Foucault

[lionheart]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/french-philosopher-michel-foucault-abused-boys-in-tunisia-6t5sj7jvw

And a great response from Allison Bailey.

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1262487938073493512.html

It was Algiers, not Tunisia, sorry.

Thank you EmbarrassingAdmissions and PhilODox for that information.

So many men, it seems, continue to be celebrated despite being unrepentant perpetrators of such despicable abuse. Can we at least hope that George Bernard Shaw may stand as a man of principle seeing as he supported the cause of ending child prostitution as it was termed at the time and ending the trafficking of girls to the continent for the purpose of child sexual exploitation?

I must look up more about Josephine Butler.

I have never really enjoyed Oscar Wilde’s work and somehow felt that as a flaw on my part, I won’t anymore!

@JeannieTheZebra

Well, from a university-philosophy perspective, the big problem was that after WW2 there didn’t seem to be many places for thinking to “go” that weren’t either seen as tainted by Nazism (basically any attempt to make the world a better place...) or hopelessly old-fashioned (anything that could be seem as “Christian” or based on the old system of right and wrong). So much of the prior 150 years or so of philosophy had been mainly German and all of that was now suspect. This was a major crisis and there was broadly speaking two responses. The first was attempting to explain “reality” by becoming more and more specific and technical, especially around language and word meanings.The other was post-structuralism, post-modernism and, later, queer theory. The basic idea behind it is that if the old belief sets lead to Nazism (and Communism) then there must be something fundamentally wrong with them and so everything in all of those beliefs must be questioned-even if that makes us uncomfortable. We have to break as many boundaries and turn as many norms upside down as possible. Both of these “response mindsets” are still playing out in university departments today. To a certain extent, we’re very much still post WW2.

This is an extremely lucid summary of the situation.

But I think before go tainting too much of post-WW2 academic thought with the excesses of a few horrible individuals (who, let's face it, have existed in all historical periods and within all philosophical doctrines), they need to consider the big picture and the positive aspects of so much being questioned and challenged. The western world is infinitely less racist, less sexist, less homophobic etc. now than it was 70 years ago. The range of acceptable ways of thinking and being is so much larger. The credibility given to the old and established just by virtue of being old and established is so much less. The power of the church is far weaker and people are able to question both its teachings and its institutions. And a person being sexually abused by someone like Foucault is far more likely to feel they can report it, and far more likely to be aken seriously when they do, than they were then.

Radical academia has been a part of all of these changes, providing much of the original thought and challenge to accepted orthodoxies that has accompanied struggle on the ground. Not least when it comes to feminism.

@FifteenToes

Oh goodness, I agree. The kind of work I do (mainly bioethics) is only really possible because of the radical academic thinking you describe. (Tbh, Foucalt and post-Foucaltian work on biopolitics has been influential on my work so, to a certain extent, even Foucault deserves some credit...)
The fact remains however, that one of the reasons why post-modernism and queer theory became dominant in universities is because there was something of a philosophical vacuum, especially in the English speaking world. If you reject the negative anthropology/morality of Christianity as shaming and exclusionary and the concept of the “common good” as potentially totalitarian (read Communist...) and then see the entire world through the lens of hyper-capitalist neoliberalism, it’s possible to see how we ended up with the “marketplace of identities/moralities/truths” phenomenon we have today.
Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot of good thinking going on. We’re just wrestling with difficult ideas and it’s going to take some time to work through everything and figure out what’s coherent and what isn’t. Eventually there will have to be a period of consolidation.

I wonder about the consolidation.

I sometimes think that a lot of postmodernism was developed explicitly to function as a critique of the mainstream - an avant-grade/elitist project, perhaps.

What happens when it becomes the mainstream?

I suspect many of those who developed the thinking never really envisioned a point where it would be the mainstream.

And is it part of a (Whiggist) historical movement of progress - things getting better and better, us all moving forwards to ever greater equality - or is it a paradigm shift? A fundamental rupture with the Enlightenment project? (A rupture which Foucault and others saw themselves as engaged in?)

Anyway, as for Foucault - his thinking is so interesting - if only because he played with the idea of what a 'body of thought' and what 'the thought that can be tied to a name such as Foucault' might be.

I think he deliberately played with the extent to which his work might be tied to his life/judged by his life.

It's come up before: at least one biographer has looked at his decision to have anonymous unprotected sex whilst he knew he was HIV+ through the lens of his work: both how his thinking might have informed that decision and vice versa.

