Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate (...) crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all. (shrink)

In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life.

Problems and solutions are given from a Heideggerian point of view for saving the earth.

For many years feminists have asserted an "intersection" between sex and race. This paper, drawing heavily on the work of Michel Foucault, offers a genealogical account of the two concepts showing how they developed together and in relation to similar political forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus it attempts to give a concrete meaning to the claim that sex and race are intersecting phenomena.

: For many years feminists have asserted an "intersection" between sex and race. This paper, drawing heavily on the work of Michel Foucault, offers a genealogical account of the two concepts showing how they developed together and in relation to similar political forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus it attempts to give a concrete meaning to the claim that sex and race are intersecting phenomena.

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible (...) to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis. (shrink)

Most feminist theorists over the last forty years have held that a basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group are oppressed. The concept of oppression has never had a very broad meaning in liberal discourse, however, and with the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980 it has even less currency in public debate. This article argues that, while we may still believe women are oppressed, for pragmatic purposes Michel Foucault’s concept of practices of freedom is a more effective (...) way to characterize feminist theory and politics. (shrink)

In “Society Must Be Defended” Foucault examines 17th century race war discourse not so much in order to understand 20th century racism or concepts of race but primarily because it constitutes an historical example of an attempt to think power without a head or king. This essay examines his account of race war discourse and the sources he used to construct it. It then takes issue with his claim that early race war discourse can be separated from 18th and 19th (...) century racisms. Finally, it returns to the question of power and argues that the effect of the 1976 lecture series was to dislodge the sovereign model of power but also the model of power as war. (shrink)

On the morning of February 11, 2015, the lead editorial in the New York Times was entitled “Lynching as Racial Terrorism.” I took great pleasure in it. I did not actually read the editorial. What gave me pleasure was the title, which affirmed the analytic and genealogical position I took on lynching in my last book: Lynching in the early twentieth century in this country, I argued, was a technique not of sovereign power but of disciplinary power; its exercise was (...) decentralized, and its terrifying effects were felt in the bodies of entire populations who regulated their conduct accordingly—such is terrorism... (shrink)

: Bodies and Pleasures has been characterized as a confessional discourse that manages to subvert confessional practice. Here it is characterized and discussed as an askesis that works to transform confessional practice as it transforms the writer/reader. Two questions emerge through that transformation: (1) How is race (in particular, whiteness) to be lived? (2) What are the possibilities for political subjectivity in the absence of dualism and the intensification of awareness of our normalization?

Does Foucault’s work on sexuality open toward the possibility of a genealogy of sex understood as binary anatomical and genetic sexual difference? I believe that it does. I argue that, if we take s...

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A (...) case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

