The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights.
Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso
- Cover
- Contents
- Foreword: Thinking Sex and Justice
- Introduction: The War on Sex
- Part I: The Politics of Sex
- 1. The New Pariahs: Sex, Crime, and Punishment in America
- 2. Sympathy for the Devil: Why Progressives Haven’t Helped the Sex Offender, Why They Should, and How They Can
- 3. Queer Disavowal: “Controversial Crimes” and Building Abolition
- 4. A New Iron Closet: Failing to Extend the Spirit of Lawrence v. Texas to Prisons and Prisoners
- 5. Seeing the Sex and Justice Landscape through the Vatican’s Eyes: The War on Gender and the Seamless Garment of Sexual Rights
- Part II: The Invention of the Sex Offender
- 6. Sex Panic, Psychiatry, and the Expansion of the Carceral State
- 7. The Creation of the Modern Sex Offender
- 8. For What They Might Do: A Sex Offender Exception to the Constitution
- Part III: Sex Work and the Trouble with Trafficking
- 9. The “Hooker Teacher” Tells All
- 10. Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The “Traffic in Women” and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights
- 11. California’s Proposition 35 and the Trouble with Trafficking
- Part IV: Making HIV a Crime
- 12. HIV: Prosecution or Prevention? HIV Is Not a Crime
- 13. HIV Monsters: Gay Men, Criminal Law, and the New Political Economy of HIV
- 14. HIV Care as Social Rehabilitation: Medical Governance, the AIDS Surveillance Industry, and Therapeutic Citizenship in Neoliberal Taiwan
- Part V: Resistance
- 15. The New War on Sex: A Report from the Global Front Lines
- 16. Building a Movement for Justice: Doe v. Jindal and the Campaign against Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Statute
- 17. Bringing Sex to the Table of Justice
- Afterword: How You Can Get Involved
- Contributors
- Index
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