The Feminist and The Sex Offender:Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

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224 pages / April 2020 / 9781788733403

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April 2020 / 9781788733427

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In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice.

With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the state’s unjust, ineffective, and soul-destroying response to it on the other. Is it possible to confront the culture of abuse? Is it possible to hold harm-doers accountable without recourse to a criminal justice system that redoubles injuries, fails survivors, and retrenches the conditions that made such abuse possible?

Drawing on interviews, extensive research, reportage, and history, The Feminist and the Sex Offender develops an intersectional feminist approach to ending sexual violence. It maps with considerable detail the unjust sex offender regime while highlighting the alternatives we urgently need.

Reviews

One of our most important scholar/activists, Erica Meiners always challenges us to engage critically with the complex and sometimes surprising ideological strategies that bolster the expanding carceral state

Angela Davis, University of California Santa Cruz

In their timely and compelling book, Levine and Meiners ask: How do we, as feminists, address sexual violence without expanding and strengthening the violent carceral state? The Feminist and the Sex Offender dives into the history—and consequences—of relying on policing and prisons to address sexual violence.

Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars

Systematically dismantling the paradigm of punishment, the authors provide a new lens of hope and political clarity, melding feminism and abolition into a powerful manifesto of liberation.

James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration

Read all 7 reviews

For all who desire a humane future, The Feminist and the Sex Offender offers a bracing liberationist and abolitionist dream of freedom and throws down a practical and heady challenge.
JoAnn Wypijewski, author of What We Don’t Talk about when We Talk about #MeToo
This book confirms everything I believe in as a sex crimes expert, restorative justice practitioner, and survivor of sexual violence.
Alissa R. Ackerman, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, California State University, Fullerton
Levine and Meiners show how the contingent now called “carceral” feminists (from the same root as incarcerate), spurred by rage and an eagerness for retribution — and by the exhilaration of “at last we’re getting the bastards” — has played a large role in expanding the prison industrial complex, along with that cruel sex offender registry, precisely at the time that other feminists and civil rights activists are trying to rein it in.
Dr. Carol Tavris, Skeptic
Pulls back the curtain on the history of the sex offender registry, its roots and its injustices, and how we can strive for a future with neither sexual harm nor state violence.
Lyra Walsh Fuchs, Dissent

For all who desire a humane future, The Feminist and the Sex Offender offers a bracing liberationist and abolitionist dream of freedom and throws down a practical and heady challenge.
JoAnn Wypijewski, author of What We Don’t Talk about when We Talk about #MeToo
This book confirms everything I believe in as a sex crimes expert, restorative justice practitioner, and survivor of sexual violence.
Alissa R. Ackerman, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, California State University, Fullerton
Levine and Meiners show how the contingent now called “carceral” feminists (from the same root as incarcerate), spurred by rage and an eagerness for retribution — and by the exhilaration of “at last we’re getting the bastards” — has played a large role in expanding the prison industrial complex, along with that cruel sex offender registry, precisely at the time that other feminists and civil rights activists are trying to rein it in.
Dr. Carol Tavris, Skeptic
Pulls back the curtain on the history of the sex offender registry, its roots and its injustices, and how we can strive for a future with neither sexual harm nor state violence.
Lyra Walsh Fuchs, Dissent