A Comparative Investigation of the Post-war Hope in Revolutionary Sexuality

Abstract This article examines the politicization of sexuality in the post-war period through a comparative lens, analysing how radical sexual politics developed differently across Western Europe and North America between 1945 and 1970. Rather than treating the ‘sexual revolution’ as a period of liberation, it investigates the intellectual and militant discourses that linked sexual matters with revolutionary politics, and their different emphasis on the structural and cultural dimensions of sexual oppression and liberation. In France, a structural analysis of sexuality as a terrain of capitalist oppression emerged, combining Freudo-Marxist theory, opposition to communist orthodoxy, and student activism. The article looks for traces of this structural analysis in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and West and East Germany, identifying three key factors shaping radical sexual politics: memories of the Second World War and fascism, relationships with orthodox communist parties, and dynamics between student movements and feminist/LGBT activism. While ideas circulated transnationally, national contexts produced different articulations of sex and politics, revealing that debates about whether a sexual revolution ‘really happened’ obscure more productive questions about the varied political hopes invested in sexuality.