Émilie Notéris traces a significant and controversial discussion in the history of feminism on the question of representation and the acknowledgement of perspectives of women of color. In 1979, both Monique Wittig and Audre Lorde took part in a colloquium in New York City marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Surprisingly, during her research, Notéris was unable to find any evidence of a meeting or interaction between these two enormously influential figures of the feminist movement. Because there was almost nothing to be found in the archives, Notéris follows this (possibly) missed encounter through the incipient and sometimes controversial debates on lesbian and Black feminism at the end of the 1970s.

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.