In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk by Michael GillMegan A. Dean (bio)Review of Michael Gill, Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk (Fordham University Press, 2023)In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mundane activity of eating with or near others became physically hazardous and normatively fraught. Nourishing oneself outside one's home could raise serious risks to one's health and wellbeing, and was suddenly subject to (...) new policies and prohibitions aimed at minimizing harm and liability. The decision to eat out demanded personal calculations of risk and benefit, as well as interpersonal negotiation, sometimes prompting contentious conversations about the realities of disease transmission and our moral responsibilities. For many people, coming to think about eating outside the home as a pressing and significant threat to health and life was a radical shift. Yet, as Michael Gill's Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk details, the experience of eating meals as risking lethal consequences, demanding active personal risk management (including knowledge and negotiation of laws and policies), and straining important interpersonal relationships, is quite familiar to those living with food allergies.Allergic Intimacies offers a rich and generative exploration of the challenges of living with food allergies in the United States. A disability studies scholar, Gill frames the book as an examination of the "meanings" of food allergy from an intersectional perspective that centers both disability and race (ix). The book analyses various cultural representations of and narratives about food allergy, and traces the health effects of social and institutional structures, policies, and practices, while interweaving these findings with Gill's personal experiences with nut allergies. The focus throughout is on IgE-mediated food allergies, the sort which can cause anaphylaxis and which are exemplified by peanut allergies. The book's central claim is that common individualistic approaches to food allergy—approaches that emphasize personal and familial responsibility for allergy management—are inadequate, failing to address the systemic and structural issues that significantly disadvantage food-allergic people in marginalized groups in the U.S., especially Black people. These structural [End Page 421] issues include barriers to accessing not only food and medicine, but also the social and economic resources necessary to advocate for food allergy needs.The book contains a preface, introduction, and brief conclusion, along with four main chapters. The introduction presents a medical and epidemiological overview of food allergies, including various hypotheses about the apparent increase in the prevalence of food allergy in recent decades. It also discusses four "scenarios" to motivate the need to move beyond an individualistic, "single-axis" (i.e., non-intersectional) analysis of food allergy: access to epinephrine injectors (8-14), food industry allergen labelling practices (14-16), airline food allergen policies (16-18), and the treatment of food allergies on The Great British Bake Off (18-23). The first chapter, "Relational Food Allergy, Immunity, and Environments," explores responsibilities toward those who have food allergies and other dietary constraints, discussing themes of risk management, identity, and the ethics and politics of allergen-free spaces, including shared meals, schools, and airplanes. The second chapter, "Nut-Free Squirrels and Princesses with Peanut Allergies: Food Allergies, Identity, and Children's Books," offers a critical analysis of children's books about food allergies, suggesting that most English-language books center white boys with peanut allergies whose experiences reflect significant economic and social privilege. These children's books largely ignore challenges experienced by many marginalized families, such as the need to fight to have food allergies recognized and accommodated by schools, pushback from community members resistant to making such accommodations, and difficulty accessing allergen-free foods. The third chapter, "Allergic Reactions through Fluid Exchanges," raises questions about the ethics of kissing and sex for food-allergic people. Because allergens can be passed through bodily fluids, food allergies complicate what counts as "safe" intimate physical contact (57-58). Gill draws upon Mia Mingus' concept of "access intimacy" (2011) to argue for an ethics of interdependence that centers communication and consent while making space for pleasure and spontaneity. The final chapter, "You Ate What? Intentionality, Accidents, and Death," explores discourses of risk, responsibility, and blame in relation to those who intentionally... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics by Hallie LibertoJonathan Ichikawa (bio)Review of Hallie Liberto, Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022)Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics offers a framework for conceptualizing permissive consent. The book is a philosopher's work of philosophy. Although it touches on non-ideal social realities, especially sexism, it is most centrally (...) a contribution to a quite abstract literature in normative ethics, following in the tradition of scholars like David Owens, Heidi Hurd, Alan Wertheimer, and Tom Dougherty—it may have a few too many Φs and abstractions to be accessible to and comfortable for many people outside the analytic philosophical tradition. The central approach to permission and consent is general—not specific to sexual consent—although some discussions are specific to sex.I have always appreciated and learned from Liberto's work on this topic, and I was excited to read her new book. As I'd hoped, it exhibits fresh and interesting moral and philosophical instincts, and advances plausible and interesting ideas. I did feel, however, that it was sometimes more difficult than one might hope to identify exactly what those ideas are. At key points, I found myself wanting more precision or explanation. I am not the kind of philosopher who shuns abstraction—I value both the concrete/non-ideal and the theoretical/abstract. And I'm not afraid of all those Φs. But as I see it, the point of writing in that mode—the reason it can be worth the cost in accessibility and style—is the ability to express and examine complex ideas with a high degree of precision. As I was reading this book, I found that much of my own intellectual contribution centered around attempts to interpret Liberto's ideas and technicalities before I was in a good position to learn from them. This was a bit of a shame, because there are intriguing ideas in this book, well worthy of consideration. I'll give my own reconstruction of a few of them below, along with some critical engagement.1. domain authorityLiberto posits that there are certain domains over which people hold a special kind of moral authority, which she calls "domain authority" (38). Someone would wrong you if they acted in your domains outside of your normative control. For example, you have domain authority over sexual contact with your body; any actions by others within that domain must [End Page 429] be in accordance with your moral control, or they are violative. Liberto typically uses the following abbreviations to discuss domain authority: S is a person who may or may not be giving P permission to Φ, which is a potential action that P might perform. Φ here is always an action within D, a particular domain of S's moral authority. Since Φ is within D, Φ would wrong S if P Φ'd without S's appropriate authorization.In the case of sexual domain rights, D is S's bodily sexual domain; P would wrong S by performing some act Φ within that domain outside of S's authority. (Φ might be sexually penetrating S, for example.) The framework generalizes. D might be my home, and Φ could stand for potential actions within my home for which any S would need my permission: entering it, say, or drilling a hole in the wall. I'll follow Liberto's use for these abbreviations. Note that Φ will always refer to an act within S's domain D.One of the more distinctive contributions of Liberto's framework is her insistence that subjects retain their domain authority, even as they exercise it to permit action within their domains (42). When S consents to Φ, Liberto says, S does not waive any rights against Φ. If they did, Φ would no longer be part of S's domain of authority D. It is possible to waive rights in this way—this is what happens with property transfers. But Liberto argues that things are quite different for permissive consent (61). If I invite P into my home, or permit P to touch me sexually, they may do so without violating... (shrink)