The War on Sex

by David M. Halperin (Editor), Trevor Hoppe (Editor)

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, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Owen Daniel McCarter, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Government, LGBT, Sexuality, Queer

512 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 2017

Reviews

[Georgie · Rating 3 out of 5]

it took me 4 months to finish this!!! christ!!! i wouldn’t recommend this book for some light reading about the law and sex - this is a heavy and detailed and dense book about a lot of topics. some essays were a lot better than others, and bc the book is american i did find it a bit annoying the focus on american law & politics but that’s not rlly a criticism as such. some great essays and great points, and others are a bit of a miss!

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to a point. America is so very different to other cultures I found myself saying wtf many a time.

[ariella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a mixed bag—while some of the essays were quite strong, others seemed like they dragged on. This is probably more reflective of my interests versus any weakness or fault of the authors.

[Isham Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly illuminating volume by scholars concerned with increasing sexual repression in the US.

[Jehnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A legalistic analysis of the treatment of gender identity and sexual politics in the modern era. The book largely focuses on the United States but has a couple of great essays about the impact of exporting conservative American ideology elsewhere. As an edited volume, there is logically redundancies in the subjects discussed.
A lot of points to consider and discuss with students.