Pink Porn Economy: Genealogies of Transnational LGBTQ Organising
Abstract Studying pre-2000s pink porn magazines reveals the importance of politics in-between in the development of LGBTQ transnational organising in the twentieth century. The usual historical narratives of LGBTQ politics in the North are based on medical or legislative documents or on self-identified queers’ descriptions of their own interactions with these discourses. However, these discourses and data only capture parts of how twentieth-century queers developed sexual subjectivity, became nationally and transnationally organised, and conducted sexual politics. This chapter uses Claire Colebrook’s (Understanding Deleuze. Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002) feminist engagement in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept device to discuss transnational political networks that rhizomatically connected the makers, disseminators and subscribers of male same-sex porn magazines produced in Denmark and Sweden between 1960 and 1980. The concepts enable an analysis of the messy entanglement of desire, subjectivity processes, consumption, organising and activism, and of the shaping of certain queer communities of belonging while also excluding others. The application of gender analysis to the entanglement of pink porn economies in queer transnational networks sheds a genealogical light on the historical division between the emergence of vis-à-vis lesbian and gay networks and politics—and on the tensions between them regarding so-called positive or negative sexual rights in the decades to come.