Today, mainstream public discourse is preoccupied with the question of how law should – or shouldn’t – regulate sex, sexualities, gender identities and gender expressions. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the achievement of formal equality for sexual minorities and various movements to involve the state in the wider regulation of gender, the relationship of sex and gender to the body politik is firmly on the policy table. In this seminar, students will be invited to examine sex, sexuality and gender as sites of politics. How and under what social and material conditions can sex be politically productive? What are the benefits, and costs, of regulating gender? What kind of freedom, including sexual freedom, is advanced by the formal equality paradigm? As a site of taboo and transgression, sex inflects all areas of public life, challenging the parameters of socially valuable behaviour. What can sex tell us about the good life and how it can be achieved?
This seminar will explore the relationship between cultural shifts and legal reform, asking how we might reframe law’s traditionally conservative and restrictive approach to sexual regulation. Among other topics, we will critically evaluate recent feminist policy reforms and pending policy proposals in the realm of sexual assault and sexual harassment, from both a domestic and international perspective. Students will explore global debates over sex work and sex trafficking, and the current state of law reform with respect to offenses related to commercial sexual services in Canada. We will examine the utility of consent as an operative framework within which to adjudicate sexual assault and related offenses in the context of both criminal law and campus regulations. Using a historical lens, we will unpack the costs and benefits of using law as a technology of governance in relation to various sorts of sex, including gay and queer sex, and BDSM. We will read an array of feminist, queer and critical race theory texts and students will learn to apply these theoretical frames as tools with which to critically assess concrete policy questions and legal problems. Overall, students will be encouraged to evaluate what constitutes ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ social attitudes to sex and gender and how law can foster, or contest, these attitudes.
Method of Evaluation: (1) Seminar Participation: 25%, (2) Research paper: 75% (7,000 words)