Eros and empire: discussion forum introduction

Few areas of scholarly inquiry have drawn the hostility of the contemporary far right as persistently as the study of gender and sexuality.Bans on gender-affirming care, restrictions on LGBTI-inclusive education, and recurrent moral panics about "grooming" have accompanied the rise of an anti-gender movement that now spans the capitalist core and periphery.Why do inquiries into the complex reality of gender and sexuality appear so threatening?If our gender and sexual lives are not the reflection of a natural or biological truth but are constituted by social relations, then we must confront the fact that we make gender and sexuality, and that we could make them differently.With that insight we enter the realm of politics: of justice, freedom, self-determination, solidarity, and emancipation.Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stoffel 2025) is a book about generations of radicals who embraced this threatening proposal, and who held that the most private concerns of our lives could become a vantage point from which to collectively reconsider and remake society as a whole.Its argument is a simple one.There is a queer radical tradition in the United States, which I call erotic worldmaking, that has been largely obscured both by the nationally bounded narratives of LGBT history and by the ways queer studies has come to canonize itself as a field.The book reconstructs this tradition through three movements: the gay liberationists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the black lesbian feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the radical AIDS activists of the late 1980s and early 1990s.