The New Sex Wars: Toward a Feminism with Teeth is a sharp, thoughtful intervention into contemporary feminist debates around sex, violence, and pleasure.

In The New Sex Wars: Toward a Feminism with Teeth, Raechel Anne Jolie delivers an urgent intervention into contemporary feminist debates. The right's drive to dominate America persistently returns to questions of gender and sexuality that have long been the focus of feminists: transgender rights, sex work, abortion, kink, and transformative justice. For right-wingers, this looks like the re-criminalization of trans people, whorephobia and the repression of sex workers, the liquidation of reproductive rights, and the bolstering of an extremely punitive justice system.

Many of these same topics were a battlefield for feminists during the sex wars of the 1980s. Jolie traces how earlier feminist stances continue to shape our current cultural landscape, and offers a framework to move out of stale debates and into truly radical paths forward. With nuance and rigor, she unpacks sex and gender phenomena at the root, demonstrating how the unresolved tensions of the past can inspire more expansive futures. Ultimately, The New Sex Wars invites readers to consider how a commitment to sexual liberation is essential to resisting the global rise of authoritarianism.

Raechel Anne Jolie is a writer and educator based in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Bitch, Teen Vogue, and In These Times, among other publications. Jolie is also the editor and cocreator of The Prison Arcana tarot zine, made in collaboration with incarcerated artists. Her memoir Rust Belt Femme received recognition in NPR's Favorite Books of 2020, was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award, and was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction. She also publishes a weekly newsletter called Radical Love Letters, in which she writes about politics, pop culture, and feelings. You can subscribe here: raechelannejolie.substack.com.