Enter to win Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era!
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Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era (Rutgers University Press; February 10, 2023; 978-1-9788-2540-6; $19.95; 216 pp. 12 color illus.), edited by Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.
What can the #MeToo moment teach queers about consent? And what can queers teach the rest of the world about ethical sex?
This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. Unsafe Words' diverse perspectives come together in the first book to directly tackle "queering consent" in one edited volume and the first to fully address the cultural and political dimensions of sexual consent. These perspectives-from varied gender identities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and social/classed experiences (including being incarcerated, former or current sex workers, or those living/working in contexts outside of the United States)-push back on the ways that more normative (lesbian and gay; white; class mobile) populations have been centered in these types of texts. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse.
The essays in Unsafe Words reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex-from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic.
Unsafe Words is the first book in Rutgers University Press's limited series Q+Public, a series of curated volumes that follow the tradition of the seminal journal OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly that was published out of San Francisco from 1988 to 1992. It was consciously multi-gender and racially inclusive, addressed politics and culture, wrested with controversial topics, and emphasized visual material along with scholarly and creative writing. Q+Public promises to bring OUT/LOOK's political and cultural agenda into the 21st century.
