Foucault News

Steven G. Ogden, The Church, Authority, and Foucault. Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom, Routledge, 2017

The Church, Authority, and Foucault addresses the problem of the Church’s enmeshment with sovereign power, which can lead to marginalization. Breaking new ground, Ogden uses Foucault’s approach to power and knowledge to interpret the church leader’s significance as the guardian of knowledge. This can become privileged knowledge, under the spell of sovereign power, and with the complicity of clergy and laity in search of sovereigns. Inevitably, such a culture leads to a sense of entitlement for leaders and conformity for followers. All in the name of obedience.

The Church needs to change in order to fulfil its vocation. Instead of a monarchy, what about Church as an open space of freedom? This book, then, is a theological enterprise which cultivates practices of freedom for the sake of the other. This involves thinking differently by exploring catalysts for change, which include critique, space, imagination, and wisdom. In the process, Ogden uses a range of sources, analysing discourse, gossip, ritual, territory, masculinity, and pastoral power. In all, the work of Michel Foucault sets the tone for a fresh ecclesiological critique that will appeal to theologians and clergy alike.

Table of Contents

1 The Church and the problem of sovereign power

2 Under Foucault’s gaze: the subject, freedom, and the power-knowledge concept

3 The concept of authority: guardians, gossip, and the sovereign exception

4 The spell of monarchy and the sacralization of obedience

5 The Church as an open space of freedom

6 New spaces and the imagination

7 Bearing the lightning of possible storms: critique, space, imagination, wisdom

Biography
Steven Ogden is an adjunct lecturer in theology, and a member of the Center for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT), with Charles Sturt University Australia. He is also the Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley. Previously, Steven has been the Principal of St Francis Theological College Brisbane, and the Dean of St Peter’s Cathedral Adelaide.

Foucault and Animals
Edited by Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, Brill, 2016

Foucault and Animals is the first collection of its kind to explore the relevance of Michel Foucault’s thought for the question of the animal. Chrulew and Wadiwel bring together essays from emerging and established scholars that illuminate the place of animals and animality within Foucault’s texts, and open up his highly influential range of concepts and methods to different domains of human-animal relations including experimentation, training, zoological gardens, pet-keeping, agriculture, and consumption. Touching on themes such as madness and discourse, power and biopolitics, government and ethics, and sexuality and friendship, the volume takes the fields of Foucault studies and human-animal studies into promising new directions.

Biographical note
Matthew Chrulew, Ph.D. (2011) is a research fellow in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts and the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. His essays have appeared in Angelaki, SubStance, New Formations, Foucault Studies and elsewhere.

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, Ph.D. (2006) is a Lecturer in Human rights and Socio-Legal Studies at The University of Sydney. He is author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill, 2015).

Table of contents
Foreword
List of Contributors
Editor’s Introduction: Foucault and Animals, Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

Part One: Discourse and Madness
1. Terminal Truths: Foucault’s Animals and the Mask of the Beast, Joseph Pugliese
2. Chinese Dogs and French Scapegoats: An Essay in Zoonomastics, Claire Huot
3. Violence and Animality: An Investigation of Absolute Freedom in Foucault’s History of Madness, Leonard Lawlor
4. The Order of Things: The Human Sciences are the Event of Animality, Saïd Chebili.
(Translated by Matthew Chrulew and Jeffrey Bussolini)

Part Two: Power and Discipline
5. “Taming the wild profusion of existing things”: A Study of Foucault, Power, and Human/Animal Relationships, Clare Palmer
6. Dressage: Training the Equine Body , Natalie Corinne Hansen
7. Foucault’s Menagerie: Cock Fighting, Bear Baiting, and the Genealogy of Human-Animal Power, Alex Mackintosh

Part Three: Science and Biopolitics
8. The Birth of the Laboratory Animal: Biopolitics, Animal Experimentation, and Animal Wellbeing, Robert G. W. Kirk
9. Animals as Biopolitical Subjects, Matthew Chrulew
10. Biopower, Heterogeneous Biosocial Collectivities and Domestic Livestock Breeding, Lewis Holloway and Carol Morris

Part Four: Government and Ethics
11. Apum Ordines: Of Bees and Government, Craig McFarlane
12. Animal Friendship as a Way of Life: Sexuality, Petting and Interspecies Companionship, Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
13. Foucault and the Ethics of Eating, Chloë Taylor
Afterword, Paul Patton

Nicholas de Villiers, Sexography.Sex Work in Documentary, University of Minnesota Press, Forthcoming 2017

A bold challenge to rethink the ways we view sex work and documentary film

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an eruption of nonfiction films on sex work. The first book to examine a cross-section of this diverse and transnational body of work, Sexography confronts the ethical questions raised by ethnographic documentary and interviews with sexually marginalized subjects. Nicholas de Villiers argues that carnal and cultural knowledge are inextricably entangled in ethnographic sex work documentaries.

De Villiers offers a reading of cinema as a technology of truth and advances a theory of confessional and counterconfessional performance by the interviewed subject who must negotiate both loaded questions and stigma. He pays special attention to the tactical negotiation of power in these films and how cultural and geopolitical shifts have affected sex work and sex workers. Throughout, Sexography analyzes the films of a range of non–sex-worker filmmakers, including Jennie Livingston, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Shohini Ghosh, and Cui Zi’en, as well as films produced by sex workers. In addition, it identifies important parallels and intersections between queer and sex worker rights activist movements and their documentary historiography.

De Villiers ultimately demonstrates how commercial sex is intertwined with culture and power. He advocates shifting our approach from scrutinizing the motives of those who sell sex to examining the motives and roles of the filmmakers and transnational audiences creating and consuming films about sex work.

Heather Brunskell-Evans (Ed) The Sexualized Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016

Book Description
This edited collection examines pornography as a material practice that eroticises gender inequality and sexual violence towards women. It addresses the complex relationship between pornography and medicine (in particular, sexology and psycho-therapy) whereby medicine has historically, and currently, afforded pornography considerable legitimacy and even authority. Pornography naturalises women’s submission and men’s dominance as if gendered power is rooted in biology not politics. In contrast to the populist view that medicine is objective and rational, the contributors here demonstrate that medicine has been complicit with the construction of gender difference, and in that construction the relationship with pornography is not incidental but fundamental.

A range of theoretical approaches critically engages with this topic in the light, firstly, of radical feminist ideas about patriarchy and the politics of gender, and, secondly, of the rapidly changing conditions of global capitalism and digital-technologies. In its broad approach, the book also engages with the ideas of Michel Foucault, particularly his refutation of the liberal hypothesis that sexuality is a deep biological and psychological human property which is repressed by traditional, patriarchal discourses and which can be freed from authoritarianism, for example by producing and consuming pornography.

In taking pornography as a cultural and social phenomenon, the concepts brought to bear by the contributors critically scrutinise not only pornography and medicine, but also current media scholarship. The 21st century has witnessed a growth in (neo-)liberal academic literature which is pro-pornography. This book provides a critical counterpoint to this current academic trend, and demonstrates its lack of engagement with the politics of the multi-billion dollar pornography industry which creates the desire for the product it sells, the individualism of its arguments which analyse pornography as personal fantasy, and the paucity of theoretical analysis. In contrast, this book re-opens the feminist debate about pornography for a new generation of critical thinkers in the 21st century. Pornography matters politically and ethically. It matters in the real world as well as in fantasy; it matters to performers as well as to consumers; it matters to adults as well as to children; and it matters to men as well as to women.