Tavistock staff and Foucault

[MNadactyl]

In the Telegraph. A whistleblower is also quoted:

“The identity politics that is colonising our public services is only causing further division and distrust which I cannot condone.”

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/05/nhs-child-gender-clinic-forced-u-turn-bombardment-wokery/

"Another series of emails last year saw the Tavistock’s LGBTQI+ staff network write a glowing profile of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose theories have underpinned woke ideologies but who posthumously faced allegations he abused boys in Tunisia in the 1960s.
Appearing to dismiss these claims, the Tavistock staff email said: “After his death, Foucault’s life and work were subject to a series of salacious attacks that focused on his sexual preferences."
Queer theory
The group also encouraged Tavistock staff to embrace “queer theory”, including studying identities “in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not ‘follow’ from either sex or gender”, as well as “anti-porn politics” and “butch-femme erotics”.
Another profile by the staff group cited the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s view that "‘many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don't do, or even don't want to do”."

“Another profile by the staff group cited the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s view that "‘many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don't do, or even don't want to do”."”

What the actual fuck

Three times Nightwalker you have dismissed Dr Em's pieces without engaging with them. As we are talking about Foucault, let's just focus on him. If you can, please explain how Dr Em's piece is wrong.

Also given Foucalt''s published views on age of consent, what are you basng your dismissal of his paedophilia on?

And I don't accept 'it is far too complex for anyone without 20 years of study to understand'. If that is truly your position then you have missed the point.

Foucault - his work is expansive and very complex

Just because something is expansive and very complex, doesn't make it good. Many a load of rubbish is wrapped up in such a way as to appear scholarly and full of insight - whereas it is just drivel and full of flaws. It depends on the reader being impressed by the presentation. Or, academics carrying on with the collusion and pretending it is worthy. Some for in group reasons, some for maybe nefarious reasons.

*If you want to understand any philosophy or critical theory, my number one advice is to actually read it. Not watch Youtube videos or read non-academic media pieces about it by people who don't really understand it themselves. Just read some of the actual work. It's never been easier to read texts in their original form than it is today with online texts and cheap paperback editions all over the place.

You can read opinion pieces all day long, but you'll never understand the work unless you read it yourself*

I suspect that you are wasting your breath...

newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

An excellent essay on Butler. I am not someone who has read any of Butler's work, I've briefly tried a couple of times and just found it utter waffle.

@Lovelyricepudding

And I don't accept 'it is far too complex for anyone without 20 years of study to understand'. If that is truly your position then you have missed the point.

If this is the case then I will not ever be able to understand any of it. And to be honest, anything that dense and complex is not being well explained.

I don't know much about Foucault but I found Heather Brunskell Evans quite interesting on the subject...

@Lovelyricepudding

Three times Nightwalker you have dismissed Dr Em's pieces without engaging with them. As we are talking about Foucault, let's just focus on him. If you can, please explain how Dr Em's piece is wrong.

Also given Foucalt''s published views on age of consent, what are you basng your dismissal of his paedophilia on?

I’m an “academic” for what that’s worth. There’s a really strong pseud’s corner vibe on this thread…

Why do I need to spend 20 years of my life studying Foucault? I don't like where it leads. I haven't read Mein Kamph and if I did it would not result in me seeing the necessity of gassing Jews.
Calling out wankery for what it is.

Ultimately, this is an NHS clinic treating children. It does not need philosophy of any kind, other than basic ethics. It needs to be concerned about data and science.

When a children's service is referencing philosophical theories that even subtlely link to paedophilia, that is a big red flag. It seems Foucault wasn't even that subtle.

I think the bellends and immature people who have not yet grasped life need to step aside and allow mothers to do ther job of protecting children. Let us do our job, you may thank us one day.

sigh the reading comprehension on this thread is very limited. I certainly didn’t say you need to spend 20 years studying Foucault at any point - I actually said you should go and read him yourself rather than read opinion pieces. Try starting with the texts I recommended.

Case in point that posters on this thread clearly don’t actually read what is actually written as opposed to what they make up in their heads is there. If you get basic things wrong and misrepresent them because you haven’t read things properly, how do you think you are getting anything else right?

I say it again - read the actual work before you start claiming you know anything about it.

@nightscrollingdoom

sigh the reading comprehension on this thread is very limited. I certainly didn’t say you need to spend 20 years studying Foucault at any point - I actually said you should go and read him yourself rather than read opinion pieces. Try starting with the texts I recommended.

Case in point that posters on this thread clearly don’t actually read what is actually written as opposed to what they make up in their heads is there. If you get basic things wrong and misrepresent them because you haven’t read things properly, how do you think you are getting anything else right?

I say it again - read the actual work before you start claiming you know anything about it.

Once we've passed your tests, may we please be allowed to comment? Would hat be OK?

@sacredfeminina

Ultimately, this is an NHS clinic treating children. It does not need philosophy of any kind, other than basic ethics. It needs to be concerned about data and science.

