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Shortlisted - Orwell Prize 2022
How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.
Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond 'yes and no', wanted and unwanted.
We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.
Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.
Author: Amia Srinivasan
Paperback Published 30 August 2022 304 pages
Originally published in trade paperback 31 August 2021
Read and Recommended by Hendri:
"In the era of MeToo, this Oxford University scholar's dazzling debut brings to the fore the difficult yet necessary conversations around consent, power relations, and sexual desires, pushing us to rethink our contemporary understanding of empowerment and liberation. Amia Srinivasa engages relevant feminist and queer literature from the past and contemporary moments, bringing us to the unfinished debates of sex, pornography, and consent that emerged in the 1980s epitomised by the Feminist Sex Wars and the Barnard Sex Conference. Unafraid of tackling difficult conversations, this book also provokes an intersectional analysis of sexual violence/ harassments, particularly when race, class, caste, and nationality differences are entangled within the violent incidents, evident in the contemporary rape case of Jyoti Singh in December 2012. This book does not offer definitive answers, yet it opens up multiple entries for us to rethink and address the unfinished business of our sexual revolution."
'Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing.' -Jia Tolentino
'I believe Amia Srinivasan's work will change the world.' -Katherine Rundell
'Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year.' -Pandora Sykes