„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.