The hegemonic form of contemporary queer theory is dependent on a model of desire as autonomous and deregulated, derived from post-'68 French theory and particularly the work of Michel Foucault. Such a model is at risk of finding itself in congruence with a deregulated post-Fordist capitalism that recuperates supposedly dissident sexual identities. This article returns to the work of Foucault to identify a largely unacknowledged tendency in his work that contests the valorization of sexuality and calls for an `end of (...) the monarchy of sex'. This possibility is linked to Foucault's controversial exploration of the concept of `spiritual politics' through his engagement with the Iranian revolution. Rather than regarding this as a regression into a reactionary religiosity, I argue that it forms an inquiry into new political possibilities of revolt. These possibilities contest what Alain Badiou has identified as the nihilism of contemporary capitalism, in which desire and sexuality are deployed to constrain the political imagination to a limited bodily `materialism'. Drawing on the work of the later Foucault, it becomes possible to develop this new politics around asceticism, which is not so much withdrawal from the world but the refusal of the mediations of identity through sexuality and the body. (shrink)

Modern urban life is increasingly characterized by specialized erotic worlds designed for sexual partnership and sexual sociality. In this article, I build on sociological theory developed in areas other than the sociology of sexuality to formulate a framework uniquely suited to the analysis of such modern erotic worlds--the sexual fields framework. Coupling Goffman's social psychological focus on situational negotiation with a Bourdieusian model of routine practice, the sexual fields framework highlights the relationship of interactional work to fields of objective relations (...) wherein historically specific erotic schemas acquire a structural manifestation that erotic players must navigate. In so doing, the sexual fields approach advances a set of sensitizing concepts for identifying the structures of collective sexual life, and raises a set of new lines of sociological inquiry, including the relationship of sexual fields to both psychoanalytic and macro-level structures and processes. (shrink)

In this paper, we build on recent work on the role of the ‘utopian pedagogue’ to explore how utopian thinking can be developed within contemporary higher education institutions. In defending a utopian orientation on the part of HE lecturers, we develop the notion of ‘minimal utopianism’; a notion which, we suggest, expresses the difficult position of critical educators concerned to offer their students the tools with which to imagine and explore alternatives to current social and political reality, while acknowledging the (...) contingent ethical constraints of the system within which they and their students are working. While agreeing with utopian theorists such as Darren Webb who have defended the need for ‘blueprint utopias’ in education in the face of the reduction of the idea of utopia to a purely process-oriented pedagogy, our focus here is on the prior educational task of providing the conceptual and communicative tools for utopian thinking to emerge. The collaborative nature of this paper is ref... (shrink)

Elizabeth A. Wilson offers in Gut Feminism a refreshingly new approach to the feminist debate on antidepressants, and a response to feminist tendencies of antibiologism. Taking the pharmaceutical treatment of depression as her point of departure, Wilson’s goal is twofold: to show how pharmaceutical data can be useful for conceptual innovations in feminist theory, and to argue for the necessity of feminist politics to account for its own capacity for aggression and harm. Divided in two parts that remain conceptually entangled, (...) Gut Feminism develops the argument that, although both aggression and biology can be ignored, “they cannot be defanged”. Wilson’s dynamic reading of biology is particularly attractive:... (shrink)

Um die Beziehung zwischen Männern und dem physischen sowie phantasierten Vaginalen zu untersuchen, zielt dieser Beitrag auf die Lokalisierung und Erhellung der Transgender-Schwelle von Cisgender-Männern, statt auf die augenfälligen Phänomene des Transgender-Erlebens zu fokussieren. Indem der Autor das Vaginale als Pendant zum Phallischen postuliert, koppelt er vaginale psychische und verkörperlichte Zustände vom Weiblichen im strengen Sinn ab, um sie, ebenso wie das Phallische, Menschen sämtlicher Gender und biologischen Geschlechter zugänglich zu machen. Dieser Begriff weist über das Konzeptuelle hinaus auf die (...) fleischliche, verkörperlichte Erfahrung vieler Transgender-Männer, die in ganzen, partiellen und/oder temporär »weiblichen« Körpern leben. Es kann auch auf die physio-psychische Realität zahlreicher Cisgender-Männer Anwendung finden. Vorstellung und Diskussion eines schwulen Cisgender-Patienten, der seinen Anus als Vagina erlebt und phantasiert, sind ebenfalls Teil des Beitrags. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics and epistemology of (...) placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

This article draws on the ‘visual turn’ in legal studies to argue for the centrality of visibility in the analysis of the regulation of gay and lesbian identities, with a specific focus on Hong Kong. Part I gives an overview of the ways in which gay visibility operates within the cityscape of Hong Kong. Parts II and III then focus on the case of Cho Man Kit v. Broadcasting Authority to examine the ways in which questions of visibility emerge in (...) the courtroom. (shrink)

In mainstream medical discourse, self-harm and suicide are considered to be individual behaviors that have psychological causes in their psychological conditions, that is to say, they are psychopathological behaviors that somehow originate from the individual's psyche and are aberrations from a healthy, rational mind. This model of psychologization of self-harm relies on the medical discourse of health as a personal issue and an individual task, and this approach isolates individuals from the society in which they are embedded.In their co-authored book (...) Queer Youth, Suicide And Self-Harm: Troubled Subjects, Troubling Norms, Elisabeth McDermott and Katrina Roen, writing from the disciplines of medicine and... (shrink)

Although the clinical and the sexual are commonly treated as antithetical realms of experience, queer commentary teaches that the clinic is a positively sexual space and that clinical intimacy is a creative form of sexual intimacy. Contrary to writers such as Engelhardt, the clinic is a space where queer publics are forged, and the barriers between moral friends and moral strangers potentially dissolve, but only to the extent that one is disposed to allow oneself to enjoy experiences of identification that (...) confound the ideals of human dignity typically invoked in writings about sexual ethics on the one hand and clinical medical ethics on the other hand. (shrink)