Insurgent Intimacies

Abstract

This article examines the intertwined arguments for sexual revolution and decolonization in the Dutch Atlantic in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, Antillean activists in the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles celebrated aspects of the Cuban Revolution and the US Black Power movement for their purported ability to regenerate romantic love. Activists contended that socialism and antiracist activism could forge new bonds of erotic equality to explode the ongoing effects of colonialism, slavery, and the regimes of sexual violence that maintained both. Considering the centrality of sexual politics to Antillean radical imaginaries, this article argues that Antilleans viewed sexual liberation as a primary rather than ancillary component of self-determination. Illuminating the Atlantic currents that informed Antillean arguments for insurgent forms of intimacy—from revolutionary Cuba to black struggle in the United States—this article reconceives of both the substance and geography of the sexual revolution.

An Insurgent Mood: Lorraine Hansberry on the Politics of Home

“…Home, to borrow terminology from Reddy (1998) and Zengin (2024), is a site of "contradictory demands and conditions," perhaps of community, solidarity, and resistance, but also of "constitutive violence" and "violent intimacies," where compulsory reproductive labor, sexuality, and desire sustain and are enmeshed with global systems of empire, colonialism, and capitalism. Home can also be a site of insurgent dwelling (Roach 2022) and insurgent intimacies (Schields 2020).…”