Les Femmes s’entetent, first published as a special issue of Les Temps modernes at the behest of Simone de Beauvoir in 1974 and reissued by Gallimard the following year, was written entirely by women and conceived at a time rich in feminist activism. It comprised a vibrant assortment of political analyses, personal testaments, poetry, short stories and manifestos. It also featured one of the unsung utopian texts of the French lesbian movement, a comedic essay called ‘Les belles histoires de la Ghena Goudou’ (‘The beautiful stories/histories of the Ghena Goudou’), by Evelyne Rochedereux, a member of the first lesbian activist group in the French women's movement, the Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes) (Rochedereux, 1974, 2051–65).

Utopian visions have never been far from lesbian activism and the more than four decades that have elapsed since the publication of Rochedereux’s story have produced a plethora of literary and critical texts ruminating on the intersections between the two. In its earliest incarnations much of this work focused on lesbian utopias in which ‘lesbian’ was understood as a figuration existing outside extant mechanisms of power (Bammer, 1991). Later scholarship, such as Annamarie Jagose's Lesbian Utopics, deconstructs what Jagose sees as lesbianism's ‘impossible dream of exteriority’, arguing instead that the lesbian body is ‘a site of discursive contestation’ that is nonetheless dependent ‘on those very economies [representational, patriarchal, heterosexual, binary] from which it distinguishes itself’ (Jagose, 1994, 160–1). In this brief chapter my interest is less in arguments over the hermeneutics of ‘lesbian utopics’ as an epistemological category than in the actual deployment of lesbian utopianism as an affective political strategy. To this end, in keeping with the political recuperation of the utopian in the 1970s, I posit utopia not as an imagined perfect society but as an aspirational practice, an ‘approach toward’ (Bammer, 1991, 7) that teaches ‘above all, to desire otherwise’ (Abensour, 1999, 145). My work also situates itself in what Patricia Ticineto Clough has called the ‘affective turn’ in theories of the social – a turn that argues that emotion and modalities of experience are both inextricable from politics and a condition of possibility for subjectivity (Clough, 2007). Specifically, I seek to analyse the practical legacies of two affective impulses that animate Rochedereux's utopian tale: humour and pleasure.