Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

By Trevor Hoppe, Angela Jones, Alexander Cheves and 10 more

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781978825420

Angela Jones

Angela Jones is a lecturer at Murdoch University, Australia. She completed her PhD in Cultural Studies in 2007, and has published book chapters and magazine articles that focus on youth, culture, and the Internet. Angela’s current research interests include popular culture and the Internet, digital literacy and education, social media strategy, social media and identity, and online communities. She previously published The Host in the Machine, also with Chandos.

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Introduction

SHANTEL GABRIEAL BUGGS AND TREVOR HOPPE

In April 1982, some forty years before the publication of this collection, a group of feminist scholars and activists met at Barnard College for a controversial gathering. The conference, titled Towards a Politics of Sexuality, aimed to inject pleasure back into feminist discourses on sexuality for women. Women against Pornography picketed the event, angered by the perceived tolerance of pornography and sadomasochism (SM) of the conveners. Many of the essays in the volume that resulted from the event—1992’s Pleasure and Danger, edited by Carole S. Vance—remain relevant today.¹ As Vance states in its introduction, To only focus on pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live.²

Vance’s edited volume remains a powerful exploration of the fraught tensions between pleasure and danger. It frames sexual harm through the lens of patriarchy and the gender binary. Women—from the married heterosexual to the radical lesbian and the so-called promiscuous—are deservedly front and center as the book tackles how male violence does harm to many groups. Similar critiques of consent and men’s sexual entitlement appear in Joseph Fischel’s Screw Consent, where he concludes that powerful men’s successful efforts to constrain women’s legal autonomy and access is more pressing an issue than whether the sex is necessarily consensual.³ Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex similarly argues that, under patriarchy, simplistic notions of consent as a clear matter of yes or no and calls to Believe women are blunt tools that fail to fully grasp the politics of sex.⁴

We write this introduction thirty years after Pleasure and Danger and cannot help but note how much remains the same, despite worthy interventions from scholars and mainstream writers alike. The battles over pleasure and danger remain fierce. Just turn on the nightly news to witness the impact #MeToo activists have had in ushering in an era of reckoning and accountability for one powerful man after another. Or glance at the latest viral story on social media, where fictional short stories no longer seem like fiction when exploring the discomfort of navigating sex.⁵ Other, more troubling aspects of these developments also feel familiar. The women who have become the face of this contemporary movement—a movement founded by a Black woman, Tarana Burke—are overwhelmingly white and assumed to be exclusively heterosexual. The Western focus of #MeToo (and perhaps even much of this volume) silences the work of feminists in and from the Global South.⁶ When we note how much has remained the same we must also contend with how the long arms of structural racism, anti-Blackness, and empire have facilitated such a circumstance.

The radical (yet unrealized) potential of this moment leaves us wondering: What does #MeToo mean for queer communities? Vance argued that the pleasure/danger dichotomy was too simplistic to fully theorize women’s sexual experiences, which in her words were more complicated, more difficult to grasp, more unsettling.⁷ As the chapters in this book reveal, the sexual lives of queer people, too, are more complicated than a straightforward binary of either pleasurable or dangerous activity. Some queers seek safety in sex while others do not; for some, sex can be a means to explore various ways of being outside of a heteronormative and homonormative world. So, when we ask what the #MeToo moment means for queer folks, what we are really asking is both what can the #MeToo moment teach queer people about consent and what can queers contribute to this ongoing conversation in a way that does not erase their queerness. If queer relationships are necessarily marked by differently gendered power dynamics (as well as racialized and classed dynamics), how is all this power negotiated?

It is important to say at the outset that when we use the word queer in this collection, we do not use it as a synonym for same-gender or same-sex relationships. Rather, this collection considers a broader array of non-heteronormative sexual relations. This includes not just gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans people but also those who practice kink and BDSM (shorthand for bondage, domination, submission, and masochism), engage in public sex, or participate in sex work. We are interested in queering consent by working through how people can, and do, disentangle consent from heteronormative logics. Within these outsider sexual cultures, even sex between cisgender men and women partners has the potential to disrupt fundamental heteronormative assumptions about sex: that sex should be had in private, that it should not be traded for money, and that sex should be egalitarian and pursued for reproduction—or, perhaps, pleasure—but certainly not pain.

This collection tackles these issues in two sections, revealing who #MeToo can and should include while also issuing calls not simply to end sexual violence but also to set people and their communities on a path toward healing.

The first section titled Queering Consent considers the nature of consent and power. What does it mean to consent to sex? How does consent look different in queer sex spaces? What tools might help us practice sex more ethically? And how does power shape sexual consent in queer and trans contexts that go beyond a (perhaps oversimplified) feminist lens of patriarchal oppression and submission? How do you negotiate and practice consent when one partner is more dominant or in a socially more powerful position? Can queer sex be consensual when that power imbalance is extreme?

The second section, titled Responding to Sexual Harm, debates how queer communities ought to evaluate and eventually redress sexual harm. What does it mean to hold each other accountable? How do we do that when the seemingly obvious system of recourse—the U.S. criminal justice system—is a site of racial, gender-based, and sexual violence? How do we even recognize when we have been harmed or when we have harmed others? What do we potentially risk in terms of our understandings of safety when we prioritize an abolitionist and transformative justice approach?

Though not exhaustive, we hope these two sections guide engagement. But we also recognize that this structure—power and consent versus sexual harm—imposes artificial boundaries and limitations that the contributors of this volume are all working to resist either through content, theorizing, methodology, or form. Truly, any of the pieces in the volume can speak to concerns addressed in either section. Therefore, our efforts to structure the unstructured is less to force the voices of our contributors into an acceptable form and more to provide a roadmap for how to navigate this text, much in the same way that contributors to this volume are sharing insights on how to navigate the unwieldy dynamics of the pleasures and dangers of sex, sensuality, and queer space.

The perspectives included in this volume are not only shaped by our imposed structuring; these essays are also shaped by varied social positioning. The experiences of white cisgender gay men and lesbians do not neatly map onto the experiences of Black trans femmes, and this volume has no expectations that these essays and experiences should be considered interchangeable or as speaking for all LGBTQIA+ people. What we offer in this volume is a variety of perspectives to open the door for further debate, for critical engagement with the ways that the consent–nonconsent binary can and often does fail.

Queering Consent

#MeToo has reignited debates about sexual ethics, primarily this burning question: What does it mean to consent? Queer social theorist Judith Butler has argued that answering this question is more complicated that it seems. Consent is not a binding contract. Agreeing to have sex does not entitle your partner to do whatever they want. Partners are constantly renegotiating what they each want, live, in the moment. Indeed, Butler writes, it may be that one thing adults do when we consent to a sexual encounter or relation is to try and understand what it means to consent or, rather, to explore some regions of ‘yes saying’—agreeing, affirming, willingness to try, the fear of trying, probing, wishing, and dreaming.⁸

Communication is only part of the equation. To Angela Jones (she/they),⁹ nobody knows this better than sex workers. In chapter 1, Jones reflects both on her own experiences as a stripper and on research interviews she conducted with sex workers to understand how professionals do consent. Although clear communication is a good first step, it is not a panacea. Power dynamics can complicate sexual agreements, especially for sex workers with marginalized identities. Jones writes, "Discussing one’s needs is vital, but sexual scripts, cultural mores, stereotypes, and power relations shape the articulation of sexual needs and boundaries. Especially for those who are economically vulnerable, [sex workers] may make choices that can put them at risk, but such coping strategies help them navigate imbalanced power