The 1970s Moment in Sexual Politics

Confronting the difficulty of situating the political action of feminists, homosexuals and lesbians in the historical sequence of the 1968’s, sometimes improperly linked to the events of May 68, sometimes apprehended as cropping up in the wake of the “68’s moment”, research for new paradigms seems necessary. This article, far from pretending to resume the political experience of the 70’s or to show the complexity of the homosexual, gay and lesbian, militant scene, aims at defining the sexual moment of the 70’s as a specific historical moment, inscribed in the sequence of 1968, but springing from the logic of its proper actions. The identity dissidence in particular forms a militant practice founded on the identity experience as a form of subjective appropriation of objective signification, that is to say as a daily job of composition, linking the political structures of traditional militantism with social structures of sexuality.