Suchergebnisse

Suspensions of sex : Foucault and Derrida -- Reproductive futurism, Lee Edelman, and reproductive rights -- Foucault's children : re-reading the history of sexuality, volume one -- Immunity, bare life, and the thanatopolitics of reproduction : Foucault, Esposito, Agamben -- Judith Butler, precarious life, and reproduction: from social ontology to ontological tact

"In Foucault's Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault's contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory."--

Abstract
The Dobbs decision revoking the constitutional legality of abortion in the United States was widely characterized as a use of raw power. That gives rise to the questions: What kind of power is in question? How does the post-Dobbs moment encapsulate a number of hinges between formations of power characterized in post-Foucauldian theory? How is fluency in the combinations of power at work in the Dobbs decision and aftermath enhanced by a vocabulary of such hinges, including "revocability," "exception," and "disqualification"? The article opens up the relationship between rights-bearing and the differential distribution of expectations (for some) that rights be accompanied by particular kinds of good conduct from which others are exempt. Asking how and why abortion has served as a device for setting aside a broad range of rights, the article gives special attention to "exemption" and "self-exemption" in the reproductive governance of abortion.

A response to Lynne Huffer's Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, this article considers Huffer's critical reaction to characterizations of feminism as dominated by a more moral tenor repudiated by queer theory. Huffer argues that a stronger distinction should be maintained between the moral and the ethical. The failure to maintain this distinction has led to a mistaken repudiation of both the moral and the ethical. Rather than jettisoning both, Huffer argues that queer theory needs the ethical. Proposing potential elements for a queer ethics, she returns to Foucaultian genealogy, an Irigarayan ethics of eros, and a new kind of synthesis of narrative and performative. Also important to the work is an emphasis on ethics understood in terms of desubjectivation and of the Foucaultian event. Rethinking the meaning of the performative in this context, this essay asks how we can distinguish between Huffer's analytic account of the event and an assessment of trans-formative queer projects as events. What, the essay asks, finally counts most importantly as an event in this context?

This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I ( HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four 'strategic ensembles' of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality ( HS1: 104) also constitutes a largely invisible hinge between the trajectories in HS1: biopolitics (vector of governmentality, management, administration and intensification of life) and sex (vector through which the repressive hypothesis is rejected). Particularly because it is one of the least discussed figures in Foucauldian commentary, my argument is that a reading of HS1 through the prism of its Malthusian couple produces unexpected results. A text that can be interpreted from the perspective of (a) its debate with psychoanalysis, or (b) its potential debate with those for whom sexual rights belong to a sexual subject, or (c) its status as a watershed text for biopolitical theory, enters into a fourth dialogue with the history of reproduction as politicized and biopoliticized, a problematic to date taken up most directly by Ann Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire. This allows for a revisiting of the complex relationship between the vectors of 'sex' and 'life' in HS1. Although reproductive sex, and reproductive life, are not the themes of the strongest importance in HS1, they serve as the invisible hinge at the interface of biopolitics and sex in HS1. Considering the status of reproductive life from this perspective becomes a departure point for reconsidering the reproductive woman, in her historical role as part of the problematized Malthusian couple and at the intersection of biopolitics and thanatopolitics.