In his film Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?, the Egyptian director Mohammad Shawky Hassan undertakes a search for cinematic forms capable of expressing the language of love. The film is a contemporary queer musical that takes Arab folktales as its formal reference and Egyptian pop music as its primary sonic material. In his essay, after discussing One Thousand and One Nights and its specific forms of narration, Hassan comes back to his own film and reflects on its narrative structure. Based on his personal love diary, the film takes on the form of a One Thousand and One Nights tale, where stories playfully unfold through conversations between Shahrazad, ghosts of former lovers, and a narrator who never comes into view. Accordingly, through its multiplicity of forms, the film offers an alternative to the predominant representations of Arab gay men in the West, who are usually only seen through the prism of oppression.

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.