Militant Desire: Lionel Soukaz and Sexual Liberation Today

Screenings on Wednesdays 29 May, 5 June, 12 June, 7pm

Militant Desire is a programme of film forums and consciousness-raising sessions around the experimental films of French gay liberation pioneer Lionel Soukaz. Rather than merely situating his early filmmaking in historical context, against the backdrop of sexual liberation movements in 1970s France, this programme aims to test their current relevance for intersectional and anti-capitalist queer debates in the present. An early member of the Front for Homosexual Revolutionary Action (FHAR), filmmaker Lionel Soukaz worked together with writers, activists and public intellectuals including Guy Hocquenghem, Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert and other pioneering figures in the early discourse of queer theory. His films from the 1970s and 1980s constitute a radical critique of assimilationist politics and anticipate contemporary concerns including the co-optation of queer culture; race and gay rights as a colonial project; the invisibility of working class people within the queer community; and the class and gender divide within revolutionary politics.

Militant Desire attempts to test if these films and activist strategies from our immediate past have undetonated potential in the present. To this end, the programme revives the 1970s activist model of the consciousness-raising session or film forum. Each screening will be followed by the group sharing and discussing their experience of the issues raised and how we might effect change in the present. Through these sessions, the institution learns from its audience and the form of the retrospective is rethought as future facing, dynamic and vital to grassroots politics.

This is the first retrospective of Soukaz’s work in the UK for two decades. Following three screenings at Gasworks, a programme at LUX will be the first to situate Soukaz’s output in the context of his British contemporaries. The printed guide to his work – with new and collected texts – will be the first published in the UK, and several of the films have never before been shown in this country.

Militant Desire is a programme curated by Paul Clinton. The programme is jointly presented by Gasworks and LUX thanks to the generous support of Fluxus Art Projects.