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Homosexual Desire (French: Le désir homosexuel) is a 1972 book by French intellectual Guy Hocquenghem. The book is polemical and focuses on the desire of homosexual men, the power of the phallus as a cultural symbol, and sexual liberation. It was the first book in the queer theoretic movement of asociality.

Background

Guy Hocquenghem was a 25-year-old intellectual who founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire, a radical French organization that opposed standard political organization and disassociated itself with making demands for the future.^[1] He was active in the New Left and its internal disagreements over the nature of homosexuality, as well as the psychoanalytic theoretical scene in France.^[2] He was a close friend of René Schérer, a French theorist who sought to eliminate negative cultural attitudes toward pedophilia and child sexuality.^[3]

Publication and contents

Homosexual Desire, originally Le désir homosexuel,^[4] was written by Guy Hocquenghem and published in the French language by Editions Universitaires in 1972.^[5] The book was translated into English in 1978 by Daniella Dangoor;^[4] this translation was reprinted in the United States in 1993.^[6] In 2017, the book was translated into Spanish as El deseo homosexual and Spanish critical theorist Paul B. Preciado contributed an afterword.^[7]

The book is polemical and sought the liberation of homosexual men over their assimilation.^[8] The primary aim of the book is to reduce the symbolic value of the phallus over society; for Hocquenghem, the dominance of the phallus leads to the subordination of women and homosexual men, and many social problems can be traced to the phallus.^[9] He argues that homosexual desire – inward feelings of same-sex attraction that are at once produced and repressed by heterosexist society^[A] – can be political, and that like the civil unrest in the May 68 movement, it can lead to the liberation of homosexual men.^[11] In his argument, homosexual desire is focused on the anus (a valueless organ),^[12] so it cannot be concerned with futurity.^[1] He argues that the repression of homosexual desire – not the death drive of Freud's psychoanalysis – leads to men lashing out in masochist fits of rage in attempts to liberate themselves (in modern parlance, internalised homophobia).^[10] Hocquenghem's notion of sexual liberation also included children; he argued that children are oppressed by society for their sexuality, and that adult–child sex is not an inherently abusive practice.^[13]

Reception and legacy

The publication of Homosexual Desire preceded Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality by four years, another influential book in the study of desire and homosexual identity.^[6] It was the first queer theoretic work about queer antisociality,^[B] a theory – advanced by writers like Lee Edelman – declaring homosexuality incompatible with many of society's values.^[14]

Notes and references

Notes

^ Homosexuality as a distinct clinical pathology and identity was, for Hocquenghem, created in the 1800s. It was developed as a category to exclude certain groups of people from power and to maintain the social order.^[10]
^ The first work is sometimes identified as Leo Bersani's essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?".

Citations

^ ^a ^b Bernini 2017, p. 10.
^ Bernini 2017, p. 60.
^ Paternotte 2014, pp. 265–267.
^ ^a ^b Schehr 1996, p. 140.
^ Penney 2004, p. 67; Shively 1978, p. 3.
^ ^a ^b Penney 2004, p. 67.
^ Bernini 2017, p. 83.
^ Bernini 2017, p. 60; Schehr 1996, p. 143.
^ Schehr 1996, p. 143.
^ ^a ^b Bernini 2017, p. 57.
^ Bernini 2017; Schehr 1996, p. 57.
^ Everett 2018, p. 120.
^ Paternotte 2014, p. 267.
^ Moore, Brintnall & Marchal 2018, pp. 9, 32.

Bibliography

Bernini, Lorenzo (2017). Queer apocalypses: Elements of antisocial theory. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783319433615.
Everett, Julin (2018). Le queer impérial. Francopolyphonies. Brill. ISBN 9789004365544.
Moore, Stephen D.; Brintnall, Kent L.; Marchal, Joseph A. (2018). "Introduction – Queer disorientations: Four turns and a twist". Sexual disorientations: Queer temporalities, affects, theologies (first ed.). Fordham University Press.
Paternotte, David (2014). "Pedophilia, homosexuality and gay and lesbian activism". In Hekma, Gert; Giami, Alain (eds.). Sexual revolutions. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137321459.
Penney, James (2004). "The schizoanalytic protest: Homosexual Desire revisited". Angelaki. 9 (1): 67–83. doi:10.1080/0969725042000232405. S2CID 151857631.
Schehr, Lawrence R. (1996). "Defense and illustration of gay liberation". Yale French Studies (90): 139–152. doi:10.2307/2930361. JSTOR 2930361.
Shively, Charley (11 November 1978). "Keeping Stonewall ... alive". Book Review. Gay Community News. Vol. 6, no. 16. pp. 3, 7.