Abstract
According to popular memory,1 the French events of May 1968 that culminated in the only ‘“general” insurrection the overdeveloped world has known since World War II’ were triggered ‘because boys wanted “into” the girls dorms’.2 Whether what Kristin Ross has since dubbed ‘the panty-raid theory of history’ is accurate, when the student protestors left the Nanterre campus, took to the streets of Paris and plastered the city with posters and graffiti calling for such freedoms as ‘Orgasm without limits’, they saturated politics with sex and politicized sexuality. Joining forces with workers who also sought to overthrow the old moral order, the student revolutionaries of 1968 rejected bureaucratic consumer society, technocracy and authoritarian rationalism while calling for direct democracy, autogestion, educational reform and sexual emancipation.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | May '68 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Rethinking France's Last Revolution |
| Editors | Julian Jackson, A Milne, J Williams |
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Pages | 376-397 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780230319561 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780230252585 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2011 |
Keywords
- young people
- public sphere
- direct democracy
- public opinion survey
- internet pornography
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences