Who Was Michel Foucault?
by Wik Wikholm
Before 1978 few American intellectual types had heard of French
philospher Michel
Foucault. But when The History of Sexuality, Volume I
appeared in English in 1978, it created a sensation in U.S. academic
circles.
In just 159 pages, the book slaughtered the sacred cows of the gay
liberation movement, the
sexual revolution, and Freudian psychoanalysis.
The privately homosexual Foucault had already established himself as a
lion
of French philosophy. His studies were so well-received in France that
many
felt he was the rightful successor to Jean Paul Sartre. Americans
finally noticed his work when he focused
his attention on sex.
The 1978 book began with an assault on a belief widely held among
progressives. Sexual liberals, including most psychiatrists, gay
liberationists, and proponents of the sexual revolution, believed that
Western culture had a big sex problem: repression. Foucault would have
none
of it. If our culture is so repressed, he asked, why have we been
talking so
relentlessly about sex for the past 125 years?
Foucault agreed there was a problem, but it was not repression. The
problem
was the way in which Western culture views some people as unnatural and
perverted. Ever since doctors first started addressing sexuality,
Foucault
argued, they have created a veritable zoo of perversions, then tried to
root
out the causes. The perpetual nature/nurture argument that developed
held no
interest for Foucault. Instead, he claimed that the categories of
sexuality
doctors had created were just arbitrary inventions of modern medicine.
Sexual
pleasures can be taken in many ways, he wrote, but categorizing sexual
desire
is pointless.
Foucault went on to say that when doctors label people perverts, they
create
the very thing they claim to want to treat. In his most controversial
arguments, Foucault asserted that homosexuality is not born of nature or
nurture, but is socially constructed. When doctors created the profusion
of
perversions, they unwittingly produced the models that gave rise to gay,
lesbian, and other sexualities. In Foucault's opinion, these identities
are
themselves a form of oppression. Above all, the philosopher believed in
freedom, and he argued that when a person accepts the label homosexual
or
heterosexual, possibilities of pleasure are foreclosed and sexual
freedom is
surrendered.
Though he was sympathetic with gay liberationists, Foucault thought
they,
too, were on the wrong track. When American activists encouraged gays to
come
out and demanded gay rights, Foucault dismissed their efforts. In his
opinion, these actions simply confirmed the idea of sexual categories he
found so oppressive. Instead, Foucault recommended a battle against any
power
that tried to restrict or regulate sexual pleasure.
The book left American gay-libbers cold. Activists were fighting a
pitched
battle against the Moral Majority, and reversals of gay rights
ordinances in
Florida and elsewhere foretold the rise of the Christian Right. In the
middle
of some of the worst setbacks since the inception of the gay liberation
movement in the late 1960s, many activists found the French
philosopher's
pronouncements ill-timed, unsupportive, and impractical.
Foucault was received more warmly on college campuses. Many feminists
and gay
and lesbian scholars endorsed Foucault. Feminists saw Foucault's
philosophy
as a promising approach to overcoming stereotypes that attributed
women's
secondary position in society to genetic influences, and many gay and
lesbian
intellectuals have since embraced Queer Theory, a philosophical attack
on
homophobia based on Foucault's work.
Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, but the debates and tension he inspired
between activist and academic communities lives on.
Wik Wikholm produces www.gayhistory.com, an introduction to modern gay
history.
He can be reached on the site's discussion boards, or by e-mail at
wik@gayhistory.com.
For further reading:
Eribon, Didier, Betsy Wing, trans. Michel Foucault. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press (1991).
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An
Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books (1978).
Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York:
Plume (1995).
Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Anchor
Books (1993).
Rabinow, Paul, ed., The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon.
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