Todd Shepard engages with the two discursive framings of “Arab men” that prevailed in France in the 1970s: the right-wing version of a supposed “Arab Invasion” and the left-wing version depicting Arab men as revolutionary heroes. In doing so, he turns his focus to the writer Pierre Guyotat, whose work seems to fall outside of these schemata. Shepard traces how the figure of “an Algerian” disappears from Guyotat’s autobiographical accounts in the late 1970s of his childhood rape. According to Shepard, this disappearance is due to Guyotat’s discussions with the artist Mostéfa Djadjam. By showing how Djadjam’s interventions changed Guyotat’s writing on the connection between violence, sex, and colonialism, Shepard also sheds light on Maghrebi perspectives on the sex-radical debates in 1970s France. In this way, Shepard argues, the “Arab man,” who only ever appears as a fantasy in left- and right-wing debates, is transformed from an imagined object into a subject.

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.