The State of Our Unions

Reading Regulating Sex, in which Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner bring together the proceedings of a workshop originally held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain, has reminded me that the demands of evaluating a set of collected presentations are peculiar. As a reader, one awaits developed analysis. However, the constraints of an oral presentation—even one redacted for print—produce an almost telegraphic prose with moments of sharp insight punctuated by obvious lacunae. At a conference this situation is remedied by a Q&A session, and even more satisfactorily by a drink or dinner. Translating this remedy for this review, I have developed a unique standard: would I want to have dinner or a drink with these authors after reading their contributions? The answer is, for the most part, a resounding yes. In other words, despite some shortcomings, the authors of Regulating Sex have provided insightful work that brings critical legal studies, theoretical sociology, and empirical ethnographic research to bear on the relations between sex and the modern liberal state.

The collection is divided into four sections that track the relationships among sex and the law and legal structures of the state, sex and developments in national and international commerce, sex and gendered notions of childhood innocence and agency, and finally sex and new visions of freedom. Although the collection includes a certain methodological diversity that ranges from ethnographies to close readings of case proceedings and legal decisions to the insights gained by work in activist politics, the works share a social-scientific perspective. Certain of the essays deserve acknowledgment, as they either provide much-needed empirical context for what have become academic truisms—for example, the notion that legal representation contradictorily is both desirable and limiting—or offer compelling new critical insight. Paisley Currah and Shannon Minter's "Unprincipled Exclusions: The Struggle to Achieve Judicial and Legislative Equality for Transgender People" explores both the representational legal complexity that faces transgendered people and the outright hostility of the state that often trumps efforts at securing social justice. Similarly, pieces by Laura Augutín, Julia O'Connell Davidson, and Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor provide a nuanced look at both the women who work in various aspects of the sex industry and the groups of men who employ their services. Wendy Chapkis's critical reading of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 sharply and eloquently exposes the act's underlying hostility toward "poor women, undocumented workers, and prostitutes" (64). The editors provide two of the strongest pieces in the collection. Bernstein's analysis of "bounded authenticity" (114) as a commodified experience made available by market capitalism certainly offers a challenge to traditional moralistic debates over sexuality. I also found Schaffner's analysis of the contradictory pressures placed on notions of children's consent revelatory.

There are faults with the collection. Historical claims and associations in some of the pieces are overgeneral, if not dubious. The style of certain essays at times seems discipline specific and at other times heavy-handed. To my mind, these faults are in a sense minor. The perils of our contemporary moment cast a more ominous shadow over the authors' project and merit comment. Since the time of the initial conference in 2000 and the publication of this volume in 2005, George Bush and his administration have launched a perpetual war on terror that promises to transform the institutions of the liberal state—the most recent example being the thuggish attempt of the executive branch to secure the power to conduct domestic wiretapping campaigns without judicial or congressional oversight—as well as the meanings of the Jacobin principles that this collection so vigorously critiques and promotes. I have had the uncanny experience of completing this review while listening to President Bush's 2006 State of the Union address. Even as I found myself compelled by the final piece of the collection, "Sex and Freedom," by Janet R. Jakobsen and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy...