Anarchist Studies |
This article focuses on the place of sexuality in Spanish anarchist analyses and strategies in the early years of the twentieth century. Sexuality - and, in particular, the construction of women's sexuality - was an important aspect of the cultural critiques written by both male and female anarchists in the 1920s and the 1930s. Nevertheless, with the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, and certainly by the time of the official founding of the anarchist women's organisation, Mujeres Libres, one year later, sexuality - especially a focus on liberating women's sexual expression - virtually disappeared as a topic of discussion in Spanish anarchist writings, with the single exception of attention to prostitution. This paper explores the shift away from explicit attention to sexual freedom and the factors that might have accounted for it.
The article examines the treatment of masturbation in Spanish anarchist journals. This moves from prohibitive advice to pedagogical regulation and thence to some re-evaluation of the practice as a 'natural' activity with some positive results. This changing anarchist discourse reflected broader shifts in sexual culture, with assimilation of ideas from sexology, psychiatry, etc. The history of this aspect of both anarchism and sexuality in Spain is useful in considering general issues such as transformation to 'modernity' and conflicts/integration between elite and popular culture.
The article charts the progress of the anti-authoritarian protest of the late 1960s in Germany, with a view to understanding why it is still regarded as dangerous by the middle class. The movement initially fused the goals of political and individual liberation to an unusual degree, through the demands of the post-Nazi generation to uncover the secrets of history and sex. Emerging splits between ideologies of political and personal liberation led to the protest movements being condemned for breeding misogyny, pornography and violence.
This article starts out by focusing on changing attitudes to sexual identity and social change in the last few decades, and moves to a discussion of the writings of the Marquis de Sade (from whose play Oxtiern or the Misfortunes of Libertinage the title of this article is taken). The article relates these writings to the question of 'essentialism' in sexual identity and concludes with a discussion of how these observations impinge on anarchist models of what it is to be human
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