The Right to Sex

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What to expect

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
BLACKWELL'S BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022

Essential lessons on the world we live in, from one of our greatest young thinkers – a guide to what everybody is talking about today

Unparalleled and extraordinary . . . A bracing revivification of a crucial lineage in feminist writing’ JIA TOLENTINO

‘I believe Amia Srinivasan’s work will change the world’ KATHERINE RUNDELL

‘Rigorously researched, but written with such spark and verve. The best non-fiction book I have read this year’ PANDORA SYKES

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How should we talk about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart.

Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity – its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power – we need to move beyond ‘yes and no’, wanted and unwanted.

We need to interrogate the fraught relationships between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. We need to rethink sex as a political phenomenon.

Searching, trenchant and extraordinarily original, The Right to Sex is a landmark examination of the politics and ethics of sex in this world, animated by the hope of a different one.

Critics Review

  • The best book I’ve read recently … Incredible

    Emily Ratajkowski
  • Quietly dazzling … A brilliant, rigorous book. [Srinivasan] coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order

    New York Times
  • I’ve thoroughly audited why anyone should skip The Right to Sex, and I couldn’t think of any reasons. Srinavasan’s work is too interesting to be perfect. It’s superb

    Irish Times
  • A daring feminist collection . . . Srinivasan accomplishes what she sets out to do: deliver a treatise both ambivalent and discomfiting, one which reveals the inadequacies in what we had imagined to be solutions

    Guardian
  • Sex has always been a minefield, but surely never more than now. In The Right to Sex, Srinivasan shows us mines I barely knew existed

    Sunday Times
  • To say that Srinivasan’s challenging, complex, and – for some – controversial essays are a must-read is a colossal understatement

    DAZED

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