Queer theory sparknotes
Foucault
FOUCAULT Michel Foucault () was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the relations between sexuality, power, knowledge and subjectivity served as a crucial basis for the emergence and articulation (as well as subsequent reconfigurations of) queer studies. Though he died of AIDS in , Foucault’s work was a vital source of inspiration for many foundational queer critics including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David Halperin, Leo Bersani, Gayle Rubin and Michael Warner.
More than any other book, the short but searing introductory volume to Foucault’s unfinished History of Sexuality () provided the critical ballast necessary for constituting sexuality as a primary category of social analysis; a vector of social oppression that intersects with but is irreducible to gender, race and class (see Rubin ).
At the same time, this volume was a major factor in effecting a shift in the terrain of ‘lesbian and gay studies’ from conceiving lesbian, gay and other sexual identities as essentialized, transhistorical, self-evident and stable categories of personal and political identity towards a vision of queer studies oriented around ‘a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal… pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence’ (Warner , p.
16). Dislodging disciplinary truths Much of Foucault’s wide-ranging oeuvre is devoted to excavating historically specific systems of knowledge (what he called discursive formations or epistemes) to demonstrate the alternativity of their organizing principles when compared to present day conceptions of knowledge and truth. In his earlier studies of madness, medicine, orders of representation and the prison he demonstrated that the truth claims of any particular domain of the human sciences are governed by systemic rules that determine the boundaries of thought in a given period; and that they are linked, moreover, to particular techniques of control.
In modern societies these techniques have mainly worked by establishing disciplinary norms which are used to categorize, rank, penalize, isolate, reform or otherwise modulate aberrant behaviour (Foucault a, ). Foucault argues the body is the primary target of disciplinary and normalizing power, rather than the mind or soul (as Marxist philosophers maintained).
Exemplified in the corporeal training of soldiers, factory workers or schoolchildren, disciplinary normalization seeks to optimize the capacities of bodies and make them more efficient at the level of gesture, action, movement and functioning. At the same time, it renders these bodies more obedient by categorizing different behaviours as the outcome of more or less normal or abnormal subjects/selves/souls, producing what Foucault terms ‘docile bodies’.
Queer theory by foucault pdf free
Michel Foucault () was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the relations between sexuality, power, knowledge and subjectivity served as a crucial basis for the emergence and articulation of queer studies.In this configuration of power/knowledge, being a good, normal, productive student, worker, soldier, or inmate is thought to find natural expression in certain kinds of (disciplined) bodily behaviour. Reversing the traditional platonic saying, Foucault thus quips, ‘the soul is the prison of the body’ (Foucault a, p.
). The desire to know The History of Sexuality () was initially conceived as an extension of the genealogical approach developed in Discipline and Punish (a) to the topic of sexuality. Inspired by Nietzsche’s work, Foucault conceives genealogy as a history of bodies that emphasizes their differential (de)formation through accident, error, discontinuities, historical contingencies, disparities and instabilities over and against any metaphysical search for origins, essences or manifold destiny.
Genealogy grasps the body as ‘a volume in perpetual disintegration …totally imprinted by history’ (Foucault b, p. ) to investigate ‘the manner in which what is most material and most vital in [bodies] has been invested’ (Foucault , p. ). This was very provocative for social movements around sexuality of the time. Guided by the theories of Freudo-Marxist philosophers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, s gay and sexual liberationists typically conceived the libidinal body as an ahistorical, prediscursive, instinctive, natural, revolutionary force or energy, the liberation (or de-repression) of which would overthrow the bourgeois-capitalist social order.
Foucault had little truck with these theories: the opening and closing pages of The History of Sexuality drip with sarcasm about such claims.
Queer theory by foucault pdf Michel Foucault () was a French philosopher and historian of ideas whose work on the relations between sexuality, power, knowledge and subjectivity served as a crucial basis for the emergence and articulation of queer studies.Foucault declares, ‘the question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?’ (, p. ). Foucault frames the ‘repressive hypothesis’ (propounded in Freudian psychoanalysis; its tenets widely espoused in s liberationist circles) as a ruse of power that is deployed to constitute sex-desire (or sexuality) as a secret, foundational, evasive ‘truth’ of personhood.
This elusive ‘truth’ must be sought out, discovered, deciphered, acknowledged, declared —in other words, put into discourse (, p. 21) — to work out who we ‘really’ are and (with the help of experts where necessary) come to terms with this. Foucault frames the clinical and institutional settings in which these power games occur as secular extensions of the Catholic confessional; the practice of penance functioning as an exemplary historical precedent in which otherwise obscure or inchoate erotic thoughts, desires, anxieties, and perceived transgressions were put into discourse and made to function as diagnostic ‘truths’ of the soul.
