Foucault Vivant

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 16:05:30 +0000

Author:

Pearl Brilmeyer

Image Credit:

Bruce Jackson

Teaching Foucault to undergraduates can be a daunting task. However, I find that an enthusiastic group can handle short portions with ease when appropriately prepared.

As an instructor of sexuality studies, I regularly teach the introduction to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality. While I've taught this text in the context of a rhetoric course on monogamy, this semester it grounded the historical unity of my course, Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture in the English Department. Notoriously difficult, this introduction is often misread due to the failure of scholars to pick up on Foucault's sarcastic tone, as he narrates the "history of sexuality," traditionally understood. In the past, I've had trouble conveying this tone to my students, who, like many of us have been taught that "theory" is serious stuff. This bias makes it difficult to get Foucault's jokes and miss the point that the "history" Foucault begins with is a kind of "story" we tell ourselves, as the French word "l'histoire" connotes.

I wanted to create a lesson plan that would lighten up class discussion and make transparant Foucault's joking tone. I also wanted to focus our discussion on the construction of historical narratives, and to talk about the relationship of narrative to history. This in-class assignment was designed to help students understand Foucault's theory of the "repressive hypothesis" by physicalizing the "story" he tells in the introduction of The History of Sexuality. Engaging with the humorous aspect of this introduction, students are asked to act out, in the fashion of the tableau vivant, scenes in throughout the parodic history Foucault seeks to overturn. In small groups students used the computers to find music to accompany their assigned paragraph/scene. We then performed them as a class, while I narrated the first few paragraphs of the text.

Image Credit: OldOnliner

In my class, I have a students with a range of familiarity with gender and sexuality theory--some are women's and gender studies majors and others have little experience thinking about gender and sexuality in a theoretical way. In general, the queer theory "pros" in class found the assignment a bit juvenile. Before the exercise, they pouted a bit about having to treat such a serious text in a silly manner and many expressed annoyance at having to perform in front of the class.

Others, particularly those for whom "theory" was a more foreign object, however, completed the assignment in good humor and discovered creative ways to represent various stages in Foucault's parody of the tale of Victorian prudishness from which we need to liberate ourselves. The performance ended with the final group ripping a piece of paper on which they had written "Freud"--a silly, but succinct way of conveying Foucault's call to move beyond the narrative of repression/liberation.

In general, there were a lot of laughs and the assignment helped students visualize the "history of sexuality" Foucault was attempting to counter in the rest of the book.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder

Blogging Pedagogy - queer studies

Foucault Vivant

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Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

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