„Sie ham mir ein Gefühl geklaut...“: Queer-feministische Perspektiven auf Bewegungen zwischen Sex und Gefühl

This article sketches a genealogy of how the opposition between sex and feeling has been mobilized by sexual emancipatory politics. The authors aim at better understanding the debate around the ‘affective turn’ within Queer Studies and the controversy on the distinction of emotion and affect. We argue that these efforts work through the mind/body dichotomy, assuming different positions in each case. The gay liberation movement of the 1970s claimed to free bodily needs and condemned the idealization of same sex love, by which the post-war homophile movement distanced itself from sex. In the 1980s sex positive feminists and parts of the lesbian movement accused their forerunners of having demonized and repressed sex as a male domain. Since the turn of the millennium the debates on the recognition of homosexual civil unions and parenthood, on the one hand, and the insistence on the subversive power of the sexual, on the other hand, have introduced further variants of this dualism. We advocate historicizing and relativizing these theoretical and political oppositions, yet without abandoning the moving force of radical alterity