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Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.): Radical Desires

Hauke Branding (ed.), Julian Volz (ed.)

Radical Desires
French Gay Liberation and Anticolonial Critique

Softcover, 192 pages

Date of publication: 25.08.2025

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

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Hauke Branding

Hauke Branding is part of the research training group Cultures of Critique at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research focuses on the history (of theory) of gay liberation, critical theory and the history of social movements. Together with Lukas Betzler, he reedited a German edition of Guy Hocquenghem’s Das homosexuelle Begehren (2019) and co-edited a dossier on 1970s French gay liberation (2021). Currently, he is working on a history of ideas of the radical West German gay liberation movement.

Julian Volz

Julian Volz is a curator, and research associate in the graduate programme Cultures of Critique at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In his dissertation, he is researching contemporary artistic practices that are referring to the (cultural-)revolutionary era of independent Algeria in the 1960s. Other research interests include Third Cinema, Queer Contemporary Art from the SWANA region and modernist Art in North Africa. Together with Meike Gerber and Emanuel Kapfinger he edited an anthology on Hans-Jürgen Krahl (2022), who was one of the leading theorists of the movement of 1968 in West Germany.
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