Foucault and Queer Theory

Tamsin Spargo

Questions to Think About:
- What do the terms ‘queer’ and ‘tolerance’ signify to you?
- How does homosexuality challenge our most basic assumptions of sexuality?
- Was the sexual revolution of the 1960’s the impetus for ‘freeing’ us sexually? What would Foucault think?
- What is constructivism? Essentialism?
- What are the problems with basing politics on identity?
- What are identity politics?
- If homosexuality is (as Foucault asserted) a cultural product, then, what is heterosexuality?
- And why is it viewed as the natural, normal sexuality?

- How do we privilege heterosexuality in discussions about homosexuality?
- What is an identity? What is an essential identity?

Highlights from the reading:
“The realm of sexuality has its own internal politics, inequities and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behaviour, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political manoeuvring, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” – Anthropologist Gayle Rubin (p. 5)

- What does Rubin mean when she says that 'sex is always political' in this quotation?
- Do you think we may, in fact, be in a historical period where sex is being renegotiated, as Rubin suggests?

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
- Poststructuralist (philosopher)
- Focused on power/discourse
- A homosexual who died of AIDS 1984
- Point of departure for queer theory/theorists
- According to Foucault: sexuality is not a natural feature or fact of human life but a constructed category of experience which has historical, social and cultural, rather than biological origins (p. 12).
- Foucault was less concerned with what ‘sexuality’ is, than with how it functions in society (p. 13).
- ‘Truth’ is knowledge that exists within a particular discourse and is bound up with power (p. 15).
- ‘Power’ is a matter of complex relationships and not property inherent in certain classes or individuals
- According to Foucault, modern homosexuality is of recent origin. For him, homosexuality is a constructed category – not a discovered identity. (This does not mean that sexual relations between men and between women did not happen before this time period p. 17).
- In his words: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior and androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (p. 20).
- Thus, homosexuality became pathologised as perverse and deviant (to be treated).

Queer Theory
- ‘Queer’ is defined as against the normative.
- Queer Theory: a collection of intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desire.
- The view of ‘self’ shifts in queer theory: the individual is not seen as atomistic, or as a holder of objective knowledge or an essential identity. The self is a socially constructed fiction (p. 50).

Judith Butler
- Foucault’s analysis was almost exclusively male focused.
- She agrees with Foucault: sexuality is discursively produced and she also claims that gender is a product of culture.
- Gender, for Butler, is performance .“It is through the stylized repetition of particular bodily acts, gestures and movements that the effect of gender is created as ‘social temporality. We do not behave in certain ways because of our gender identity, we attain that identity through those behavioral patterns, which sustain gender norms’”(p. 53).
- We are, according to Butler, identities without essences, subjects in process.