Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Suspensions of Sex: Foucault and Derrida -- 2. Reproductive Futurism, Lee Edelman, and Reproductive Rights -- 3. Foucault's Children: Re-Reading The History of Sexuality -- 4. Immunity, Bare Life, and the Thanatopolitics of Reproduction: Foucault, Esposito, Agamben -- 5. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, and Reproduction: From Social Ontology to Ontological Tact -- Notes -- Index

A response to Lynne Huffer's Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, this article considers Huffer's critical reaction to characterizations of feminism as dominated by a more moral tenor repudiated by queer theory. Huffer argues that a stronger distinction should be maintained between the moral and the ethical. The failure to maintain this distinction has led to a mistaken repudiation of both the moral and the ethical. Rather than jettisoning both, Huffer argues that queer theory needs the ethical. Proposing potential elements for a queer ethics, she returns to Foucaultian genealogy, an Irigarayan ethics of eros, and a new kind of synthesis of narrative and performative. Also important to the work is an emphasis on ethics understood in terms of desubjectivation and of the Foucaultian event. Rethinking the meaning of the performative in this context, this essay asks how we can distinguish between Huffer's analytic account of the event and an assessment of trans-formative queer projects as events. What, the essay asks, finally counts most importantly as an event in this context?

This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I ( HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four 'strategic ensembles' of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality ( HS1: 104) also constitutes a largely invisible hinge between the trajectories in HS1: biopolitics (vector of governmentality, management, administration and intensification of life) and sex (vector through which the repressive hypothesis is rejected). Particularly because it is one of the least discussed figures in Foucauldian commentary, my argument is that a reading of HS1 through the prism of its Malthusian couple produces unexpected results. A text that can be interpreted from the perspective of (a) its debate with psychoanalysis, or (b) its potential debate with those for whom sexual rights belong to a sexual subject, or (c) its status as a watershed text for biopolitical theory, enters into a fourth dialogue with the history of reproduction as politicized and biopoliticized, a problematic to date taken up most directly by Ann Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire. This allows for a revisiting of the complex relationship between the vectors of 'sex' and 'life' in HS1. Although reproductive sex, and reproductive life, are not the themes of the strongest importance in HS1, they serve as the invisible hinge at the interface of biopolitics and sex in HS1. Considering the status of reproductive life from this perspective becomes a departure point for reconsidering the reproductive woman, in her historical role as part of the problematized Malthusian couple and at the intersection of biopolitics and thanatopolitics.

Following criticisms of Alison Stone's treatment of Judith Butler on nature and embodiment, this article argues that Stone has reconfigured Butler so as to accommodate Stone's interpretation of Irigaray. The project can be used to draw attention to forms of prior reconfiguration that may occur when differing theoretical frameworks are brought into dialogue with each other. The need for such forms of implicit, prior reconfiguration helps draw attention to the differences and relationships between different frameworks and the only apparently similar terms and concepts embedded in them. In the light of a staged encounter between Butler and Irigaray, Stone widens the conceptual space within Butler's project, into which she drops an alternative, reconfiguring understanding of Butler's work as requiring an absent concept: original, multiple, self-differentiating nature. She argues that the concept has the potential to serve as a useful intervention into the work of Butler and, among others, Schelling. Although this potential is not directly addressed by Stone, the reading serves as an occasion to reflect on a number of interpretative questions concerning not only the tacit work that occurs in one author's reconfiguration of another but also the varied methodologies that may be appropriate to the interpretation of Luce Irigaray's work in particular.