Book Review: Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework

Abstract

MeToo movement, in which people post their experiences of sexual abuse and sexual harassment with the hashtag #MeToo on various social media, has triggered fraught debates upon sex, consent, and justice. #MeToo movement provides a platform for different definitions of sexual consent battling with one another as consent is the central concern of permissible sexual behaviour. Additionally, in the absence of a carceral form of justice, #MeToo movement comes out as an informal communication channel. Therefore, how justice can be guaranteed under this circumstance becomes a prominent issue and has attracted attentions from various disciplines.Tina Sikka aims to address such an issue in her book Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework. Based on her professional knowledge in sexuality studies on consent, gender-based violence, and restorative justice, she proposes a brand-new framework of sexual ethics, i.e., 'pleasure and care-centered ethic of embodied and relational sexual Otherness' (p. 60). According to this framework, Sikka expects to settle problems of justice, offense, and harm emphasized in the social movement. She assumes that justice may be achieved through restorative and reparative alternatives when traditional carceral approach fails. Sikka is not the first scholar proposing restorative approaches upon gender-based violence; nevertheless, she panoramically analyzes all feminist thoughts and models of sex relations in #MeToo movement. Her innovative works of proposing a new framework of sex is a pioneering endorsement for applying the restorative approach to gender-based violence.This book can be divided into three parts. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 as Part I focus on previous feminist theories and Sikka's new model, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 as Part II elaborate on #MeToo movement and follow-up issues, and the last five chapters as Part III are five representative cases of #MeToo.In Part I, Sikka thoroughly examines the historical evolution of feminist waves and approaches to sexual relations. Sikka argues that sex is partly discursive, articulatable, and definable (p. 60)., so it can be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed (Cheng and Cheng, 2012). Law is one of the primary means in constructing sex and sexuality (Stychin, 2013). In Chapter 1, Sikka traces back to four feminist waves, and focuses on the evolvement of the discursive construction of sex and the conditions for desirable sex. The significant demands of #MeToo movement are embedded in specific feminist theories. For instance, digital feminism prevailing in the fourth wave feminism draws Book Reviews