Radical Americas Special issue: Radical Periodicals Article Sex and the radical imagination in the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle Sinead McEneaney St Mary’s University, Twickenham;
[email protected] How to Cite: McEneaney, S. ‘Sex and the radical imagination in the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle.’ Radical Americas 3, 1 (2018): 16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.016. Submission date: 28 September 2017; Acceptance date: 20 December 2017; Publication date: 29 November 2018 Peer review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Copyright: c 2018, Sinead McEneaney. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.016. Open access: Radical Americas is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Abstract This paper looks specifically at two influential newspapers of the American underground press during the 1960s. Using the Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle, the paper proposes two arguments: first, that the inability of the countercultural press to envisage real alternatives to sexuality and sex roles stifled any wider attempt within the countercultural movement to address concerns around gender relations; and second, the limitation of the ‘radical’ imagination invites us to question the extent to which these papers can be considered radical or countercultural.