Description
This wide-ranging discussion explores the contradicting cultural and legal concepts surrounding the idea of the age of consent for sex, with special focus on how consent is related to the juridical and social construction of the child, the sex offender, and the homosexual. Consent is also examined as a moralized concept to reveal what the paradigm of consent tells us about society’s attitudes toward sexual harm and sexual freedom. The idea of sexual autonomy as defined by Stephen Schulhofer is seen through feminist rhetoric’s reconstructions of autonomy. Ideas are applied in the analysis of three popular films dealing with consent: 13, Superbad, and Doubt. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against the adoption of consent as our primary determinant of sexual freedom. For Joseph J. Fischel, consent is not necessarily always ethically sound. It is, he argues, a moralized fiction, and it churns out figures for its normativity: the predatory sex offender and the innocent child.Examining the representation of consent in U.S. law and media culture, Fischel contends that the figures of 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 late modern sexual politics. Engaging legal, queer, feminist, and political theory, case law and statutory law, and media representations, Fischel proposes that we change our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and “peremption,” which he defines as the uncontrolled disqualification of possibility. Such a shift in theory, law, and life would be less damaging for young people, more responsive to sexual violence, and better for sex.
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