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13 - Queer politics, queer theory, and the future Of “identity”: spiralling out of culture

from Part 3 - Feminist theories in play

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2006

Ellen Rooney
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

Any attempt to map the political complexities of the queer movement must begin with an acknowledgement of its theoretical indebtedness to the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1976) which, mainly owing to its radical reconception of sexuality and power, has become “the text that, everyone now says, you can't even begin to practice queer politics without reading.” Foucault dismantles traditional views of sexuality as an instinctual quality and encourages us to conceive of it instead as a discourse, arguing that the ways in which sexuality expresses and manifests itself are subject rather than, as previously assumed, impervious to the specificity of their historical and cultural context. As Angela Carter, doubtlessly Foucault’s queerest English contemporary, expressed it so pertinently in The Sadeian Woman:

our flesh arrives to us out of history, like everything else does. We may believe we fuck stripped of social artifice; in bed, we even feel we touch the bedrock of human nature itself. But we are deceived. Flesh is not an irreducible human universal. Although the erotic relationship may seem to exist freely, on its own terms, among the distorted social relationships of bourgeois society, it is, in fact, the most self-conscious of all human relationships, a direct confrontation of two beings whose actions in the bed are wholly determined by their acts when they are out of it.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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