Sodomy's Solicitations

Joseph Fischels provocative book, Sodomys 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 Sodomys Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problemsand 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. Sodomys Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formationsa right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism. In the series Sexuality Studies