Review: Halperin, David M., and Trevor Hoppe, editors. The War on Sex.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: When I moved to Miami, Florida in 2008 as an eager anti-rape activist and academic-in-training, I was confronted by the “scene under the Julia Tuttle Causeway” that Roger Lancaster documents in his contribution to David M. Halperin and Trevor Hoppe’s necessary 2017 edited collection The War on Sex (Duke University Press, 92). Due to the now iconic 1,000 feet laws which still prohibit “all sex offenders from living within a thousand feet” from places “where children gather,” there was a “small camp of sex offenders [who] took up residency under the Miami bridge” (ibid.). What made this cohabitation even stranger was that the Miami authorities “charged with monitoring sex offenders allowed” the illegal squatting, “because they could find no other place for the men to live” (92-93). By 2009, “the camp had swelled to as many as 140 squatters” (92). This compelling, confusing scene of abjection was essential to forming my abolitionist politics and reorienting the way I thought and spoke out against sexual violence, sexual offence laws, and the carceral state.