Slipping between Danger, Pleasure and the Law: Thoughts on Three Recent Books Addressing Sexuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Slipping Between Danger, Pleasure and the Law: Thoughts on Three Recent Books Addressing Sexuality Jackie Jones et al, eds, Gender, Sexualities and Law, New York: Routledge, 2011, 352 pages.Paul Johnson & Derek Dalton, eds, Policing Sex, New York: Routledge, 2012, 192 pages.Troubling Sex: Towards a Legal Theory of Sexual Integrity by Elaine Craig, Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2012, 220 pages.Sexuality is slippery. It slips, for example, between pleasure and danger, between surrender and repression, and between force (the kind that turns some of us on) and violence (the kind that terrorizes us). It can be a site of intense oppression and unwanted objectification, and also of empowerment and affirming desirability. In this review, I address three recent books that reckon with the ambivalence of sexuality in relation to the law and regulatory practices.The first book is a 2011 anthology, Gender, Sexualities and Law, edited by Jackie Jones, Anna Grear, Rachel Anne Fenton and Kim Stevenson. Coming from an explicitly feminist perspective, the focus is on gendered danger, violence, and oppression around the world. The second is a 2012 anthology, Policing Sex, edited by Paul Johnson and Derek Dalton. Focusing specifically on operational policing, the book provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the regulation of consensual non-normative sexuality across different regional contexts. The final book is a 2012 monograph entitled Troubling Sex: Towards a Legal Theory of Sexual Integrity, by Elaine Craig. Informed by the insights of both feminism and queer theory, Craig analyzes Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) jurisprudence to offer a constructivist theory of sexual integrity that remains open to contestation and resignification. Considered together, these three books provide interesting and sometimes contrasting viewpoints on the concerns, issues, and theoretical frames preoccupying sexuality scholars in the current moment.Let's first delve into the Jones et al anthology. Largely bound together by their shared use of a feminist legal perspective, the anthology showcases twenty-three chapters that boast a wide range of methodologies, arguments, and theories in their treatment of the titular triad: Gender, Sexualities and Law. The book is divided into six parts: Theory, law and sex; Representations, law and sex; Violence, law and sex; International violence, law and sex; Reproduction, law and sex; and Relationships, law and sex. It is beyond the scope of this review to provide commentary on every chapter-which is unfortunate, as each provides a valuable contribution to the field and is worth reading. Instead, I will highlight a few chapters that focus more squarely on sexuality; the good, the bad, and the in-between.In the chapter, 'She never screamed out and complained': recognising gender in legal and media representations of rape, Kim Stevenson revisits old territory, but with fresh historical insight and current day contextualization. (121) Most feminist theorists are aware that rape myths endure, that conviction rates in sexual assault cases are low, and that gendered (and sometimes misogynist) logic can influence the credibility of the alleged victim. Many want to believe the situation is getting better. Stevenson surprises the reader by showing how, in Victorian times, convictions were easier to secure, ironically because of gendered stereotypes. Stevenson, of course, is not suggesting we return to Victorian mores, but rather that we need to take into account the complexity of credibility in different contexts. She ends the chapter by considering how legal professionals and members of the public continue to deny the ways that rape trials can revictimize women, perpetuate sexist stereotypes, and lead to unjustified acquittals.In the next article, Gendering rape: social attitudes towards male and female rape, authors Philip N.S. Rumney and Natalia Hanley draw on focus group research to interrogate the feminist truism that rape is taken more seriously when the victim is male. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".