Guest Editors’ Introduction

Shannon Winnubst is Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Here current book project, The Biopolitics of Cool: Neoliberalism, Difference and Ethics, expands on the central theses of her essay in this issue, inquiring into the conceptual transformations of social difference and ethics underway in the social rationality of neoliberalism, especially as diagnosed by Foucault in his 1979 lectures. She is author of Queering Freedom (Indiana, 2006) and editor of Reading Bataille Now (Indiana, 2006). More recent publications include: “The Missing Link: Homo Economicus (Reading Foucault and Bataille Together),” Blackwell Companion to Foucault, eds. Chris Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (Blackwell, forthcoming March 2013); “Temporality in Queer Theory and Continental Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass, 5 (2) 2010, 136-146; and “What if the law is written in a porno book?” Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction, ed. Constantin Boundas (Continuum Press: 2009).

Jana Sawicki is Carl Vogt '58 Professor of Philosophy at Williams College. Her next project will focus on interpretations of the idea of "getting free of the self" in Foucault's ethics and it's relevance to the politics of ourselves within a contemporary frame. She is co-editor (with Timothy O'Leary and Chris Falzon) of Blackwell's Companion to Foucault, and author of Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (Routledge, 1991) as well as other essays on Foucault, feminist theory, and queer theory. Recently published articles include: "Foucault, Queer Theory, and the Discourse of Desire," in Foucault and Philosophy, ed. Timothy O'Leary and Chris Falzon (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); "Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism," Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd Edition, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2005); "Foucault's Pleasures: Desexualizing Queer Politics?" Feminism and the Final Foucault, eds. Karen Vintges and Dianna Taylor (University of Illinois Press, 2004). A new essay, "Queer Feminist Thinking" will appear in the Foucault Studies 16 (Guest Editor, Cressida Heyes).