Michel Foucault and Queer Theory

Michel Foucault is the most important public intellectual in recent times. Although he died in 1984 of AIDS, the first public figure in France to do so, and was a highly influential figure in his time, his influence grew almost exponentially thereafter. It is the 'queering' influence of academic discourse by writers such as Foucault and Judith Butler who have also bequeathed to us the previously novel idea of gender identity.

What this lecture seeks to do is to discuss the broad issues related to language and power that Foucault's writing highlights. While I will find myself in agreement with the problems bequeathed to us by Enlightenment notions of humanity that Foucault catalogues in his voluminous scholarship, I will also question whether in the name of emancipation and empowerment the performance of writers like Foucault have in fact enslaved us in an entirely arbitrary and powerless experience of human nature. Our understanding of life has been 'queered.'

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