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14 - The Social Construction of Sexuality and Bodily Autonomy

from Section V - Regulating Sexuality and Bodily autonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Celia Wells
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
Oliver Quick
Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Summary

The state, through law, exercises a significant influence over bodily autonomy in general and the construction of sexuality in particular. Laws regulate, for example, the age of consent to sexual intercourse, and the nature of consent required for medical examinations, cosmetic and ritual procedures such as tattooing and circumcision, and for procedures in relation to childbirth and reproduction. Criminal laws embody norms of sexual practice and regulate the right of citizens to engage in sexual activity which is not consistent with those norms. Legal interventions in these areas inevitably confront the blurred social boundaries between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ conduct, and raise in a particularly vivid way questions about the proper scope of criminal law.

Steven Box 1983 Power, Crime and Mystification (Tavistock), p. 121

Nearly one hundred years ago, Durkheim wrote that suicide is ‘merely the exaggerated form of common practices’ and that it ‘appears quite another matter once its unbroken connection is recognised with acts, on the one hand of courage and devotion, on the other of imprudence and clear neglect’. This relatively simple, but radical idea – that there is considerable overlap between deviance and convention, rather than the former being distinctly different and opposite to the latter – inspired later generations of sociologists…[A] similar lesson can be obtained from considering how ‘normal’ sexual encounters merge imperceptibly into sexual assaults of which rape is the most serious, and how the former provide the ingredients out of which the latter can emerge.

Type
Chapter
Information
Lacey, Wells and Quick Reconstructing Criminal Law
Text and Materials
, pp. 477 - 488
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Cowan, Sharon and Hunter, Rosemary (eds.) Choice and Consent: Feminist Engagements with Law and Subjectivity (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Peregrine translation, 1976).
Ebtehaj, Fatemeh, Jackson, Emily, Richards, Martin and Day-Sclater, Shelley (eds.) Regulating Autonomy: Sex, Reproduction and the Family (Hart, 2009).Google Scholar
Plummer, Ken, Intimate Citizenship: Personal Decisions and Public Dialogues (WashingtonUniversity Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Smart, Carol, Law, Crime and Sexuality (Sage, 1995).Google Scholar

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