Given he was a sophisticated thinker, who played with the philosophical tradition of both refusing the materiality of the author in the work (the philosophers body/life within the work/being used to judge the work) and the desire to do just that (reading a philosophy through the life of the author), I think it is acceptable to look at Foucault's work through the lens of his choices.

And I'm not sure it is just one or two transgressive individuals.

There is something so odd about how an essentially transgressive and quite niche area of philosophical thinking became so very popular.

I think there's a really interesting materialist history to be written there.

My own niche theory is that, while a lot of post-modernism and post-structuralism came out of post-2WW and failure of 68, it became popular as a result of AIDS and the absolutely appalling failure of the Right's response to AIDS, particularly in the USA.

But it's a niche theory.

Another one here who thought of Joe Orton. Am I right in remembering that Kenneth Williams went with them to Morocco? I can't remember if he was interested in the teenage boys/young men or if he was a kind of asexual homosexual.

When I was a teenager I read something in the NME which referred to 'the rent-boy bastards who shopped Oscar Wilde at his trial.' It was only years later that I fully appreciated that these were teenagers and young men living in a time of workhouses and destitution.

I'm also interested in the Ballet Russes, but it makes me uncomfortable that so many of the young male dancers had a relationship with Sergei Diaghilev. Nijinsky developed schizophrenia, but I can't help wondering if a large part of his mental health problems were due the way he was treated.

What happens when it becomes the mainstream?

Jane Clare Jones has written/spoken about this a lot. Here's one piece:

Disciplining Martina: Heretics and the Church of Trans Normativity

Quite how the people writing this thought they could parse ‘bad normativity’ from ‘good hegemony’ is anyone’s guess – if ‘normative’ or ‘hegemonic’ discourses are ‘disciplinary’ or ‘bad’ by virtue of being hegemonic, then there is no reason why ‘queer’ discourses should get a free pass. (There is a paradox in the centre of queer thought here – at the point at which queer theory becomes a form of academic normativity, it is no longer, by its own definitions, queer)

Final quote:

For the love of the goddess, open your fucking eyes. This is an unequivocally, irremediably identitarian discourse. Everything we learned about the dangers of totalization, and the inability to deal with difference, and the importance of openness. Every thing you allegedly believe about ‘bad’ normativity, and discursive discipline. Every thought that arose from the post-war ashes about how not to purify ourselves with flames. This discourse is everything you claim to oppose. It is everything that it claims that it isn’t.

FFS. LOOK.

this is the petion that was mentioned

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws

@EsmaCannonball

Another one here who thought of Joe Orton. Am I right in remembering that Kenneth Williams went with them to Morocco? I can't remember if he was interested in the teenage boys/young men or if he was a kind of asexual homosexual.

When I was a teenager I read something in the NME which referred to 'the rent-boy bastards who shopped Oscar Wilde at his trial.' It was only years later that I fully appreciated that these were teenagers and young men living in a time of workhouses and destitution.

I'm also interested in the Ballet Russes, but it makes me uncomfortable that so many of the young male dancers had a relationship with Sergei Diaghilev. Nijinsky developed schizophrenia, but I can't help wondering if a large part of his mental health problems were due the way he was treated.

Yes, Kenneth Williams went with Orton and Halliwell to Morocco at least once. I don't know if he had any contact with boys there but I think he did, up to a point, with other consenting adults. In one of the documentaries about him, an expat gay couple remember him on the beach sitting bolt upright in jacket and tie while everyone else was in swimming trunks! (The doc is narrated by Maureen Lipman. Tangiers presented as a liberating place for gay men.)

I love the Ballets Russes, the decor, the costumes, etc. But yes, what you mention is troubling. Again, abuse behind a veneer of arty decadence. It's shocking how much of that abusive behaviour by privileged men has been normalized.

Interesting about that Stephen Fry play. Would he get away with that as it’s practically juvenilia? He must have been very young when he wrote that. Not that much is going to topple him from his current National Treasure status.

Thank you OP

Everything has a price and everything can be commodified.

www.the11thhourblog.com/post/let-s-have-no-more-talk-of-dysphoria?fbclid=IwAR2YUfNkFZEqDtH7bFoeq_1sn6dp3qYIJs0002Yy37YXqvuutUURpRHs06I

'The media is selling disembodiment as expression, for profit and they are including free shipping.

In less than a decade, the “transgender” “human rights” “movement,” (I am already running out of quotation marks) has morphed from "born in the wrong body," to “gender identity disorder,” to “gender dysphoria,” to “gender incongruence,” to “gender identity,” to “gender expression,” complete with its own line of make-up, fashion and body scars.'