Chapter 7 - The Durability of Affect and the Ageing of Gay Male Queer Theory

Summary

The work of Guy Hocquenghem is at the beginning of modern theorization of sexuality: it is part of the wave of theory that emerges in France after May 1968; and it is republished as the second title in the first year of Duke UP’s ‘Series Q’ in 1993. This chapter considers the affective charge of his writing, as it is located in his style and its mannered affectedness, and in its historical context within the French left as it attempts to articulate class, race, and gender in 1970s France. His queerness inheres less in a particular kind of affect, such as a particular relation to shame, than in the division between feeling mutually with others and feeling ‘in relation’. Feeling back into the affective intensity of Hocquenghem’s moment may offer resources for contemporary queer thought, in ways that thinking about queer theory does not.