Book Review

Pamela Haag's Consent performs a complex and fruitful wedding of critical legal studies and intellectual-political-cultural history in order to denaturalize key foundational terms in the contemporary discourse of sexual rights in the United States. Haag's historical arguments are fascinating and clearly important, and her work offers crucial insights to feminist theorists and activists and to scholars engaged in writing histories of sexuality.

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Both in its methodology and in its specific arguments, Consent stands against the too-common practice of segregating the history of sexuality from a mainstream history of American "public" life. Though this work centers on sexual rights, it is equally a history of "the American culture of liberalism." Haag is adamant in her insistence that "economic, political, and sexual thought in American liberal culture change interdependently, largely through their shared moorings in free contract and a language of violence and coercion." It is not only that our notions of sexual rights evolve in response to changes in the theory and practice of liberalism but that liberalism itself is negotiated and recast through notions of (hetero)sexuality, especially in the intersection with ideas about race, citizenship, labor, and the social contract.

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