Unsafe Words

Reading Unsafe Words and the ways the various essays reckon with the #MeToo movement filled a need that had been lacking, a return to the hashtag and a pulling apart of what its focus had become. The essays in this book take a deep-dive into multiple facets of consent, grapple with white supremacy and mass incarceration and carceral attitudes within the queer community, talk about repair after harm, and reflect on situations where it’s unclear whether or how or to whom harm occurred. I found the book challenging in the best ways at times.'  Autostraddle

With this dazzling collection of meditations and provocations from leading scholars in the field of sexuality studies, Unsafe Words offers something we desperately need: a place to ask the queer questions about consent that dare not speak their names. Can consent be queered? What happens when queer and feminist sexual politics clash over questions of consent? How does the prevailing consent paradigm perpetuate the harms of the criminal legal system and thwart more just possibilities for redress? This is a must-read for both activists and scholars of sexual ethics alike.'  Cati Connell, author of A Few Good Gays: The Gendered Compromises behind Military Inclusion

Unsafe Words provides many urgently needed, generative, and useful ways to think about sexual ethics beyond the punitive, and lets the kinds of people whose sex lives were never destigmatized (or even decriminalized) lead readers in asking better questions. Steven W. Thrasher, Anarchist Review of Books