A guest post elsewhere
A guest post: Queers, Foucault, truth, justice and the law. Which starts ...
Michel Foucault, archetypal postwar French thinker-one of the gang of four that Stephen Hicks dissects in his excellent Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (which I review here)-was notorious for his social constructionist analysis of history and for his avid embrace of a homoerotic hedonism, extending to BDSM (bondage-dominance sado-masochism). That embrace of homoerotic hedonism led to his death from AIDS: one of the early, prominent fatalities from the “gay plague”.
There is a certain irony, therefore, in one of the most trenchant criticisms of Foucault’s social constructionism being mounted by a historian of homosexuality. Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (which I review here) is a direct assault on Foucault’s intellectual legacy.
And continues here.
Michel Foucault, archetypal postwar French thinker-one of the gang of four that Stephen Hicks dissects in his excellent Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (which I review here)-was notorious for his social constructionist analysis of history and for his avid embrace of a homoerotic hedonism, extending to BDSM (bondage-dominance sado-masochism). That embrace of homoerotic hedonism led to his death from AIDS: one of the early, prominent fatalities from the “gay plague”.
There is a certain irony, therefore, in one of the most trenchant criticisms of Foucault’s social constructionism being mounted by a historian of homosexuality. Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (which I review here) is a direct assault on Foucault’s intellectual legacy.
And continues here.