Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet 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.
SHANTEL GABRIEAL BUGGS is an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Florida State University. Her research on how race, gender, and technology shape romantic and sexual relationships has appeared in such journals as Sociological Inquiry, Identities, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. TREVOR HOPPE is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His research analyzes the social control of sex by institutions of medicine, law, and public health. He is the author of Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness and co-editor of The War on Sex.
Series Foreword by E. G. Crichton and Jeffrey Escoffier Introduction Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and Trevor Hoppe Part 1: Queering Consent 1. Sex Workers Are Experts on Sexual Consent Angela Jones 2. Consent in the Dark Alexander Cheves 3. Lost in the Dark-Or How I Learned to Queer Consent Trevor Hoppe 4. The Straight Rules Don't Apply: Lesbian Sexual Ethics Jane Ward 5. Momentos de consentimiento: Consent in Lesbian Relationships in Mexico City Gloria GonzAlez-LOpez and Anahi Russo Garrido 6. Black Femmedom as Violence and Resistance Mistress Velvet 7. Consent through My Lens: A Photo Essay Don (D. S.) Trumbull Part 2: Responding to Sexual Harm 8. Before Consent, after Harm Blu Buchanan 9. Rejecting the (Black Fat) Body as Invitation Shantel Gabrieal Buggs 10. My Firsts: On Gaysian Sexual Ethics James McMaster 11. Was I a Teenage Sexual Predator? Mark S. King 12. (Trans)forming #MeToo: On Freedom for the "Unbelievable" Survivors of Gender Violence V. Jo Hsu 13. "Oppression Was at My Doorstep from Birth": A Conversation on Prison Abolition Dominique Morgan and Trevor Hoppe Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Index
"Reading Unsafe Words and the ways the various essays reckon with the #MeToo movement filled a need that had been lacking, a return to the hashtag and a pulling apart of what its focus had become. The essays in this book take a deep-dive into multiple facets of consent, grapple with white supremacy and mass incarceration and carceral attitudes within the queer community, talk about repair after harm, and reflect on situations where it's unclear whether or how or to whom harm occurred. I found the book challenging in the best ways at times." (Autostraddle) "With this dazzling collection of meditations and provocations from leading scholars in the field of sexuality studies, Unsafe Words offers something we desperately need: a place to ask the queer questions about consent that dare not speak their names. Can consent be queered? What happens when queer and feminist sexual politics clash over questions of consent? How does the prevailing consent paradigm perpetuate the harms of the criminal legal system and thwart more just possibilities for redress? This is a must-read for both activists and scholars of sexual ethics alike." - Cati Connell (author of A Few Good Gays: The Gendered Compromises behind Military Inclusion) "Unsafe Words provides many urgently needed, generative, and useful ways to think about sexual ethics beyond the punitive, and lets the kinds of people whose sex lives were never destigmatized (or even decriminalized) lead readers in asking better questions." - Steven W. Thrasher (Anarchist Review of Books)
