Eros and Empire
The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire provides an alternative view of US-based struggles for sexual freedom.
Alexander Stoffel analyzes three prominent US-based social movements—gay liberationism, Black lesbian feminism, and AIDS activism—to argue that they were fundamentally shaped by their transnational entanglements. Departing from popular domestic framings of these movements, Stoffel recasts the history of radical queer thought and action as a project of erotic worldmaking. This project mobilized queer affects of pleasure, desire, and eroticism in the fight for revolutionary transformation on a world scale. The transnational perceptions, activities, and consciousness of queer radicals, Stoffel argues, not only conditioned the trajectory of queer history, but also radicalized wider anti-imperialist, socialist, and abolitionist struggles past and present.
In this ambitious and interdisciplinary work, Stoffel reconsiders the United States' revolutionary sexual past and creates new opportunities for the study of sexual formations in relation to questions of capital accumulation, empire, and resistance.
—Emily Hobson, University of Nevada, Reno
"Through rich historical detail and theoretical sophistication, this book shows how queer struggles have engaged the question of the national and the transnational as a major site of disagreement, contestation, and emergence. Attending to the histories of gay liberation, black lesbian feminism, and HIV/AIDS activism, Stoffel argues that we cannot fully appreciate those movements without understanding their deep engagements with radical internationalism. The argument is one that should never be retired."
—Roderick Ferguson, Yale University
"Eros and Empire situates the erotic worldmaking of American gay liberationists, Black lesbians, and AIDS activists beyond the nation-state frame, toward a critical engagement with post-war capitalism and American empire as both conditions of possibility and sites of struggle. Stoffel's work reorients queer theory and LGBTQ+ studies toward a transnational scale to build political projects on the radical possibilities of the 'ungovernability of desire'."
—Lauren B. Wilcox, University of Cambridge
"In this groundbreaking book Stoffel illuminates how the erotic worldmaking of radical sexual politics in the United States was shaped by successive regimes of capitalist accumulation. By scaling up the concerns of queer Marxism to the level of the transnational while also offering a social history of queer theory, Eros and Empire revolutionizes our understanding of the relationship between the intimate and the imperial."
—Rahul Rao, author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