When a children's service is referencing philosophical theories that even subtlely link to paedophilia, that is a big red flag. It seems Foucault wasn't even that subtle.

No, the Tavistock has always been a multi-disciplinary clinic - not just for child patients but with a much wider psychiatric scope - that is partly an academic centre for psychology and psychoanalysis and training. In fact it was for a long time the one place in the NHS to fund psychoanalytic therapies for mental health. And psychoanalysis advocates the very opposite of gender ideology. GIDS is only one part of the Tavistock. If anything GIDSs had sidelined a philosophical and psychodynamic approach in favour of spurious “medical only” gender treatments.

I’m horrified by the scandals at GIDS, but on this thread posters are extremely ill-informed about both what the Tavistock is, and indeed the whole field.

Once we've passed your tests, may we please be allowed to comment? Would hat be OK? hmm

I tend to think that actually knowing something about a subject before spouting off on it is generally a good thing, yes!

@nightscrollingdoom

sigh the reading comprehension on this thread is very limited. I certainly didn’t say you need to spend 20 years studying Foucault at any point - I actually said you should go and read him yourself rather than read opinion pieces. Try starting with the texts I recommended.

Case in point that posters on this thread clearly don’t actually read what is actually written as opposed to what they make up in their heads is there. If you get basic things wrong and misrepresent them because you haven’t read things properly, how do you think you are getting anything else right?

I say it again - read the actual work before you start claiming you know anything about it.

So your answer is 'no, I am not able to explain what is wrong with Dr Em's pieces'?

I can certainly write an analysis of those pieces if you like? I’m not sure anyone on this thread would bother reading it, however!

Hubris.

Lots of it here!

Quite a few of us are academics.

Hectoring, that's another good word.

Hubris and hectoring.

Neither are well received, here or in real life.

Going back to the article:

"Another series of emails last year saw the Tavistock’s LGBTQI+ staff network write a glowing profile of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose theories have underpinned woke ideologies but who posthumously faced allegations he abused boys in Tunisia in the 1960s.
Appearing to dismiss these claims, the Tavistock staff email said: “After his death, Foucault’s life and work were subject to a series of salacious attacks that focused on his sexual preferences."

Why oh why has anyone in that place of work taken it upon themselves to write what they did, and to send it to others at work? There has to be more to this story.

Good, start with a quick summary of how her statements on Foucault are wrong. If you restrict it to the length of an abstract then I will definitely read it. I find having to write concisely for academic but non specialist audience really tests one's understanding of a topic. And if I find your position arguable then I will also read a longer piece.

To start with, those articles completely misrepresent postmodernism, poststructuralism and the works they are selectively quoting from. The actual trend of “queer theory” in the later twentieth century was completely at odds with current transgender ideology, which bears more resemblance to a religiose pseudoscience.

It is Foucault’s work that suggests that medical and psychological “diagnoses” can actually be produced by the very discourses that claim to “discover” them - a Foucauldian reading of gender ideology suggests that it doesn’t really exist in that form until discourses and institutions create it by naming and producing it. Much of Foucault’s work on law, psychiatry and the clinic completely undoes the idea of an inner “identity” that can form the basis of of identity politics.

The work on how social and institutional forces actually create conditions like “transgender” is the very opposite of what current gender ideology claims.

The Tavistock is a university and postgraduate-level academic and clinical institute, of which only part is clinical practice and which has multiple departments and clinics - GIDS being only one of these. It’s like a multidisciplinary university for several clinical and academic disciplines. Theoretical philosophy and psychiatry, and the history of these as social institutions, is a completely normal topic for seminars to focus on. The problems at GIDS seem to have been very different. Honestly, that Telegraph article is poorly understood scaremongering.

Honestly, the last thing anyone needs to worry about is Foucault. If you want to get angry at the treatment of children, there are plenty of other routes to focus on - and particularly the influence of US based politics on the transgender issue, transgender lobby groups, social media sites and lots of other ways that this is affecting the public sphere that have nothing to do with 1970s intellectual history.

To start with, those articles completely misrepresent postmodernism, poststructuralism

To be fair it is nigh in impossible to define either of them without a certain amount of cognitive dissonance and reliance on people nodding along sagely.

In a nutshell, her statements on Foucault are wrong because she misrepresents Foucault’s analysis of sexuality as advocating it instead of critiquing it.

The History of Sexuality is a three volume philosophical inquiry critiquing historical constructions of ideas of sexuality, and she’s taken an illustrative passage from the first few pages of the beginning of the introduction, that he’s using to critique historical ideas of sexuality, and claimed he’s advocating for it.

@SamphiretheStickerist

To start with, those articles completely misrepresent postmodernism, poststructuralism

To be fair it is nigh in impossible to define either of them without a certain amount of cognitive dissonance and reliance on people nodding along sagely.

No, they do have clear and distinct definitions, and they are not the same thing as each other.