Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T13:13:12.880Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×