From Gay Liberationism to Trans Marxism: A Paradoxical Parable

Description

Among Europe’s first 1970s Gay Liberationist groups, the UK’s GLF, French FHAR, and Italian FUORI! pioneered the analysis of oppression from a specifically gay standpoint, affirming the political-theoretical significance of epistemologies rooted in the affective, embodied, and marginal. But this affirmation formed one pole of a propellant dialectic: Gay Liberationists also continually resisted the sedimentation of sexuality and gender into identity-categories, proclaiming instead their historical specificity and contingency, and outlining an ultimately self-abolitionist horizon. Underpinned by Freudo-Marxist analyses of repression and reification, this dialectic — speaking prophetically to what some have termed a 'paradox' — of identity-affirmation and negation proved richly complex to navigate analytically, let alone concretise politically. It also represents one of the most notable and generative threads linking ‘70s Gay Liberationism to today’s Trans Marxism. This paper proposes that a *parable*, a suggestive placing-beside, of Gay Liberationism and Trans Marxism unveils a paradoxical interweaving of friction and inheritance, whose fruit might nourish both our theory and our praxis. The latter frequently engages the former explicitly — rescuing it from the "enormous condescension" of linear narratives, whose revisionism flattens the ‘gay’ into the irredeemably essentialist predecessor of the ‘queer’ — but also critically: at its best, Trans Marxism appropriates and deepens liberationist analyses of alienation, abstraction, abjection, and family and gender abolition, but avoids the potential pitfalls of reificatory nostalgia. Indeed, while both traditions stake oppositional claims to a one-dimensionally affirmative ‘idpol’ whose limitations have never been more acutely apparent, today’s anti-trans backlash throws into sharp relief the greatest strengths *and* thorniest weaknesses among Gay Liberationist analyses. The friction of this paradoxical encounter thus charges Trans Marxism with its translation into dialectical terms for current material conditions, equipping and instructing a (re)invigorated struggle for “communist intersubjectivity”, which — per notorious Gay Liberationist Mario Mieli — “will be transsexual.”

Period	7 Nov 2025
Event title	Historical Materialism Conference 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map