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        • Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series
        • social science
        • The Screwball Asses
        The Screwball Asses

        The Screwball Asses

        by Guy Hocquenghem

        Translated by Noura Wedell

        • $13.95 Paperback

        88 pp., 5 x 7 in,

        • Paperback
        • 9781584350811
        • Published: October 16, 2009
        • Publisher: Semiotext(e)

        $13.95

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        • Description
        • Author(s)

        A founder of Queer theory contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process.

        Alone in his forest dwelling, an ogre had spent years building machines to force his visitors to make love to one another: machines with pulleys, chains, clocks, collars, leather leggings, metal breastplates, oscillatory, pendular, or rotating dildos. One day, some adolescents who had lost their way, seven or eight brothers, entered the ogre's house...—From The Screwball Asses

        Our asshole is revolutionary.—Guy Hocquenghem

        Workers of the world, masturbate!—Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire slogan

        First published anonymously in Félix Guattari's Recherches in the notorious 1973 issue on homosexuality (seized and destroyed by the French government), The Screwball Asses remains a dramatic treatise on erotic desire. In this classic underground text, queer theorist and post-'68 provocateur Guy Hocquenghem takes on the militant delusions of the gay liberation movement. Hocquenghem, founder and leader of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire, vivisects not only the stifled mores of bourgeois capitalism but the phallocratic concessions of so-called homophiles, and, ultimately, the very act of speaking desire (and non-desire). Rejecting any “pure theory” of homosexuality that claims its “otherness” as a morphology of revolution, he contends that the ruling classes have invented homosexuality as a sexual ghetto, splitting and mutilating desire in the process. It is only when non-desire and the desire of desire are enacted simultaneously through speech and body that homosexuality can finally be sublimated under the true act of “making love.” There are thousands of sexes on earth, according to Hocquenghem, but only one sexual desire. Available in English for the first time, The Screwball Asses is a revelatory disquisition, earning Hocquenghem his rightful place among the minoritarian elite of Gilles Deleuze, Jean Genet, and Tony Duvert.

        Guy Hocquenghem (1946-1988), essayist and activist, is often considered the father of Queer theory. He was the author of Homosexual Desire (1972) and L'Amour en relief (1982). The Screwball Asses is his first work available from Semiotext(e).

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