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Before
Sexuality
by David M. Halperin (Editor), John J. Winkler (Editor),
Froma I. Zeitlin (Editor)
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David M. Halperin
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 Saint
Foucault : Toward a Gay Hagiography by
David M. Halperin
The acclaimed author of One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality offers an uncompromising and impassioned defense of
the late French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault as a
galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will
continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals,
activists, and scholars.
"My work has had nothing to do with gay
liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in
1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of
homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has
Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of
both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of
gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his
personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing
scrutiny by commentators as diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard
Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller?
David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an
uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French
philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as
a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for
other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading
of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work,
it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only
counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay
activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but
also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin
rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate
over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have
absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked)
and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a
biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse,
as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power,
represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay
men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of
homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation
anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand
of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary
direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the
first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and
the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an
up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory.
"Where there is power, there is
resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of
Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving,
Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he
views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial
intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic
evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly
vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of
AIDS.
One
Hundred Years of Homosexuality : And Other Essays on Greek Love
(The New Ancient World Series) by
David M. Halperin
Halperin's subject is the erotics of male
culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of
"homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the
interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity,
Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater
prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences
were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and
provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto
ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of
"Greek love."
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University of New South Wales
David M. Halperin (BA Oberlin, MA PhD Stanford)
has a background in classical philology and comparative
literature; he now works in the history of sexuality and
lesbian/gay studies. He taught for more than fifteen years at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (United States)
before coming to UNSW in 1996. He is a founding editor of GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Recent publications
include: One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and other essays on
Greek Love (1990) and Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay
Hagiography (1995) as well as two edited volumes, Before
Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient
Greek World (1990) and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993).
David is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, U.S.A.
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David M. Halperin, Representations Online, UC
Berkeley
Excerpt:
Just how far Baudrillard was willing to go in
order to render this sort of unsolicited service to Foucault
emerges from another remark of his in the same passage:
"Foucault's death. Loss of confidence in his own genius. . .
. Leaving the sexual aspects aside, the loss of the immune system
is no more than the biological transcription of the other
process." [1] Foucault was already washed up by the time he
died, in other words, and AIDS was merely the outward and visible
sign of his inward, moral and intellectual, decay Leaving the
sexual aspects aside, of course...
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By David M. Halperin, Copyright © 2000 Duke
University Press
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GLQ is the leading journal in lesbian and
gay studies today. Providing a much-needed forum for
interdisciplinary discussion, it publishes scholarship, criticism,
and commentary in areas as diverse as law, science studies,
religion, political science, and literary studies. Its aim
is to offer queer perspectives on all issues touching on sex and
sexuality.
Edited by Carolyn Dinshaw and David M. Halperin.
Available Past Issues from Amazon.com:
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Names Index:
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G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies
