Enticements

Reviews / Votes

Enticements arrives exactly when we need it, filling the scholarly vacuum to be found between queer and legal theory. As LGBTQ legal studies calcifies into a field, the essays in Enticements lure us away from that disciplinary pull, reminding scholars of law, sexuality, and identity of the delights that lie in critically imagining queer legal futures. (Katherine Franke, author of Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality) For those of us in and around queer legal studies, Enticements is the collection that we've been waiting for. Joseph J. Fischel and Brenda Cossman's curated collection goes beyond the bounds of identitarian thinking that has corralled too much analysis on the regulation of sexuality. The essays in this volume beseech us to see that sex (the act, the designation) is everywhere, and so too is the juridical imaginary that governs thinking about bodies, innocence, intimacy, rights, and wrongs. (Paisley Currah, author of Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity) A field-defining collection that is defiant, insistent, caring, and considered. Enticements populates the nomenclature 'queer legal studies' with intellectual genealogies that include and exceed queer, critical and left-legal, feminist, Black, critical ethnic, postcolonial, and crip studies, which materializes the editorial promise to entice: luring fields not obviously, or previously, hailed by the 'queer' or the 'legal' into the unstable -reactive, unpredictable, tense, and charged - relation of the two. They invite readers to consider queer and legal as objects, ways of thinking, and modes of asking questions, and invite readers to dwell in the uncomfortable, sometimes incompatible, but nonetheless essential pairing of the two. (Emily A. Owens, author of Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans) Contributors to Fischel and Cossman's Queer Legal Studies collection investigate the proliferating assortment of genders, sexualities, and intimacies, questioning how they have been regulated, criminalized, or privileged by law and other regulatory forces. They focus on a wide range of sex/gender regulatory regimes, interrogating the use and abuse of queer history for impact litigation and social change, colonial and postcolonial sex laws otherwise obscured by the modern LGBT paradigm of sexual identity, and the policing of trans and cis men. (Law and Social Inquiry)