Abstract
This chapter takes as its point of departure Michel Foucault’s late 1970s intervention in French legal reform, specifically his work to change age of consent laws during the Penal Code reform of 1977–78.2 Foucault’s biographers note the range of his post-1968 activism, including the occupation of a university building at Paris VIII Vincennes (1969), work with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) (1971–73), participation in efforts to change the age of sexual majority (1977–78), and travel to observe the unfolding Iranian Revolution (1979).3 This activity has been linked to Foucault’s turn towards genealogies of power rather than archaeologies of knowledge.4 But this activity might also contradict his genealogical work, manifesting belief in radical transformation—even revolution—seemingly undermined by the more diffuse modalities of power described in Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). This chapter considers Foucault’s efforts to change French age of consent law, including decriminalisation of consensual sex with persons under the age of fifteen, in relation to his Collège de France lectures from 1974 to 1979, focusing on the intersections between Foucault’s academic writings on monstrosity and his activism in the public arena.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of misrepresentation) that possesses revolutionary force.
Michel Foucault1
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Notes
See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, Betsy Wing (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1993)
David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
On Foucault in Iran, see Janet Afaray and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Gilles Deleuze argues that Foucault’s work with the GIP between 1971 and 1973 maintained a post-1968 decentred left practice of linking ‘prison struggle and other struggles’ through a concept of power, at a time when broader left approaches became more centralised (including a return to Marxism). See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Seán Hand (trans. and ed.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [1986]), 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticises Foucault and Deleuze for opposing power to ideology/ interest (rather than thinking about their interrelationship), symptomatic of Western/metropolitan intellectual interests in the era of neocolonial international capitalism.
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.
See Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
See Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993)
Linda Alcoff, ‘Dangerous pleasures: Foucault and the politics of paedophilia’, in Susan J. Hekman (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996), 99–135.
See Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
Roger N. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). This book came to my attention only in the final revision of this chapter.
Gillian Harkins, Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). See chapter 1, ‘Laying down the law: the modernisation of American incest’, 26–68.
James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 3.
Ibid. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Andrew N. Sharpe contests Foucault’s privileged focus on the hermaphrodite in Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law (London: Routledge, 2010).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, Franklin S. Klaf (trans. from 12th German edn, original 1st German edn published in 1886) (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965), 369.
Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
See Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Harcourt’s account draws attention to the changing meaning of ‘nature’ in discourses of order, including the rationalisation of the economy and the turn to markets to rationalise life. Foucault’s statement that free markets are not natural but rather require order is a limited reading of the relation between nature and order (better explored by Harcourt).
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neo-Liberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
See Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
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Harkins, G. (2012). Foucault, the Family and the Cold Monster of Neoliberalism. In: Duschinsky, R., Rocha, L.A. (eds) Foucault, the Family and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291288_5
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