The ‘post’ in the past Queer radicalism - in the spirit of Stonewall

Abstract

According to a famous image of Walter Benjamin, the Angel of History is propelled into the future by a violent storm blowing from paradise, but keeps his face turned toward the wreckages of the past. In times of crisis looking forwards seems to be compulsory: we are asked to sacrify our present for the future, and at the same time the future is paradoxically coinceived as but a repetition of the present. If on the other hand we try to be maverick or angelical enough to look backwards, we may discover that the 'post' of our democratic politics may be already in our past. This pages will focus on gay liberation mouvements of the Seventies in order to investigate how their radicalism represents an alternative to the progressivism of present mouvements for the civil rights of gay, lesbian and trans people.

Keywords: Queer Theories, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, Lee Edelman.