History & Latinx Studies

This state-of-the-field essay examines trends in the U.S. and Canadian literature on the sixties that uses gender and sexuality as lenses of analysis.  This literature, as we see it, is strongest in looking at the counter-cultural aspects of gender, sex, and sexuality, while those quite solid works that examine the attempts of social movements and activists to reshape institutions and state policies largely take for granted the ways in which protagonists were gendered --let alone the gendering of institutions, policies, and ideologies.  By bringing these two strains of scholarship into the same conversation and highlighting the gendered and sexualized dynamics at the heart of these movements, institutions, and social relations, as well as the gendered transformations in political subjectivity of the activists themselves, new research, we contend, can show the multiple dimensions of political and cultural struggles of the sixties.  In so doing, scholars will expand in critical ways notions of what constituted political struggle, protagonist, and polity.

Paperback Palgrave 2019    This unique volume brings together literary critics, historians, and anthropologists from around the world to offer new understandings of gender and sexuality as they were redefined during the upheaval of 1968.

"1968 is one of the most fiercely debated and misunderstood transformative years in global history. This extraordinarycollection takes us out of our comfort zones and brilliantly shifts the terms of discussion away from the cheerful celebration of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to the more terrifying and painful stories of brutal repression, agonized shame, and conflicted aspirations. It decenters the typical western tales told about 1968 by bringing in the vantage points of Havana, Mexico City, Prague, and Dakar, while offering utterly fresh accounts of developments in Paris and San Francisco as well. The beaten, burning, and yearning bodies evoked here withsensitivity and rigor change how we think about the intricate interconnections between emotions and politics." - Dagmar Herzog, author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics

"1968, like 1789 and 1848, is a watershed year in the history of revolutionary movements, one whose events reshape everything that follows. Drawing on archival research, close readings of texts and images, and political analysis to reframe these events in a comparative global context, and foregrounding the hitherto neglected significance of gender and sexuality, Frazier and Cohen s new interdisciplinary collection proposes major revisions in how we think about 1968 and what has come since." - Andrew Hoberek, University of Missouri-Columbia

"Frazier and Cohen's collection considers the centrality of gender and sexuality in a year of global political ferment.Essays on events and social movements in Africa, Europe, and the Americas challenge conventional scholarship, raise new questions, and provoke new directions in our thinking about why 1968 mattered then, and why it still does today."-Lisa Duggan, author of Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism,

CONTENTS
Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy

“Out Now!”: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam    Justin David Suran

Los Duenos de Mexico: Power and Masculinity in ’68  Elaine Carey

“Your Sexual Revolution Is Not Ours”: French Feminist “Moralism” and the Limits of Desire  Julian Bourg

Plus ça Change… Gender and Revolutionary Ideology in Cuban Cinema of 1968
Emily A. Maguire

Africa and 1968: Derepression, Libidinal Politics, and the Problem of Global Interpretation  Steven Pierce

Spirit, Awakenings, Imaginaries, Beyond ’68

Talking Back to’ 68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures  Deborah Cohen, Lessie Jo Frazier

Acts of Affection: Cinema, Citizenship, and Race in the Work of Sara Gomez
Susan Lord

The “Burning Body” as an Icon of Resistance: Literary Representations of Jan Palach
Charles Sabatos Ph.D.

Ambiguous Subjects: The Autobiographical Situation and the Disembodiment of 68
Michelle Joffroy

The Spirit of May 68 and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement in France
Michael Sibalis

Afterword Michele Zancarini-Fournel (Translated by Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier)

This chapter explores scale and, specifically, global scale. Scale refers to the arenas in which political, economic, and social processes and practices are imagined and investigated as occurring; such processes and practices are scaler. Global scale, then, is such an arena. Globalization —the term most conventionally associated with 1990s neoliberal rearrangements of a global scale—actually gained currency during the late 1960s; as the global became a critical category in the Cold War. Not only are these global rearrangements the critical context for understanding the global scale of 1968; understanding scale’s genesis helps explain why some phenomena, such as ’68, are deemed “global” in scope in ways that usually go unexamined.
This essay has three aims: a) to sketch debates around scale and its scholarly importance; b) to offer a historical understanding of the problem and use of scale in global studies; and c) to posit that sexual intimacy and political desire in the 60s became global in ways that further challenge how we as scholars use scale. Even as sociologist Saskia Sassen finds the global in the local, we posit a multi-directional methododology of scale where dynamics usually associated with the local are locatable as the global. The global parameters of late-1960s social movements suggest the multi-scalar re-orderings of the Cold War as both novel and fundamental to the attendant political, economic, and cultural changes that brought these movements to fruition.

