Radical Feminism and the Politics of Desire

Abstract Thinking about desire has been integral to radical feminism. My goal is to revive a critical politics of desire informed by the history of radical feminist thought: one sensitive to social determinants of romantic and sexual attraction and open to the possibility that our desires can be radically transformed outside of oppressive environments. To do this, I reconstruct radical feminist strategies for navigating politically problematic desires, including demonstrating that recent scepticism toward this project has underestimated its available resources. In particular, I build upon attempts to reconfigure the social contexts in which romantic and sexual desires are formed, including recommending cultural and economic interventions which influence who is seen as desirable. Radical feminists also recognized potential harms of questioning desire, including the problem of intense sexual moralism. In dialogue with this history, I propose that changes in the infrastructure of desire-formation are often better placed to avoid the unproductive shame and defensiveness associated with a critique of desire. So too, I suggest that attempts to remake our public sexual culture ought to incorporate feminist insights about the importance of imagination, experimentation, and open discussion.