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Despite a historically rich tradition of thinking about the relation between sexuality, desire and revolution, there is little engagement with desire's radicality today. This volume attends to the radicality of desire as a starting point for overcoming heteropatriarchal capitalism by turning to the specific radical homosexual critique as it was first formulated in France in the 1970s in the writings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire, as well as in the conceptions of their most important protagonists, Monique Wittig and Guy Hocquenghem. Radical Desires seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries.
At the same time, the volume is also interested in intersectionally expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. As French gay liberation activists' relations to North African men were often problematic, several contributions engage with the latent orientalist and racist tropes that appear in the movement's writings. By aiming to go beyond a mere historicization of these ambivalences and exploring which contemporary problems appear in a different light as a result, Radical Desires highlights the (dis-)continuous relationship between current debates and those in 1970s France.
To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, the volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on Queer liberation in a transnational context.
With contributions by Friederike Beier, Antoine Idier, Émilie Notéris, Lukas Betzler, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Sido Lansari, Todd Shepard and Julian Volz.
List of contents
9 - 26 Introduction (Hauke Branding, Julian Volz)27 - 48 Materialist Queerfeminism, the Queering of Dialectics, and the Sexless Society: A Tribute to Monique Wittig (Friederike Beier)49 - 78 "Drift" and "Scattering": The Pluralities of Guy Hocquenghem (Antoine Idier)79 - 88 Holding the (Foot)note: Monique Wittig and Audre Lorde, a Missed Encounter? (Émilie Notéris)89 - 106 Against Unambiguity: Guy Hocquenghem's Writing of Desire (Lukas Betzler)107 - 130 Let Me Be Yours: Notes on the Intrinsic Queerness of "One Thousand and One Nights" (Mohammad Shawky Hassan)131 - 144 Où partent les oiseaux, après le dernier ciel? (Sido Lansari)145 - 172 Searching for New Languages, Searching for Minor Voices in the Archive: Notes on Sido Lansari's Artistic Practice (Julian Volz)173 - 200 What Mostéfa Djadjam Taught Pierre Guyotat about Language: Algerian Perspectives and the Writing of Sexual Revolution in 1970s France (Todd Shepard)
About the author
Hauke Branding is part of the research training group Cultures of Critique at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He was coeditor of a German edition of Guy Hocquenghem's
Das homosexuelle Begehren and a dossier on 1970s French gay liberation.
Julian Volz is a curator and research associate in the graduate program Cultures of Critique at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is coeditor of an anthology on Hans-Jürgen Krahl, who was one of the leading theorists of the movement of 1968 in West Germany.
