Joseph Fischel

Joseph Fischel is a theorist of social and sexual justice. His research on the regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality traverses normative political theory, queer studies, and critical race and feminist legal theory. His first two books interrogate consent as the magnetizing, dominant metric of modern sex law and late modern sexual ethics. Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) argues that the sociolegal figures of the recidivistic sex offender, the innocent child and the heroic homosexual invest consent with its normative power while obfuscating more pervasive but less perceptible forms of sexual injury and gendered violence. Fischel’s second book, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice (University of California Press, 2019), explores cases of atypical and non-normative sex in order to scaffold a sexual ethics less beholden to consent for what we think of as the “ordinary” couple form.

Fischel is finishing his latest book project, Sodomy’s Solicitations (forthcoming in the Sexuality Series of Temple University Press), which examines the life and afterlife of sodomy law in New Orleans and beyond to reconsider the centrality of sex—in contradistinction to race, gender, or sexuality—for liberal and neoliberal governance.

Fischel co-edited Enticements: Queer Legal Studies, with University of Toronto law professor Brenda Cossman (NYU Press, 2024). Fischel’s future research might interrogate the pregnancy question across feminisms. Fischel is an avid fan of beaches, Orangetheory, and mediocre television.