@Lovelyricepudding
I understand what you are saying. But it seems others misinterpret it this way. Perhaps Butler may be the answer? If her earlier work agrees with Foucault but now she is ignoring that to keep TRAS happy then the logic is Butler is pro gender, Butler agrees with Foucault so Foucault must be pro gender?
How do you see this linking with Queer theory? And what do you understand Queer theory to be?
She doesn’t “agree with” Foucault in that sense; her early work is loosely influenced by Foucauldian methodology, because she was originally a Hegelian scholar, and Foucault also derived some of his historical method from Hegel. But it isn’t like she just replicates Foucault as such. Critical theorists draw from a lot of precursors and contemporaries, and often they make use of some aspects but critique others, or they make use of a methodology but jettison part of the consequences of the thought, and so on.
Foucault himself was not explicitly interested in the idea of gender/sex (very much the main province of French feminism and psychoanalysis at that point in his career); but he is interested in sexuality in history. Largely male homosexuality, of course. There are, of course, many feminist criticisms to be made of Foucault about this, and lots of use to be drawn from his work too.
The initial phase of “queer theory” was very much about male homosexuality - “queer” of course being the slur against gay men at the time, not the current idea of “queer”. Sex and gender was very much thought of by male theorists of homosexuality (often dismissively so), as the province of feminists during the 70s-90s. Eve Sedgwick, in The Epistemology of the Closet (which typifies early “queer theory”), spends a lot of time in her work trying to justify why she as a woman is interested in male homosexuality, and why she should write on it if she’s not a gay man. (She does at one point make the somewhat comical statement that she can empathise with the marginality of gay men because she’s a fat woman, which is both kind of ludicrous and also…kind of not.) But her work was a very good polemical history of the gay rights movement in America, and how the politics and theory of sexuality might come together. It’s also famous for its rather overburdened prose style, but probably unjustly so. It’s worth reading, if you can stick with the prose.
That kind of “queer theory” sought to make a space in academic work and society for gay people to articulate their experiences and rewrite same sex oriented experience back into social and literary history. It’s a world away from the current daffy rubbish some TRAs come out with (here’s looking at you, Grace Lavery and Andrea Chu).
Much current trans/queer theory is a rather mendacious attempt to piggyback on the serious work of late 20thc century theorists of homosexuality and bisexuality. It adopts this body of work on sexuality and LGB history and tries to use it to do the same thing for gender ideology that was done for gay people. It’s usually pretty bad, though, because of all the obvious contradictions in gender ideology that we all know about. And it dismisses and co-opts the serious work of 20thc. feminist theory in a similar way. But to do so it rests on a kind of vulgarised postmodernism and a US version of identity politics, as well as a very uncritical notion of medical / clinical essentialism.
I enjoy writing about this, but I probably need to go to bed now!