About

Identity politics is in crisis. The decade following the ‘transgender tipping point’ has yielded an explosion of queer and trans cultural representation, but also a potent media and political backlash, troubling straightforward conceptions of ‘progress’. Within this polarised setting, LGBTQ+ identities may only be affirmed or denied, leaving little space for more critical approaches towards ‘identity’ as a hegemonic discourse. While scholars have begun to re-evaluate how ‘identity’ emerged as a popular concept (Táíwò 2022), the intellectual heritage of 1970s gay liberationism has so far remained virtually unexplored. Against the allegation of identity-‘essentialism’ sometimes ascribed to queer theory’s gay predecessors, this project investigates the complex and critical development of gay ‘identity’ in and through the activist press in Britain, France, and Italy, across the decade following the political revolts of 1968. It explores whether and how gay-liberationist understandings of ‘identity’ can illuminate the contradictions underpinning today’s crisis of identity politics, within and beyond an LGBTQ+ context.

Grassroots print culture was a key site for what initially appears as such a contradiction: the critical problematisation of gay identity, at the same time and through the same intellectual currents as its positive construction. Significant amongst the inheritance of the ‘long ’68’ is the now widespread notion that the ‘lived experience’ of marginalised standpoints cultivates unique, politically consequential insight. Whilst advocating for the value of their ‘embodied knowledge’, however, gay liberationists simultaneously refuted any conception of sexual identity-categories as natural or fixed: gay ‘identity’ should be affirmed, but only as the first step towards its categorical destabilisation. This project investigates how these underexplored histories might equip activist presents to navigate the apparent paradox of both affirming *and* transcending LGBTQ+ identities – opening onto a reenlivened ‘imagining otherwise’ (Olufemi 2021), which could intervene critically and productively in the present identity-political impasse.