The Queer Body of MLF Literature

Abstract

The emphasis on sexuality from a queer perspective has led to what is deemed to be a radical rethinking, and what is oftentimes also a reinventing, of sexuality's medium or element, namely the body. Looking back at literary writings produced in the 1970s by some of the women engaged in the French Women's Liberation Movement, and more specifically at the ways in which the body and bodies were at once celebrated, figured and dismantled in a number of these texts, I argue that a proto-queer de-normativization and reconceptualization of the body with respect to ‘sex’ and sexual duality was already at work. A serious look back at the writings of that period makes the hypothesis of an epistemological break between second-wave feminism and queer thinking and activism, or of the conceptual supersession of the former by the latter, more difficult to argue in this respect.