual abuse, Sodomy's Solicitations unpacks how sexual regulation functions as a potent tool for governance. Drawing on legal theory, queer studies, critical race theory, and feminist scholarship, this rigorously interdisciplinary work offers a provocative and incisive analysis of sexuality and the state. Essential and transformative, Fischel opens new avenues for understanding political power and sexual justice.""--Paisley Currah, Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at the City University of New York, and author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity ""Joseph Fischel has done it again! Cutting through the discursive habits and cultural taboos that exceptionalize sex, Sodomy's Solicitations reveals alternatives that are not only pragmatic but advance human understanding beyond the places where it has been mired in sexual fears and misperceptions. To read this book is to confront the consequences of the outsized ethical significance assigned to sex, namely its easy weaponization by the state, which uses sexual hierarchies and punishments to police all of us.""--Jane Ward, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality ""The book is erudite, playful at times, and well-argued.... Fischel takes his evidence from sodomy law and its deployment in Louisiana. His evidence is carefully presented and often fascinating, and the legal and constitutional analysis here is strong and thorough.... [T]he book is a major addition to the academic study of sexuality.""--Compulsive Reader

""Fischel has undertaken a detailed examination of the ways that legislative changes such as those in Louisiana undermine a long line of precedents celebrated for their expansion of sexual liberty and bodily autonomy. Given our current political moment, Sodomy's Solicitations should have been published yesterday.""--Joe Rollins, Professor of Political Science at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York ""In this groundbreaking work on queer sexual politics, Joseph Fischel shifts the focus from marginalized identities to state machineries of sexual control. From sex work to park cruising, from abortion restrictions to laws governing animal sexual abuse, Sodomy's Solicitations unpacks how sexual regulation functions as a potent tool for governance. Drawing on legal theory, queer studies, critical race theory, and feminist scholarship, this rigorously interdisciplinary work offers a provocative and incisive analysis of sexuality and the state. Essential and transformative, Fischel opens new avenues for understanding political power and sexual justice.""--Paisley Currah, Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at the City University of New York, and author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity ""Joseph Fischel has done it again! Cutting through the discursive habits and cultural taboos that exceptionalize sex, Sodomy's Solicitations reveals alternatives that are not only pragmatic but advance human understanding beyond the places where it has been mired in sexual fears and misperceptions. To read this book is to confront the consequences of the outsized ethical significance assigned to sex, namely its easy weaponization by the state, which uses sexual hierarchies and punishments to police all of us.""--Jane Ward, Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Author Information

Joseph J. Fischel is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice and Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent.

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