Foucault and Queer Theory [Anglais] [Broché]

This is a postmodern encounter between Foucault's theories of sexuality, power and discourse and the current key exponents of queer thinking who have adpted, revised and criticised Foucault. Our understanding of gender, identity, sexuality and cultural politics will be radically altered in this meeting of transgressive figures.

"Foucault and Queer Theory" excels as a brief introduction to Foucault's compelling ideas and the development of queer culture with its own outspoken views on heteronormativity, sado-masochism, performativity, transgender, the end of gender, liberation-versus-difference, late capitalism and the impact of AIDS on theories and practices.

A few years ago, the controller of Channel 4 was described as a 'pornographer in chief' because of the perceived sexual content of his programming. The world-wide web and satellite porn channels were seen as threatening to breach the defences of our island state of innocence. Now, it seems, everyone's at it, or rather talking about it. We've seen documentaries and dramas about prostitution, the vice squad, the sexual habits of evry type of animal under the sun. If a programme has talking heads, chances are they'll be taking about doing it. And if you don't want to do it, you'd better keep quiet (celibacy's not sexy any more) or try tantric sex. It's Madonna's latest thing, apparently, and she should know.

In politics, the old equation of power and sexiness still seems to triumph over principles and aesthetics alike. Although ga politicians are still being 'outed', being gay is not, it seems, the problem it once was for those with ruling ambitions. The press has repeatedly reported a growing climate of 'tolerance', as "The Sun" announced an end to gay-bashing editorials. Although gay and lesbian characters in soap operas are generally all too respectable, the flamboyant camp of Julian Clary and Eddie Izzard's transvestism have contributed to their success. It seems we're altogether a more open, more tolerant, sexier society - and it's getting better all the time. Or is it? Is mainstream culture just flirting with a bit of the other in order to keep us all on a broadly straight line?

While there does seem to be a broader definition of acceptable sexual behaviour, many of the old prejucices remain, and new crises are always in the making. Scenes of mob hysteria about convicted or even suspected paedophiles reveal the fightening side of people power. Freud may have uncovered infantile sexuality, but it's not something late 20th-century society can discuss rationally. There seems to be a crisis about how to cope with 'sex offenders' generally. Are they ill, and if so, what's the cure? Or are they 'evil'? What or whom are they offending? Nature, the Law, Society?

And how, more generally, do we know what makes one erotic activity good and another bad? Is it a matter of divine ordinance, biological nature, or social convention? Can we really be sure that our own desires and pleasures are normal, natural, nice - or that we are? Why does sex matter so much?

As the anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues: 'The realm of sexuality has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behaviour, the concrete instutional 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 overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.'

If, as it seems, we are living in such a moment, then one of the ways in which erotic life is currently being renegotiated is through the exploration of how we understand sex in the ways we do. While this exploration may be going on in a myriad of contexts - in the media, in medicine, in parliament - the analysis which is the focus of this essay has been undertaken most energetically by individuals and groups who have experienced the fullest, and at times deadliest, effects of the politics of sex. As women were the first group to explore gender difference, so lesbians, gay men and other groups whose sexualities are defined against the norm of heterosexuality have been foremost in the exploration of the politics of sexuality. In challenging our most basic assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality, including the oppositions between heterosexual and homosexual, biological sex and culturally determined gender, and man and woman, these thinkers are developing new ways of exploring the issue of human identity.