5 Embodying Liminality: Exploring the ‘Affects’ of Sexual Encounters in Backpacker and Volunteer Tourism

AbstractDespite mutual taboos against exogamy, memoirs and similar materials written by Jews from Yemen contain a number of anecdotes describing love affairs and sexual encounters between Muslims and Jews prior to the mass migration of the vast majority of Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949–50. These stories associate these liaisons with vulnerability, poverty, and marginalization. In them, sex and conversion to Islam are intrinsically connected, yet this interreligious intimacy leads not to resolution but to ongoing identity crises that persist beyond the community's realignment with a majority-Jewish society. The staging of the anecdotes in rural areas where shariʿa norms held only nominal sway, in watering places and hostels where strangers might interact, and at dusk, when identity is difficult to discern, heightened their ambiguity.

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Two Truths and a Lie: In re John Z. and Other Stories at the Juncture of Teen Sex and the Law

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1111/j.1747-4469.2012.01310.x ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 38 (02) ◽

pp. 364-402 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michelle Oberman

Keyword(s):

Contemporary Literature ◽

Adolescent Sexuality ◽

Two Truths ◽

Academic Literature ◽

Meaningful Relationship ◽

Depth Study ◽

The Subject ◽

The Law ◽

Sexual Encounters ◽

Criminal Justice Response

Laws governing adolescent sexuality are incoherent and chaotically enforced, and legal scholarship on the subject neither addresses nor remedies adolescents’ vulnerability in sexual encounters. To posit a meaningful relationship between the criminal law and adolescent sexual encounters, one must examine what we know about adolescent sexuality from both the academic literature and the adults who control the criminal justice response to such interactions. This article presents an in-depth study of In re John Z., a 2003 rape prosecution involving two seventeen-year-olds. Using this case, I explore the implications of the prosecution by interviewing a variety of experts and analyzing the contemporary literature on sexual norms among youth. I also relate a series of interviews conducted with the major players in the prosecution. Examining this case from a variety of perspectives permits a deeper understanding of how the law regulates adolescent sexual encounters and why it fails.

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