Joseph Fischel is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  He received his PhD from the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago in 2011, and spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.  His research interests are in normative political theory, feminist and queer studies, public law, and the legal regulation of sex/gender/sexuality. He is currently working on two book manuscripts. The first, titled Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, interrogates how the figures of the child and the sex offender, and figurations of consent, organize contemporary understandings of sexual harm and freedom in the United States. The second, tentatively titled Selling Sex (and Justice) in Orleans Parish, examines the political campaign to declassify sex work as sex offense in Louisiana from multiple perspectives: ethnographic, queer theoretic, race critical, and sociolegal.  He has published articles in the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy, the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, Archives de politique criminelle, and on the website The Feminist Wire.  Essays on homonationalism and on sex work/sex offense in New Orleans are forthcoming. In 2012, he received the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. He is a committed fan of yoga, beaches, and mediocre legal television series.