This course will read Michel Foucault’s critical influence on the intellectual and political formation of queer theory since it emerged as a distinct body of knowledge in the early 1990s.

While Foucault did not live to see queer theory take up his name as one of its founding figures, there is no one more famous for shaping the field’s major theoretical concerns about sexuality, subjectivity, modernity, and power. Whether figured as a call to jettison “sex-desire” in favor of “bodies and pleasures,” or to challenge juridical notions of sovereignty and rights by attending to biopower, or to refute humanism by insisting that the nineteenth century birthed “the homosexual” as “a species,” Foucault engaged the most significant intellectual inheritances of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis, Marxism, and liberalism. By situating “Queer Theory’s

Foucault” in the context of these intellectual traditions, we will trace not only the generative force of The History of Sexuality but how it has remained central to ongoing queer theoretical labors. Key engagements with Foucault will likely include familiar figures from the field (Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) as well as those working in other left critical traditions (Arnold Davidson, Rey Chow, and Ann Laura Stoler).

Organizers:
Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK)
University of Bergen, Norway

Lecturer:
Professor Robyn Wiegman
Literature and Women’s Studies
Duke University
Durham, North Carolina, USA

Useful before and after the course!

1.  Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program, Part I [Listen!] April 12, 1983: Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 1456 

2. Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program Part II and Discussion [Listen!]  April 12, 1983: Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 1456

3. Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self: Introduction and Program Part III and Discussion [Listen!]  April 12, 1983: Berkeley Language Center - Speech Archive SA 1456

4. Foucault, Michel.  History of Sexuality Volume 1. 

5.  Foucault, Michel.  “History and Homosexuality.

6.  Foucault, Michel.  “The Danger of Child Sexuality.”

7.  Foucault, Michel.  “Introduction.” The Normal and the Pathological.  Georges Canguilhem.

8.  Foucault, Michel.  “The End of the Monarchy of Sex.”

 http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/mrc/search_vod?keyword=michel+foucault