Analysis Of ' Foucault And ' Queer Theory '

Over the past 200 years sexual liberation and freedom have become topics of discussions prevalent within western culture and society. With the recent exploration of sexuality a new concept of sexual and gender identity has emerged and is being analyzed in various fields of study. The ideology behind what defines gender and how society explains sex beyond biology has changed at a rapid pace. In response various attempts to create specific and catch all definitions of growing gender and sexual minorities has been on going. This has resulted in the concept of gender becoming a multi- layered shifting hypothesis to which society is adapting. Since the 19th-century, philosophers and theorists have continued to scrutinize gender beyond biological and social interpretation. Margaret Atwood 's The Handmaid 's Tale captures the limitations and social implications forced upon a set gender based on societal expectations. Gender is a social construct that limits the individual to the restrictions and traditions of a society, or if it’s an individually formed self-identification of sex and sexuality that is formed autonomously. Evidence of gender establishment can be seen within literary works and supported by various schools of gender and sexuality theory.

have looked at the history of sexuality since the 18th century in what Foucault calls

Sedgwick describes one of the most distinctive Gothic tropes, as the ‘unspeakable’ (Sedgwick, Pg. 94), through this trope, she explains how sexuality between men has been recognized as having no name, essentially being ‘unspeakable’, ‘unmentionable’, and ‘not to be

Set in the Victorian era of the 1800’s Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert exemplifies society’s views on the established gender roles of this time. Flaubert utilizes Emma Bovary’s masculinity to accentuate Emma’s desire for control. Her desire for control extends from the social pressure of the period, revealing her envy towards men. Flaubert undoubtedly depicts Emma’s characteristics to have a masculine undertone and throughout the novel her femininity deviates as her priority shifts. Emma’s lack of femininity translates to her relationships by maneuvering an interchanging role of a girlfriend or boyfriend.

He argues that psychologists as early as Freud have determined the importance of a person’s sexual identity in defining a person’s psychological make-up and then points out that it is impossible for a reader to divorce their sexuality from a reading of any text, that a reader brings to a text the entirety of his experiences and identity and therefore, he brings his sexual identity to the reading of a text also. I use the male pronoun at this point in this paper because the author of the article examined the homosexual male reader, which is separate from either the heterosexual identity and also separate from a lesbian identity because "the homosexual male, in spite of his ‘difference’ is still a biological man, and very importantly, he is a socially constructed man, with all that this implies for phallocentrism and patriarchy" (73). Therefore, it can be seen, a reader can neither divorce their sexual identity nor their gender identity from a reading of a text; in fact, because these factors play a major role in a reader’s psychological make-up, they also play a major role in a

As being developed by poststructuralism, feminism, lesbian & gay studies and even American pragmatist theory (Parker,2001; Seidman,1997), queer theory has become one of the most important theories, which contributes to the research of sociology, arts and organizations. On the one hand, queer theory has been used to study the relations between the sexuality, gender and workplace. On the other hand, by utilizing denaturalized, deconstructive and performative methods to queer the presumptions of the taken-for-granted norms, queer theorists question and disprove the traditions which people cherish (Seidman,1995).

To understand Butler’s work, it is important to know who Butler is. Judith Butler was born on February 24, 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio. She attended Bennington College and Yale University afterwards where she studied philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984. She then taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, John Hopkins University, and University of California, Berkeley. In 1987, Butler had released her first book called “Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France” which was about the concept of desire. Butler had then released her better known work “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” in 1990, and its sequel, “Bodies that Matter: On The Discursive Limits of Sex” in 1993. Much of her work had great influence on feminism, cultural studies, and continental

In The Introduction to the History of Sexuality, Foucault explains how during the 19th century with the raise of new societies, the discourse or knowledge about sex was not confronted with repulsion but it “put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning sex” (Foucault 69). In fact, this spreading of discourse on sexuality itself gives a clear account of how sexuality has been controlled and confined because it was determined in a certain kind of knowledge that carries power within it. Foucault reflects on the general working hypothesis or “repressive hypothesis,” and how this has exercised power to suppress people’s sexuality. It has power on deciding what is normal or abnormal and ethical or unethical

This book features a collection of Judith Butler’s essays and her primary intention with this collection is to “focus on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictive normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life” (12). These essays look at the construction of gender and the way certain conceptions of it are normalized and reproduced in potentially harmful and limiting ways. Butler uses a feminist poststructural framework to critique the normalizing/marginalizing views of gender that exist because the “terms that make up one’s own gender are, from the start, out-side oneself, beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author (and that radically

Both Foucault and Butler claim that sexuality is not what makes us who we are, that it is simply a social construct. In addition, they both believe that by submitting to the mechanisms of power and categorizing ourselves sexually, we are giving impetus to our own subjugation. While they hold similar beliefs in many ways, and much of Judith Butler's work is building upon work done by Michael Foucault, Judith Butler does diverge from Foucault's ideas. The reason Butler revises Foucault is that his concept of biopower leaves no room for resistance to power. For Foucault, a shift in the 17th century from a top-down monarchial model of power which focused on the individual gave way to a political technology for controlling entire populations.

Queer theory could potentially offer the most qualitative of methodologies for collecting and analysing data. As it questions, even defies, the notions of objectivity and the essentiality of fact, queer theory opens more “texts” for study, and more bodies of knowledge to compile, compare, and evaluate.2

To begin my analysis on the queer narrative in The Hours, we must fist discover what

The Panopticon better known as the perfect prison offers a jarring reflection of how society has been monitoring and policing our women through several different practices within a social cycle. Feminist philosopher, Sandra Lee Bartky, displays how everyone in society is guilty of monitoring and policing of femininity in her article, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” Bartky’s symbolic use of the Panopticon is a way to allude that systems set in place by the male patriarchy have been a tool in order to oppress and objectify women. Despite the idea of the Panopticon being used to show how women are scrutinized the rest of Bartkey’s argument seems to have flaws by not fully exploring content and making generalizations on who can and cannot be policed. Bartky’s inference to the Panopticon is poignant but despite this the argument made in her article is lacking as she does not fully develop upon her ideas.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, social theorist, philologist and literary critic whose work had a tremendous impact on several disciplines. He was not a sociologist by training, but he worked diligently on sociological issues and otherwise had significant influence on the work of other sociologists. One of his most famous works is the The History of Sexuality, in which he examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life. According to Foucault, the idea that everyone has a sexuality is relatively a recent development in the West. In Volume 1, Foucault discusses the relationship between sex and power in a historical context. He states that the ways in which humans think about sexuality is primarily shaped by the "repressive hypothesis," which claims that Western society had suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century, and this was due to the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois society. There are several key concepts in this book that will be discussed in this paper include repressive hypothesis, sexuality, power, and discourse. This paper will seek to show the ways in which sexuality is a discursive object, and how sexuality was linked to power throughout history.

Foucault, when talking about the androgynous mind seems to be implying that as a woman you have a mind that is more masculine or as a male you have a mind that is more feminine. In his quote, “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul.” it seems to imply that there is this overbalance of one sex or the other in one’s brain. He doesn’t really go into any more detail about the statement because he is talking about a classification of sex. So, when the statement is read, it seems to imply that state of mind as mentioned before.