Sex and harm in the age of consent
by Fischel, Joseph J., Ph.D., THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2011, 306 pages; 3472847

Abstract:

Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent investigates the figures of the child and the sex offender, and the figuration of consent, in United States law and media culture. It diagnoses how dominant understandings of sexual harm and danger are mediated through and against the child and the offender. I argue that consent purchases its normative force as an ethical metric through the symbolic production of the sex offender and the child as its characterological bookends. More simply: consent cannot do the kinds of things we want it to do, cannot divide good sex from bad, harm from freedom, or respond to sexual inequalities and injustices that pervade late modern life in the United States. I suggest displacing consent as the gravamen adjudicating sexual harm, so that we might diagnose more precisely the problems of sexual inequality and injustice while at once unloading the injurious cultural baggage borne by the child and the sex offender.
 
AdviserPatchen Markell
SchoolTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
SourceDAI/A 72-12, p. , Oct 2011
Source TypeDissertation
SubjectsAmerican studies; Law; Political Science; Criminology; Gender studies
Publication Number3472847
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