But for Foucault it is precisely the endless process of searching out, chasing down, uncovering and declaring the imputed truth lodged in desire that enables power to extend its grasp more thoroughly into the lives of individuals and societies, penetrating our bodies, excitations, social relations and self-conceptions in ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ (, p).
This produces us as governable subjects by leading us to interpret ourselves – or be interpreted by others – according to the norms and value hierarchies instituted within the human sciences. From this perspective, contemporary fixations with increasingly precise definitions/declarations of sexual and other essentialized ‘identities’ — so central to the normalized LGBTQIA+ movement’s expansive popular culture— are less a sign of ‘progress’ or some testament to greater inclusion than a product of our increasingly intensive administration by the formations of power/knowledge that characterize the neoliberal regimes of our present; the (self-)scrutinizing, individualizing and essentializing injunctions of a form of power bent on cultivating, itemizing, subordinating and expropriating embodied life.
Biopower: the political investment in life Foucault links the invention and problematization of sexuality over the course of the 19 th century with the growing influence of the sexual sciences (sexology, psychology, psychoanalysis, criminology); the emergence of which he connects, in turn, to the increasing investment in ‘the population’ as an object of knowledge, intervention, technical manipulation, optimization and control on the part of modern nation-states.
This ‘will to knowledge’ is indicative of a much broader shift in the strategic emphasis of power; from the sovereign prerogative of ‘taking life or letting live’ that characterized monarchical societies (picture a king executing one of his traitors in public to demonstrate his might and power) to what Foucault terms biopower, conceived as the political investment in the biological life of individuals and populations on the part of nation-states – an objective Foucault encapsulates in the phrase, ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (, p.
). The emergence of biopower is accompanied by a proliferation of medical, psychological, statistical, criminological, educational, demographic and eugenic disciplines (‘the human sciences’), the formation of which is motivated by desires to strengthen, improve, maximize and control the life and bodily capacities of the population (to defend the nation, to supply an exploitable labor force for industrial capitalism, etc.).
Biopower develops along two main axes (, p. ): the disciplines (devoted, as mentioned earlier, to training, optimizing and economizing individual bodily capacities); and the regulatory controls, concerned with establishing norms and administering statistical targets for the species-life of the population (birth rates, death rates, levels of health, life expectancy, etc.
— also referred to as biopolitics). It is because ‘sexuality’ appears at the junction of these two axes of power — the disciplining of bodies and the reproduction/ordering of populations — that it emerges as such a significant object of knowledge and target of power, Foucault maintains (, p. ). In connection with the politics of life that defines and gives rise to the Euro-modern state, sexuality operates as ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’ (, p.
). Biopower does not work primarily or exclusively by prohibiting, repressing, censoring, forbidding, or outlawing particular behaviours, nor has it proceeded historically by oppressing the working classes as Freudo-Marxist theorists had maintained. Rather, it starts by cultivating the life, health, bodily capacities and physical vigor of the bourgeoisie, conceived as a class or ‘race’ whose progeniture, health, vitality and hygienic purity could be ensured according to the eugenic logics of good breeding (, p.
Queer theory by foucault pdf download Foucault’s work and life, achievements and demonisation, have made him a powerful model for many gay, lesbian and other intellectuals, and his analysis of the interrelationships of knowledge, power and sexuality was the most important intellectual catalyst of queer theory. What is QueerTheory? ‘Queer’ can function as a noun, an adjective or.). Indicative of this logic, Victorian era anxieties over degeneration and degeneracy conceived social problems such as alcoholism, vagrancy, insanity, delinquency and perversion as hereditary conditions according to biologizing theories (, p. ). Meanwhile, over the 18th and 19th centuries the punishment and policing of sexual and gender transgressions gradually gives way to (or otherwise accommodates) the practice of studying and surveying such variations.
Previously regarded as sinful acts that anyone might commit, sexual transgressions become reformulated as deviations from a norm and psychiatrized as the attributes of distinct species, life forms or kinds of individual (, p. 43).
In sly and seductive prose, Foucault depicts this process as not merely descriptive but constitutive and determining: an ‘implantation’ through which new kinds of individual are created, incorporated, defined and bound. ‘The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game’ (, p. 48) Foucault writes, evoking the analytic preoccupations and performative effects of late 19th century sexology (e.g.
its construction of the homosexual as a personage). Foucault’s intervention induced a profound reorientation in the usual meaning given sexuality. No longer a natural property of bodies, a self-evident basis of identity, nor even a stable object of positivist knowledge, sexuality emerges as an historical construct and effect of power; ‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours, and social relations by a certain deployment derived from a complex political technology’ (, p.
