The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

by Judith Levine, Erica Meiners

Overview

In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice.

With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible?

Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788733403
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/23/2020
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	306,357
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Judith Levine is a longtime journalist and author of countless articles and commentaries in popular media-Village Voice, New York Times, Harper's, Boston Review, N+1, and others-as well as four books. Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex won the LA Times Book Award.

Erica Meiners is a professor of education and women's and gender studies at Northeastern Illinois University and the author of several books, most recently For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State.

Table of Contents

Introduction. One Problem, Two Faces:

Sexual Harm and State Violence 1

Convo: Systems and Individuals 16

Part I Feminists Confront Sexual Harm

1 Anti-violence Feminisms 21

2 Intersectionality 31

Part II State Violence: The Sex Offense Legal Regime

3 Protecting (White) Innocence 39

4 Punishment and "Management": The Sex Offender Registry 43

5 Policing Deviance: What Is a "Sex Offender"? 53

6 Medicalizing Violence 69

7 "Real" Guilt and the Trouble with Innocence 79

Part III Fractured Resistance

Racial or Gender or Class Justice? 87

8 The "Registered Citizens'" Rights Movement 89

9 Religious Movements: Redemption, with Conditions 107

10 Men Face Masculinity 112

Convo: What about White, Cisgender, Straight Man? 116

11 Women's Against the Regime 121

12 Restorative and Transformative Justice: Making the Road 139

Convo: Whose Job Is Change? 150

Part IV Ten Ways to Confront Sexual Harm, End State Violence, and Transform Our Communities

Reform or Radical Change? 157

1 Abolish the Sex Offender Registry and Civil Commitment 159

2 Demedicalize Sexual Violence 161

3 Decriminalize Child and Teen Sexuality 163

4 Invest in Radical and Free Sex Education 165

5 Complicate Consent 169

6 Eroticize Safety, Proliferate Pleasures 172

7 Build and Sustain a Robust Welfare State, Not a Carceral State 176

8 Think Intersectionally 179

9 Practice Restorative and Transformative Justice 181

10 Embrace Abolition Feminism 183

Acknowledgments 187

Notes 189

Index 209

Editorial Reviews

Levine and Meiners show how the contingent now called ‘carceral’ feminists (from the same root as incarcerate), spurred by rage and an eagerness for retribution—and by the exhilaration of ‘at last we’re getting the bastards’—has played a large role in expanding the prison industrial complex, along with that cruel sex offender registry, precisely at the time that other feminists and civil rights activists are trying to rein it in.”
—Dr. Carol Tavris, Skeptic

“Pulls back the curtain on the history of the sex offender registry, its roots and its injustices, and how we can strive for a future with neither sexual harm nor state violence.”
—Lyra Walsh Fuchs Dissent

From the Publisher