Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Queer people have been pioneers in imagining new ways to have sex, but their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. This book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to explore challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. It reveals the tools that queer communities have developed to practice ethical sex and explores how they can better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic.

Format: Hardback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 10 February 2023
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Queer people may not have invented sex, but they have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. However, their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities 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. 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 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.

Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.

Dimension: 203 x 127 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781978825413