Interview with Joseph Fischel on the Junior Faculty Manuscript and Research Colloquium Colloquium

Interview by Anima Gebele von Waldstein, FAS Graduate Communications Fellow, 2021

Joseph Fischel is a theorist of social and sexual justice. His research on the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality draws upon political theory, queer studies, and critical race and feminist legal theory. Informed by the ongoing discussions on consent, his first two books question consent as the dominant metric of modern sex law and late modern sexual ethics. His first book, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, argues that the normative power of consent obfuscates more pervasive but less perceptible forms of sexual injury and gendered violence. His second book, Screw Consent, develops alternative idioms for sexual politics beyond consent, among them autonomy, access, and democratic hedonism.

Professor Fischel used the Junior Faculty Manuscript Colloquium to prepare his third book, on the regulations of sodomy and sex work in the contemporary United States, for publication. Now, with his book forthcoming in Temple University Press’s Sexuality Series, he took the time to talk to us about his findings.

The description of your forthcoming book Sodomitical Justice: A Solicitation reads that it examines the life and afterlives of sodomy law in New Orleans and beyond to reconsider the centrality of sex for liberal and neoliberal governance. Could you give us a bit more background on this and how this is important for legal studies?

Sodomitical Justice takes Louisiana’s Crime against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) law, which criminalizes particular, commercial sexual transactions, as the starting point to investigate broader questions about identity-based sexual justice politics, the policing of non-normative sex, and erotic flourishing.   

But first some background on the subject: Louisiana’s CANS law criminalizes consensual anal and oral sex for money. The statute was enacted in the early 1980s to target racial minority boys and young men offering sex for money in the French Quarter; later, after Hurricane Katrina, the law was disproportionally enforced against black cis and trans women.  In 2012, CANS was declassified as a felony and a registerable sex offence, but CANS is still on the books. Over the past decade, I interviewed people convicted of CANS, people convicted of other sex offenses, local officials, and—this will sound bizarre at first—several farmers. My colleague and friend Gabe Rosenberg and I interviewed farmers because in 2018 state representative enacted an “animal sexual abuse” law developed out of CANS. Building off these interviews, archival research, and doctrinal analysis, Sodomitical Justice advocates a more ecological, less identarian sexual politics. Under such a politics, the “bad actors” turn out to be the state and industrial agriculture. The last chapters of the book make the case that both CANS as well as anti-prostitution laws are unconstitutional.

Your first book, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, also argues that we ought to pay attention to modes of sexual injury and gendered violence not captured by the figure of the rapist or pedophile. Was this insight the starting point for your new book? In other words, what inspired and motivated you to write your new book on this particular topic?

The idea to research sodomy law indeed came to me during the writing process of my first book, and so in a way my new book was ten years in the making. I discovered in the process of writing Sex and Harm that sodomy laws have historically been enforced against men committing sexual violence against boys, so that made me curious about the unintended and unexpected consequences of sex law. Also, Sex and Harm concentrated on the motivations behind and inefficacy of sex offender registration and notification requirements. The CANS law briefly made national headlines because hundreds of women convicted of CANS were classified as “Sex Offenders” in Louisiana. So, I wanted to investigate the aftermath of the grassroots movement, legislative reforms, and lawsuits organized to declassify the women as sex offenders.

How did you make use of the Junior Faculty Manuscript and Research Colloquium? How did it help shape your project?

We held the colloquium last May over Zoom. My colleagues—fantastic feminist scholars working across political theory, literary theory, Black Studies—generatively challenged my ideas and encouraged me to flesh out and broaden the book’s arguments. Collectively, their suggestions for reframing the manuscript and its stakes brought the thesis of the book into focus.

Who do you think will be most interested in your book? What kind of impact do you think will your publication have in the field and also to the broader public?

I hope Sodomitical Justice will do its part to bring sex back to sexuality studies. I hope too the book offers insights for students, scholars and activists concerned with forms of sexual injustice not as recognizable as “phobia” or “violence.” I think the book would fit well in undergraduate courses on feminist and queer studies and courses on social movements. The book also engages with legal theorists on pertinent issues surrounding punishment, public indecency, animus, and the 14^th Amendment, so it should appeal to law students as well.

What are you excited about working on next?

Currently, I am the co-editor of a collection-in-progress on queer legal studies titled Enticements, which I hope will be an important contribution to studies of law and sexuality. My next monograph will survey how feminist thinkers, lawyers and artists engage the “pregnancy question.” Pregnancy is social and corporeal, disabling and world-making, biological and political, hyper-surveilled and under-supported. So, I want to investigate how pregnancy and its complications travel across feminisms.