Foucault and Queer Theory

Tamsin Spargo

"Sexuality is a cultural product that cannot be regarded as a simple extension of a biological process." (p. 45)

Questions to Think About:

1. What do the terms ‘queer’ and ‘tolerance’ signify to you?
2. How does homosexuality challenge our most basic assumptions of sexuality?
3. Was the sexual revolution of the 1960’s the impetus for ‘freeing’ us sexually? What would Foucault think? (p. 12)
4. What is constructivism? Essentialism?
5. What is an identity? What is an essential identity?
6. What are identity politics?
7. What are the problems with basing politics on identity?
8. If homosexuality is (as Foucault asserted) a cultural product, then, what is heterosexuality? (p. 45)
9. And why is it viewed as the natural, normal sexuality?
10. How do we privilege heterosexuality in discussions about homosexuality? 

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).
• 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).

Important Vocabularly

• Episteme: (paradigm) the structure of thought which epitomizes the thinking of a particular age. It is the underground network of assumptions and thought processes, the 'mind-set,' which limits the scientific, philosophical, and cultural thinking of an age.
• Discourse: the accumulation of concepts, practices, statements, and beliefs that are produced by an episteme. A particular episteme gives rise to a particular form of knowledge (discourse). 
• Truth: knowledge that exists within a particular discourse and is bound up with power.
• Power: a matter of complex relationships rather than property inherent in certain classes or individuals

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.
  

Who is Eddie Izzard?


Julian Clary?

What Do "Women" Want?

NEW YORK TIMES

January 25, 2009
What Do Women Want?

By DANIEL BERGNER

Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.



While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

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