The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i14.3889Abstract
Through a careful reading of Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism alongside Volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality, I argue that scholarship on both neoliberalism and queer theory should heed Foucault’s framing of both neoliberalism and sexuality as central to biopolitics. I thus offer two correctives to these fields of scholarship: for scholarship on neoliberalism, I locate a way to address the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism in a manner that Marxist analyses fail to provide; for scholarship in queer theory, I warn that the longstanding embrace of non-conformity as a mode of resistance to normalization is suspiciously neoliberal. I conclude with the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of jouissance as a non-fungible limit to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism that, if historicized and especially racialized, might offer a meaningful response to the increasing ethical collapse wrought by the neoliberalization of our lives.Downloads
Published
2012-09-14
How to Cite
Winnubst, S. (2012). The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning. Foucault Studies, (14), 79–97. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i14.3889
Issue
Section
Special Issue on Foucault and Queer Theory
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