• Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
  • Search Site

Polari Magazine

  • Home
  • Up Front
    • Editorial
    • Clementine: The Living Fashion Doll
    • Polari Safari
    • WTF? Friday
    • Bulletin Board
    • Polari Facts
  • Features
    • Interviews
    • Features
    • Gallery
    • Opinion
    • Heroes & Villains
  • Community
    • Oral Histories
    • Coming Out Stories
    • Relationships
    • IDAHO
    • LGBT History Month
    • Blogs
  • Reviews
    • Books
    • Film and Television
    • Music
    • Stage
    • Visual Arts
    • Classics: Books
    • Classics: Film and Television
    • Classics: Music
  • About
    • About Polari Magazine
    • Contributors
    • Contact

You are here: Polari Magazine / LGBT History Month / LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 6

LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 6

06 Feb 2013 / Comments Off / in LGBT History Month/by Jonathan Kemp

To celebrate LGBT History Month, 2013, Polari is publishing a daily series of LGBT Heroes, selected by the magazine’s team of writers and special contributors.

Michel Foucault LGBT History Month Day 6

Michel Foucault – Philosopher & Social Theorist
by Jonathan Kemp
………………………………………………………………………………………….

“Pleasure is something which passes from one individual to another; it is not secreted by identity. Pleasure has no passport, no identification papers.” – Michel Foucault

I discovered the work of Michel Foucault during my final year as an undergraduate. I was writing a dissertation on the representation of gay men in fiction and was slowly making my way through every book on the subject of sexuality Nottingham polytechnic library contained, and before long I came across his slim yet explosive little book, History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (1979). This was 1988, a good few years before the emergence of queer theory, for which – as many writers contest – Foucault’s book was instrumental. But why was it so explosive? Why did it almost single-handedly influence a generation of lesbian and gay, queer and feminist scholars?

In it, he challenges the commonly held assumption that the Victorians suppressed sexuality, arguing that instead, there was an explosion of sex into discourse driven by an imperative to deploy sex as a means of expanding what he calls biopower; that is, the control of populations. The medical policing of desire – itself an extension of the Enlightenment drive to know and name, to box and label everything – constructed normative and reductive realities and knowledges in order to make the world more manageable. Surveillance of the public extended into the private domain of the bedroom, and sexual behavior became a battleground, a question of morality, biology and medicine. But where there is a discourse there is always a reverse-discourse, and once the homosexual was named – around 1870 – those who identified with this type – this species – could formulate a politics of liberation using the terminology of  the clinic. The ‘invention’ by science of the homosexual was also the invention of queer politics.

“Just because this notion of sexuality has enabled us to fight [on behalf of our own homosexuality] doesn’t mean that it doesn’t carry with it a certain number of dangers. There is an entire biologism of sexuality and therefore an entire hold over it by doctors and psychologists – in short, by the agencies of normalization. … It is not enough to liberate sexuality; we also have to liberate ourselves … from the very notion of sexuality”. In other words, for Foucault sexual pleasure was not part and parcel of discovering a true self, of owning and expressing an identity, but was tied to the very apparatus of power we imagined we were escaping. “We must not believe that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.”

The exciting opportunities, for him, lay in the creative possibilities of non-normative sexual practices and new, alternative forms of organizing personal relationships; not in discovering who we are, but refusing who we are.

Foucault was no ivory tower academic; he was a frontline activist. In 1970 he co-founded the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, which led to a friendship with another favourite Frenchman of mine, the poet of prisons, Jean Genet. In 1982, two years before his death, he drove 3000km from Paris to Warsaw heading a convoy of medical supplies and smuggled printing materials for Solidarnosc.

Born in Poitiers in 1926, Foucault struggled with his own homosexuality in his youth and attempted suicide more than once. Whilst his work on sexuality opposed the concept of liberation because it required an understanding of the self at odds with his own theoretical position, he nevertheless personally supported and benefitted from the lesbian and gay struggle for equality, especially once he began visiting the US regularly from the mid-’70s and discovered the gay sex clubs of San Francisco and New York. His own moment of liberation – like that of many men at that time – was cut short when he died of AIDS in 1984.

I have read pretty much everything he has ever published in English, and whilst I may not always agree with what he says, I have nothing but admiration for the ways in which he constantly upturned epistemological assumptions and always strove to see the bigger picture, to reverse commonalities of thought. “Knowledge is not for knowing”, he wrote, “knowledge is for cutting.”

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
Tags: aids, history of sexuality, jonathan kemp, lgbt history month 2013, michel foucault

Related Posts

Did you like this entry?
Here are a few more posts that might be interesting for you.
Related Posts
Cumming of Age: Erotica
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 25
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 4
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 27
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 17
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 12
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 12
LGBT History Month Heroes – Day 13
Jonathan Kemp Reading From Twenty-Six
Our LGBT Histories: Music – Day 11

Search Polari

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

About Polari Magazine

Polari Magazine is an LGBT arts and culture magazine that explores the subculture by looking at what is important to the people who are in it. It’s about the lives we lead, not the lifestyles we’re supposed to lead.

Its content is informed & insightful, and features a diverse range of writers from every section of the community. Its intent is to help LGBT readers learn about their own heritage and to sustain a link between the present and the past.

Polari is designed to nurture the idea of community, whether that be social and political, or artistic and creative. It is your magazine, whether you want to read it, or whether you want to get involved in it, if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer.

Polari Magazine is all these: it's a gay online magazine; it's a gay and lesbian online magazine; it's an LGBT arts and culture magazine. Ultimately, it is a queer magazine.

Latest Posts

  • Polari Magazine 2008-2014December 3, 2014 - 6:16 pm
  • Tearing Up Their Map: An Interview with LambDecember 2, 2014 - 2:45 pm
  • Future Islands • GigDecember 2, 2014 - 1:41 pm
  • Puppets with Attitude (at Christmas)December 1, 2014 - 6:30 pm
  • The Aesthetic of Voyeurism: Interview with Antonio Da SilvaDecember 1, 2014 - 1:25 pm
  • Broke With Expensive Taste • Azealia BanksNovember 28, 2014 - 3:59 pm
  • Royalty Strutting on an American College Stage: Miss and Mr. Gay ISU 2014November 27, 2014 - 2:59 pm
  • Bright Light Bright Light: Everything I Ever WantedNovember 26, 2014 - 11:15 am
  • Jaime Nanci And The Blueboys: ‘Toy’ TalkNovember 25, 2014 - 4:09 pm

Twitter

Tweets by @PolariMagazine

Archive

  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • July 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
© Copyright - Polari Magazine - Wordpress Theme by Kriesi.at
  • scroll to top
  • Send us Mail
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Join our Facebook Group
  • Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Website Privacy & Cookies