Slovakian redacted translation of Mexico '68. “Talking back to ‘68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures,” in Civic Agency and Political Subjectivity: Gender Implications of Actions and Representations, Zuzana Maďarová and Alexandra Ostertagova, eds. Aspekt Press (Bratislava, Slovakia). Frazier, L.J., Cohen, D. 2015. “Akoodvrávaťroku1968.Rodovošpecifickénaratívy,participatívnepriestoryapolitickékultúry” in Maďarová,Z.Ostertágová,A(Eds.):Politickáobčianskasubjektivitaaaktérstvo. Bratislava: ASPEKT. Redacted and translated.

*Interdisciplinary: Cultural Criticism (poetry, film, literature) and History
*Global and cross-cultural figures, movements, sources:  French, Cuban, Czech, Mexican, US-ian.
*Bridges counter-cultural and broader socio-cultural phenomena.
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¿Qué es la memoria política sino la continuidad de las insistencias, las reiteraciones, las certezas fulgurantes de logro o derrota, el amor a las vivencias que al evocarse suscitan ideas de nobleza propia y monstruosidad ajena? Carlos Monsiváis RESUMEN Este artículo indaga las coincidencias y diferencias entre la movilización de las mujeres en el movi-miento estudiantil de 68 y la de las jóvenes activistas feministas de hoy. Para ello revisa los primeros tex-tos sobre el movimiento estudiantil, en especial los escritos por los líderes, donde encuentra una ausencia de reflexiones sobre la participación de las mujeres. También recupera el trabajo de dos autoras que, inquietas por esa ausencia, investiga-ron las intervenciones de las mujeres, y registraron una variedad de acciones, incluso con actitudes feministas poco conocidas. Además, da cuenta del giro que algunos autores dieron posteriormente, al reconocer el papel de las mujeres. Por último, es-tablece cierta correlación entre las preocupaciones que impulsan la actual forma de movilización de las jóvenes feministas en un contexto de múltiples violencias y la de las activistas del 68. ABSTRACT This article explores the coincidences and differences between the mobilization of women in the 1968 student movement and activism by today young feminists. It examines the early works on the movement, especially those written by the leaders, and finds a lack of discussion regarding women's participation. Lamas recovers the works of two female authors who were concerned by this absence, and conducted some researches on women's mobilization, finding a variety of actions, including some barely known feminist stances. The article reveals as well the reassessment made by some authors later on, as they acknowledged the role of women. Finally, the author finds a certain correlation between some of the demands of today's young feminists vis-à-vis a violent social context and those of the female activists during the 1968 movement.

The claim that '68 was global has become axiomatic. How so, for whom, with what impact? Scholars have productively pursued two scales of analysis: grassroots and geopolitical. While student movements have been the premier instance of the more socio-cultural scale, seldom has their mobilization been analyzed vis-à-vis the ostensibly more macro scale of supra-state entitie. Intermediaries between these sectors, leaders of major universities occupied an acutely uncomfortable, pivotal place. Through historical analysis based on archival research (on the biographies of university administrators, student movements, and media debates) the Global 1968 is here considered from the perspective of higher education administrators at elite universities of capitalist empire in the mid-twentieth century at metropoles/global cities-London and New York-and semi-periphery nodes-Bloomington (Indiana, USA) and Mexico City. For such elites, consternation over the turmoil of 1968 constituted a kind of global moral panic when universities presidents found themselves the objects of intense pressures on multiple fronts: from students, to relinquish much authority, and at the same time, from fellow elites and much of the public, to forcefully discipline students. In juxtaposing brief biographies of these university presidents, we highlight the experiences and visions of the global that these men brought to the table, in relation to the pressures that they faced from student movements on their campuses as well as from political powers and the general public. These multi-scaler pressures constituted 1968 as a global phenomenon and put administrators squarely on this conjunctural hot seat.