Foucault News

Bourcier, M.-H. (2012). “Cultural translation, politics of disempowerment and the reinvention of queer power and politics”. Sexualities, 15 (1), p. 93-109.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711432107

Abstract
This article addresses the task of describing the flows and trends of cultural translation of queer between the USA and Europe, particularly France. Firstly, it demonstrates how queer groups located in France re-translated ‘queer made in the USA’, inspired by continental philosophy, back into a French idiom in the mid-1990s. It then seeks to explain their contemporary responses to new trends and agendas in queer studies and politics that sound more and more compliant with ‘logics of disempowerment’. The re-sexualization and re-politicization of French post-structuralist philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacan, made possible by American queer theory and cultural studies, have been succeeded by a phase in which American theorists seem to crave the traditionally European privilege of being lauded as public intellectuals. At the beginning of the new century, a violent recodification by straight scholars and institutions took place and is still taking place in France: queer and post-colonial studies are dismissed or banned as subjective, unscientific agit prop. Today’s benevolent researchers reaffirm their power through powerlessness and ‘identify’ with the victims they defend. In this context, recent American queer theory and politics can give the impression of being driven by a logic of disempowerment. To illustrate this, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is compared with her Undoing Gender. Thus where Gender Trouble promoted strategies of resignification and resistance for both gender expression and hate speech, Undoing Gender displaces the strategy of resignification from hate speech to what could be called ‘master words’ such as ‘the universal’ and ‘the human’, and this ‘neo-universalism’ is linked to a politics of vulnerability. Moreover, whereas in Gender Trouble, textual or discursive performativity is impersonal and reversible, in Undoing Gender, the continental European figure of the philosopher is back. To counter this development, to pursue a strategy of dis-identification with the nation state and the United States, to quit the politics of vulnerability or desperation and to reverse the disempowering effects of the neo-assimilationist agenda, the article proposes a specifically French alternative. This consists of seeking to insert a queer version of what Felix Guattari calls ‘micropolitics’ into the macrocultural agenda of the LGBT right.

Taylor, Chloe (2012). “Foucault and Familial Power”. Hypatia, 27 (1), p. 201-18.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01171.x

Abstract
This paper provides an overview of Michel Foucault’s continually changing observations on familial power, as well as the feminist-Foucauldian literature on the family. It suggests that these accounts offer fragments of a genealogy of the family that undermine any all-encompassing or transhistorical account of the institution. Approaching the family genealogically, rather than seeking a single model of power that can explain it, shows that far from this institution being a quasi-natural formation or a bedrock of unassailable values, it is in fact a continually contested fiction that masks its own histories of becoming.

Thompson, Malcolm (2012). “Foucault, fields of governability, and the population-family-economy nexus in China”. History and theory, 51 (1), p. 42-62.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00611.x

Abstract
It was only in the early twentieth century that China discovered that it had a population, at least if a population is understood not as a simple number of people but instead in terms of such features as variable levels of health, birth and death rates, age, sex, dependency ratios, and so onas an object with a distinct rationality and intrinsic dynamics that can be made the target of a specific kind of direct intervention. In 1900, such a developmentalist conception of the population simply did not exist in China; by the 1930s, it pervaded the entire social and political field from top to bottom. Through a reading of a series of foundational texts in population and family reformism in China, this paper argues that this birth of the Chinese population occurred as a result of a general transformation of practices of governing, one that necessarily also involved a reconceptualization of the family and a new logic of overall social rationalization; in short, the isolation of a population family economy nexus as a central field of modern governing. This process is captured by elaborating and extending Foucault’s studies of the historical emergence of apparatuses (dispositifs) into a notion of fields of governability. Finally, this paper argues that the one-child policy, launched in the late 1970s, should be understood not in isolation from the imposition of the family-responsibility system in agriculture and market reforms in exactly that period, but as partmutatis mutandis of a return to a form of governing that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century.