This paper considers the following question: how can those whose thought is informed by poststructuralist values, arguments, and training legitimately teach the history of philosophy? In answering this question, three pedagogical approaches to courses in the history of philosophy are considered and criticized: the representational, the phenomenological, and the conversational. Although these three approaches are seemingly exhaustive, each is problematic because the question they attempt to answer rests on the false assumption that there is one, universally right way to teach (...) philosophy and many wrong ways. In rejecting this assumption, the author considers a new, more concrete, and contextualized question concerning teaching philosophy from a postmodern perspective. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Charles Scott has always encouraged his students to take up the questions they find most troubling, difficult, and even possibly unanswerable. For him, philosophy is about movements of thinking themselves rather than arrival at reasonable conclu­sions. In tribute to Scott as a teacher, this paper takes up a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: How might we teach our students today so as to prepare them for life in a world of ecological instability beyond what any member of our species has (...) ever experienced? It looks at the question of ethics in the midst of pollution, peak oil, and climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Chloë TaylorLadelle McWhorterAs Chloë Taylor notes, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America puts forth a genealogy of race and racism. It also contains fragments of genealogies of intelligence, disability, family values, and a few other concepts and practices that were hugely influential in the twentieth century and have been since. In addition, it presents a certain conception and experience of abnormality and of sexuality in relation to (...) all of the above. But the book does not present a theory of racism or of sexual oppression or of both together. There are important differences between theorizing and the practice of genealogy, at least in the way that I understand the two, and that difference makes a difference in the book’s structure and aims.When I began my graduate education in the early 1980s, feminists were producing compelling critiques of regimes of knowledge and techniques of knowledge production that claimed legitimacy through detachment, dispassionate observation, and objectivity.1 Theory was a not infrequent target of those feminist critiques. Theory (from the Greek theoria, as Heidegger reminds us) is about seeing (not, for example, touching or feeling), and theorizing is typically about representing with accuracy and thoroughness what non-theorists see only incompletely, if at all. Theory, therefore, seeks to correct distortions as it captures reality under concepts.2 Theory also aims to be unitary and exclusive. And theories compete with each other; no matter how many theories there are, only one can possibly be true.By contrast, genealogy is not detached or dispassionate; on the contrary, one takes up genealogy precisely because one feels a need to change something—including something in or about oneself. One takes up genealogy, Michel Foucault maintains, in order to “free thought from what it silently [End Page 216] thinks,” to “enable it to think differently,”3 to get free of oneself as one has been constituted in a certain milieu. Genealogy is concerned with accuracy of representation, therefore, to the extent that detail, facts, and logical plausibility make a narrative more compelling, more moving, more potent—to that extent, and no further; it does not employ scholarly observation and insight to get at “the truth.” A good genealogy constructs a new way of seeing and experiencing that may well disturb a given regime of truth and may make possible the generation of new truths or perhaps new habits of thought and action, but it does not purport to be final or exclusive. It problematizes habitual practices and ways of seeing and, thus, it opens toward indefinite possibilities. My book is genealogical; it promotes no theories. I emphasize this, because I want to insist on the book’s hospitability to the extension of its analyses beyond its covers and to its own (self-)overcoming.Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America presents some genealogies, then, but it is not only a collection of genealogies. It is explicitly framed by a set of contemporary political and ethical contingencies, some of which it identifies as problems, and it considers what to do in response to them. Its genealogies are undertaken and constructed in the context of grappling with those questions, a featured one of which is this: Can we find enough common ground to make common cause between antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists?In the course of tracing a genealogy of twentieth-century racism, I found quite a bit of common ground between racial minorities and nonhetero-sexual people in the United States. So, in addition to my genealogies, I offered some (admittedly perhaps heavy-handed) advice to antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists, namely: Not only is there ground for common cause, but you ignore this ground at your peril, because there is not a lot of other ground for you to stand on; if you do not acknowledge this common history and the strong connections among the forces that oppress your group and those that oppress these other groups, you will have to deny much of your own history and obscure many of the sources of your own oppression. I did not issue the same advice to disability activists or environmentalists, although they might do well to consider it too. I singled... (shrink)

This essay provides a genealogy of corporate personhood as it exists currently in US law and places moral personhood in a similar genealogical context. This treatment demonstrates that the two are inextricably intertwined in both conception and institutionalized practices. We would do well to dismantle both; meanwhile, however, corporate personhood's implicit illiberal notion of collective mentality and responsibility may suggest possibilities for establishing collective counterforces to oppose activities of transnational for-profit corporations and mitigate their devastating political, economic, and environmental effects (...) upon actual people and the ecosystems upon which we depend. (shrink)

Charles Scott has always encouraged his students to take up the questions they find most troubling, difficult, and even possibly unanswerable. For him, philosophy is about movements of thinking themselves rather than arrival at reasonable conclu­sions. In tribute to Scott as a teacher, this paper takes up a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: How might we teach our students today so as to prepare them for life in a world of ecological instability beyond what any member of our species has (...) ever experienced? It looks at the question of ethics in the midst of pollution, peak oil, and climate change. (shrink)

In his 1979 lecture series now translated as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault suggests that there is an important relationship between neoliberalism and the cluster of phenomena he had previously named “biopower.” The relationship between these two apparently very different forms of governmentality is not obvious, however, and Foucault does not explicate it. The question has become a pressing one for feminists because it underlies a set of issues surrounding the emerging field of “reprogenetics.” Feminists have been highly critical (...) of invasive reproductive technologies for decades, viewing them as demeaning to and dangerous for women's bodies and as staunchly traditional in their reinforcement of gender roles and of maternity as female desire and destiny. Reprogeneticists accuse feminists of hypocrisy in seeking to curtail the widest technically possible range of “procreative choice.” This essay traces some ways in which reprogenetics may be interpreted as a biopolitical formation as well as a neoliberal formation and suggests how the two seemingly antithetical types of phenomena might actually be overlapping and mutually reinforcing—perhaps opening the way for a more effective feminist critique. (shrink)