). This reconceptualization of sexuality enabled queer scholars to ‘shift the focus of our attention from matters of truth to matters of power’ (Halperin , p. 31). Rather than getting caught up in technical debates over whether a particular scientific/expert claim about sexuality is true, Foucault prompts us to ask what happens and what is at stake – historically and politically — when such aspects of experience are constituted as objects of knowledge or matters of truth.
‘Foucault’s example teaches us to analyze discourse strategically, not in terms of what it says, but in terms of what it does and how it works,’ David Halperin lucidly reflects (, p.
Queer theory by foucault pdf printable: Foucault’s work and life, achievements and demonisation, have made him a powerful model for many gay, lesbian and other intellectuals, and his analysis of the interrelationships of knowledge, power and sexuality was the most important intellectual catalyst of queer theory. What is QueerTheory? ‘Queer’ can function as a noun, an adjective or.
30). Legacy and critiques Foucault’s impact on the contemporary humanities and social sciences has been profound. Concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, first elaborated in Foucault’s work on sexuality, have become key analytic terms for whole traditions of scholarship that extend beyond queer studies such as the post-Marxist thought of Italian philosophers Georgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Roberto Esposito; or the governmentality scholarship of Anglosphere sociologists Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean, Mariana Valverde and Pat O’Malley — though queer critics have remarked how quickly and completely the politics of sexuality drops out of these prominent strands of scholarship indebted to Foucault.
Feminists initially expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of attention paid to gender difference in Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality.
Queer theory by foucault pdf english Foucault, Michel, , Homosexuality, Postmodernism, Queer theory Publisher Duxford, Cambridge, UK: Icon Books ; New York, NY: Totem Books Collection internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled Contributor Internet Archive Language English Item Size M.While Foucault identifies the hysterization of women’s bodies as a key domain in the historical deployment of sexuality, gender is neither a significant term nor a focus of detailed analysis in this text. Feminist scholars have since drawn extensively on Foucauldean concepts, methods and insights, however, to develop interventions of major significance for feminist theory as well as queer studies.
Judith Butler’s () influential work on feminism and the subversion of identity centrally mobilizes Foucault’s (a) work to underline the regulatory effects of identity and displace the notion of an interior essence behind the bodily expressions taken to constitute gender. Another significant line of critique points out the development of biopower in Euro-modern societies coincided with the aggressive colonization of much of the world on the part of those same societies.
Postcolonial critics have argued that racial categories and racialization are more centrally implicated in the Euro-modern regime of sexuality than Foucault’s account admits. Many of the disciplinary and regulatory technologies that Foucault locates at the heart of Euro-modern biopolitics — such as the panopticon or the Nazi concentration camps – were first devised and deployed in colonial outposts (Stoler ).
Other critics demonstrate how apprehensions of sexual savagery, gender deviance and unfamiliar kinship arrangements were mobilized to justify colonial projects of invasion, dispossession, subordination, genocide and enslavement of indigenous and racialized peoples (Morgensen ). Many of the racial, sexual and gender hierarchies elaborated in colonial outposts were imported back to imperial metropoles to inform thinking about social and class hierarchies and stoke anxieties about sexual intermixing (Stoler ).
Perhaps it is no coincidence that sexology’s early diagnostics of perversions (its construction of the homosexual, for example) adopts the procedures of comparative anatomy and a terminology of species and specification that is uncannily redolent of the discourses of evolutionary biology (Foucault , p.
; see Somerville ). Rather than subjective prejudice or bigotry, Foucault conceives ‘racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form’ (, p. ) as an upshot and instrumentality of biopower. ‘Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State’ (, p. ). Developing this line of thought, queer and trans critical race theorists have mobilized Achille Mbembe’s term necropolitics to stress how the optimization of European life that constitutes the focus of biopower’s regime of sexuality is co-extensive with the systematic killing, neglect, dispossession, debilitation and incarceration of racialized and colonized peoples (Snorton and Haritaworn ).
In this line of analysis and many others, Foucault’s work persists as a vital source of critical insights, analytic inspiration and political revisioning. Bibliography Butler, J. (). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (a) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane.
Foucault, M. (b) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in D. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. () The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. () Society must be defended: Lectures at the Collège de France New York: Picador.
Halperin () Saint Foucault. New York: Oxford University Press. Morgensen, S. () Settler homonationalism: Theorizing settler colonialism within queer modernities. GLQ 16(): Rubin, G. () Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In: C. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Snorton, C. R. and Haritaworn, J. () Trans necropolitics. In: S. Stryker and A. Aizura (eds.) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge, pp. Somerville, S. (). Scientific racism and the emergence of the homosexual body. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5(2), Stoler, A. ().
Race and the education of desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Warner, M. () Introduction: Fear of a queer planet. Social Text