Okay, to used a mixed metaphor, I'll bite this thread. I have a love/hate relationship with Foucault's work that includes both a lot of respect and a lot of problems. I think Foucault deserves our respect if for nothing else because he was a political activist who was out on the streets confronting cops, helping prisoners organize themselves and speak out, and fully immersed in gay and lesbian grassroots activism. This is more than one can say of most other Pomo authors and, unfortunately, of most people on Pen-L for that matter. I think it's grossly unfair to just dsimiss him with a comment of "rubbish." Foucault's main influence on today's lesbian and gay movement is probably his conception of power. For Foucault, power is mainly exercised through control over discourse: People in power control how our lives are spoken about and what options we are allowed to declare for ourselves. The objective of people whose power is taken from them is to find ways to speak up and to point to the contradictions in the dominant discourse as a way of exploding it. This type of thinking has had a temendous influence on the AIDS activist movement. At the beginning of the epidemic, people with AIDS were talked about through the discourse of public health, and policies that were most widely thrown out were those of control (quarantine, contact tracing, etc.). Through the process of self-organization and speaking out in various ways, people with AIDS (fka, "AIDS victims") began to be seen as faces and human beings. They began to appear in unexpected places demanding things on their behalf. Tactics in AIDS activism have often centered around finding ways to poke holes in public discussion, whether through embarrassing people in high places, getting arrested for doing "reasonable" things, or simply rasing spectacles where bourgeois propriety (and the law) would not have them. The discouse now focuses on treatments for PWAs and support for people in high-risk groups. Thinking about activism this way is not a substitute for a materialist analysis of AIDS or anything else. ACT UP has always made some clear materialist points: Our main enemies are drug companies who do research on a for-profit basis, ignoring promising but unprofitable therapies and charging tens of thousands of dollars a year for the drugs they do develop (I and 72 other people were arrested yesterday for blocking access to the New York Stock Exchange in protest of drug prices). Our other big enemy is the for-profit health care system and we are very clear on why the US has no universal health coverage. People in ACT UP also have a very clear understanding of how corporations control public research funding and the state in general. It is problematic that Foucault saw his analysis in contradiction to materialism in many ways. Primarily, his analysis of the "repressive hypothesis" in the first volume of _The History of Sexuality_ describes the repression of homosexuality as waning throughout the century because the discourse around homosexuality was expoloding, and he offers this piece in response to materialist critics. This is a very different history from, say, John D'Emilio's _Capitalism and Gay Identity_, which describes material repression of homosexuality in response to the growth of gay and lesbian households in the early twentieth century. I side unambiguously with D'Emilio, but I also think that Foucault's points about exploding discourse are worth tackling because understanding consciousness is a big part of understanding the subjective element of making history. It is possible that the right stew of Marx, Gramsci and Chomsky could come up with a basis of understanding discourse that is firmly grounded in materialism. But it hasn't happened yet, at least not in a way that incorporates the many innovative ideas about seizing language that Foucault held. Foucault wrote at a time when the relationship between Marxism and feminism was still being redefined, and when Marxist discourse about homosexuality was barely existent. Many marxists still have bad sexual politics. Meanwhile, Foucault has influenced many lesbian and gay academics and political activists. It is partly due to his influence, I think, that the Marxian discourse about homosexuality has changed. He does not deserve to be spat on. Comradely, Tavis
