Preface: Why We Need Madness Acknowledgments Introduction: Mad for Foucault 1. How We Became Queer First Interlude: Nietzsche's Dreadful Attendant 2. Queer Moralities Second Interlude: Wet Dreams 3. Unraveling the Queer Psyche Third Interlude: Of Meteors and Madness 4. A Queer Nephew Fourth Interlude: A Shameful Lyricism 5. A Political Ethic of Eros Postlude: A Fool's Laughter Notes Works Cited Index

This two-part article summarizes the major arguments of Lynne Huffer’s 2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. The second part of the piece is a dialogue between Hu...

Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Mad for Foucault A Conversation

Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality

The “ex-gay” movement does not encourage people to pray the gay away but confess the gay away. As a loose organization of mostly Christian ministries and psychotherapy practices that offers “freedom from homosexuality,” the movement offers religious and psychological confessions of sin and disease and testimonies of truth and belief as technologies of both selfsacrifice and identity formation. The aim is to control unwanted same-sex desire through lifelong labour and struggle so as to sacrifice one’s gay or lesbian identity for an ex-gay identity. However, in the debate surrounding the movement, those opposed use confessions of trauma and harm, and testimonies of their own truth and belief, to try and sacrifice the movement in favour of gay and lesbian identities. Confession and testimony, then, which are two sides of the same coin, underlie the discourses and practices of all involved in ex-gay truth games. In the 1970s and 80s the ex-gay movement operated in the shadows of Christianity as an embarrassing secret. This dissertation analyzes the movement from the 1990s, when, in alliance with the Christian Right, it “came out of the closet” through a cross-platform advertising campaign that generated fifteen years’ worth of “earned media” in news and popular culture entertainment. By deploying an economic discourse of consumer choice, the movement hoped to justify itself as a legitimate form of religious and psychological intervention, but the Christian Right hoped to use it to encourage the repeal of legislation protecting gay rights. Those tactics backfired, resulting in a consumer fraud lawsuit, legislation banning conversion therapy for minors, and scathing critiques and satires in mainstream popular culture. Nevertheless, the movement has legitimized itself within its own conservative Christian communities. In this dissertation I show that limiting the ex-gay debate to commercialized and politicized concepts and strategies neglects the real problem at the heart of the controversy: the paradoxical use of confessions of self-renunciation and true-belief as technologies of selfemergence sacrifices the self to unstable and “fundamentalist” truth games; on both sides of the debate. The real problem is not whether ex-gay change is possible; the problem is confession itself, which encourages unyielding testimonies of fundamental beliefs from supporters and antagonists of the movement alike. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, I examine the confessional logic governing a wide range of media texts and statements, which are treated as events that seek to govern thought and behaviour in a broad sense: to influence, persuade, encourage, and convince people to govern themselves so they can govern others. I do not analyze ex-gay language itself, but trace how it functions and operates as discourse within the North American cultural wars. I analyzed the movement as a mediated cultural phenomenon currently constituted by cost-benefit calculations and marketing protocols but historically constituted by the psychological and religious governmentalities that pervade its thought and practices.

Confess the Gay Away? Media, Religion, and the Political Economy of Ex-Gay Therapy

Research Highlights and AbstractThe study of gender, sexuality—and, in particular, queer theory—is central to the social sciences and humanities.Our analysis of citation practices shows that queer ...

Additional excerpts

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What's Queer About Political Science?

ly. Through the vicissitudes of publishing and publicity, it concretizes the communication requisite to philosophical transformation. 72 Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 282, 283. 73 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 11. 74 Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 325, 327.

/pdf/curiosity-philosophy-and-the-politics-of-difference-5fsfebwxh6.pdf

Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory

Citations

Mad for Foucault A Conversation

Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality

Confess the Gay Away? Media, Religion, and the Political Economy of Ex-Gay Therapy

What's Queer About Political Science?

Curiosity: philosophy and the politics of difference

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