Sex Panic and the Punitive State

One evening, while watching the news, Roger N. Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.

• The War on Sex
• In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence
• Protecting Our Kids?: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us
• Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America
• Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventive State
• Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics
• Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice
• Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent
• The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture
• How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century)