Mad for Foucault. Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Contemporary critiques of sexuality have their origins in the work of Michel Foucault. Challenging an essentialist understanding of sex, Foucault was the first to develop the idea that sexuality was rooted in discipline and biopolitics, therefore revolutionizing our conception of sex and its relationship to society, economics, and culture. While Foucault's seminal arguments helped to establish the foundations of queer theory and greatly advance feminist critique, Lynne Huffer argues that our interpretation of the theorist's powerful ideas remains flawed. Over the past two decades, scholars have limited themselves to Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1, while paying less attention to his equally explosive History of Madness. In this earlier text, Foucault casts Western rationalism as a project that both produces and represses sexual deviants, calling out the complicity of modern science and the exclusionary nature of family morality. Reintroducing these ideas into our understanding of Foucault, Huffer brings exciting new strands of his critique into focus. She then revisits Foucault's work on ethics in light of these discoveries, establishing an ethics of eros that sees sexuality is a lived experience we are repeatedly called on to remember. Throughout her analysis, Huffer works in her own personal experiences, along with Foucault's, sampling from unpublished interviews and other archival materials. In doing so, she intimately illustrates the problem of rethinking sexuality as a product of reason.

About the Author
Lynne Huffer is professor of women's studies at Emory University and the author of Maternal Pasts, Feminists Futures: Nostalgia and the Question of Difference and Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing.