The War on Sex

The War on Sex (2017)

The War on Sex is a 2017 sociology book edited by University of Michigan professor David M. Halperin, and SUNY Albany professor Trevor Hoppe. Contributors include Judith Levine, Scott De Orio, and Roger Lancaster.

The book begins with the famous historian and queer theorist David Halperin, writing:

The world is waging a war on sex.

It is a quiet war. It is often an undercover war. It has gone unnoticed, for the most part, except by those who have been affected by it, directly or indirectly. [...]

It has devastated civil liberties. It has had grave consequences for the autonomy and agency of women, young people, the disadvantaged, and the vulnerable. It has ruined many, many lives. It has had a particularly violent impact on those who are socially marginalized, socially stigmatized, or racially marked, or who cherish nonstandard sexual practices. Sexual freedom has lost significant ground to it — ground that will take a very long time to recover. [...]

And, as in most wars, fog and shadows, propaganda and disinformation conceal the contours of events. So we need to understand what is going on in order to confront it and to challenge it. And we need to do that now.

It is particularly significant that Halperin co-edited the book and authored the introduction, as he is widely considered a key figure in Queer Theory, having penned a popular definition of Queer:

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. "Queer," then, demarcates not a positivity but a positinality vis-a-vis the normative - a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices: it could include some married couples without children, for example, or even (who knows?) some married couples with children - with, perhaps, very naughty children. [Italics in original].

Across 17 academic essays, The War on Sex examines the rise of sexual surveillance in the United States starting in the 1970s, the criminalization of HIV, the development of sex offenders as a criminal category as well as their registration by the hundreds of thousands, the persecution of sex workers by self-proclaimed anti-sex trafficking NGOs, and sex panics related to children and satanism in American society.

Book Description:

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights.

• Read The War on Sex (2017) as a PDF (Annas Archive, external link).
• Wikipedia entry for the book.