Queering the French Sexual Revolution: Reflecting on the Use of Categories of Identity in the History of Sexual Politics

Building on my research on the history of radical sexual politics in France between 1945 and 1970, this paper aims to demonstrate that the history of sexuality requires a queer approach. Nowadays, the term queer has two meanings depending on whether it characterizes an identity or an approach. While these two meanings are related, they are very much in tension. As Jeffrey Weeks explains, ‘some self-defined queer historians see their practice as a break with lesbian and gay history; others see strong lines of continuity’ (2012). Indeed, doing queer history can mean going against approaches that take sexual and gender identities and labels as obvious categories, ready to be applied to any study of the history of sexual politics. The question of the use of categories of gender and sexuality identities has been at the heart of methodological and theoretical debates around the emergence of gender politics history in the late 1980s and of queer history in the 2010s (Scott, 1986; Scott, 1992; Downs, 1993; Weeks, 2012; Krylova, 2016). My call to queer the sexual revolution maps on the two meanings of the word queer. First, it means bringing out queer voices and recovering the importance of those intellectuals and activists who did not conform to the heterosexual norm. This is important because the sexual politics formulated before the 1970s in France tend to be described as ‘male and heterosexual’ (Coffin, 2020). Uncovering queer voices, therefore, reshapes the usual narrative about the pre-feminist and pre-LGBT sexual revolution. I am not just aiming at recovering marginalized voices, but also at writing the political history of the sexual revolution in a way that does not attach strict categories of gender and sexual identities to the actors I am studying. Indeed, pre-1970s French sexual politics did not rely on notions of identity, and historians of sexual politics, therefore, need to think beyond the paradigm of identity to understand their peculiarity. I argue that the absence of the rhetoric of identity in pre-1970s sexual politics is what led scholars to consider that these early sexual politics were dominated by heterosexual men. However, if we look closely at the intimate experiences of the activists and intellectuals who defended the sexual revolution between 1945 and 1970, we see that many of them had experiences that deviated from the gender expectations and sexual norms of the time. Moreover, if we look at their claims and their writings, they denote a complex relationship with feminism and gay activism, which shows they considered the issues faced by gay and lesbian people and women. French discussions on the sexual revolution before the 1970s offer a case study to critically reflect on how historians of sexual politics use categories of identity. It is this process of questioning the use of categories of identity that prevail in contemporary political analyses of sexual minorities that I call queering the sexual revolution.