Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture, Exclusion, and the Politics of Friendship

Abstract

This chapter revisits Foucault’s brief, influential interview “Friendship as a Way of Life” in order to interrogate what his figuration of friendship means for trans, intersex, of color, and otherwise non-homonormative subjects who are so often relegated to the outskirts of the circuits of homonormative intimacies—fetishized and spectacularized while debarred from comprehension as legible sexual partners. It examines the centrality of cisgender male homoeroticism in Foucault’s theorization of queer friendship and explores the implications of the presumption of bodily sameness at work in his meditations on the interplay between sex and friendship. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the ascesis of queer friendship that Foucault found a site of such rich possibility was also predicated on the exclusion of trans, femme, non-binary, fat, disabled, and non-white bodies, thus deeply informed by forms of privilege left uninterrogated by Foucault. A contemporary account of queer friendship as a way of life necessitates that we think through the legacy of such exclusions, and the material traces they’ve left on queer forms of sociality.