Doing Justice to Guy Hocquenghem
Desire, Politics and the Struggle Beyond Identity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19217025 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Srđan Đurđević (0000-0003-2955-3541, Université Rennes 2, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-28 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-22 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Homosexuality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0091-8369 • E-ISSN: 1540-3602 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00918369.2026.2659676 |
| PMID | 42015750 |
| OpenAlex | W7155211976 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
This article reexamines the political and theoretical project of Guy Hocquenghem, a key yet often misread figure of post-1968 radical thought. Moving beyond the standard reception that limits him to early gay liberation, I argue that Hocquenghem elaborates a sustained critique of identity, community, and normalization that remains urgently relevant today. Through a close engagement with Anti-Oedipus, I show how his analysis of homosexual desire operates as a critique of Oedipal subjectivation and as a precondition for revolutionary politics. The article then revisits the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire (FHAR) as a "war machine" whose collective experimentations-rather than any doctrine-embodied a politics of desire irreducible to identity affirmation. In the mid-1970s, Hocquenghem turned this critique against emerging gay normalizations, consumerist cultures, and legalist politics, defending instead the minoritarian force of delinquent homosexuality. Finally, I explore his late writings on foreignness, where desire becomes a transversal movement that unsettles national, sexual, and subjective boundaries. Hocquenghem's work, I contend, offers conceptual tools that challenge contemporary queer politics oriented around recognition and fixed or additive conceptions of identity (including certain reductive uses of intersectionality), insisting on a politics of alterity, drift, and desubjectivation. Re-reading Hocquenghem today is not an antiquarian exercise but a way to rethink the politics of sexuality beyond identity
Human sexuality · Identity (music) · Identity politics · Normalization (sociology) · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre
| Highly cited | No |
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