School of Letters, Art and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia
DOCTORAL QUEER THEORY READING GROUP Semester 2, 2016 Program Foucault: A Longtime Companion The Queer Theory Reading Group at the University of Sydney seeks to promote a supportive and mutual learning environment for doctoral candidates working in the humanities. We engage in weekly scholarly discussions focused on canonical and contemporary works in queer theory. All the readings are pre-­‐assigned, selected by current doctoral candidates to offer both new and established scholars in queer theory a focused point for discussion. While each semester of the reading group features a different theme, the overall endeavour of the group is to interrogate the term ‘queer’. Refusing to reduce or reify the term, we want to explore the ways in which queer has been mobilised, and the ways in which it can be mobilised, to reconsider both contemporary and historical issues relating to, among other things, gender, sex, sexuality, race, identity, subjectivity and politics. 2016 Steering Group Ben Bolton |[email protected] Matthew Clarke | [email protected] Jaya Keaney | [email protected] Paul Kelaita | [email protected] Mark Peart | [email protected] Annalise Pippard | [email protected] Academic Sponsor Professor Annamarie Jagose
Semester 2, 2016 Program Foucault: A Longtime Companion This semester we take as our focus the writing of Michel Foucault, whose body of work continues to shape, through both attachment and dissent, current debates in queer scholarship. Our reading will centre on questions of history and temporality, and what it means to think about a uniquely queer form of historiography. What can we say of ‘sexuality’ in the past? How does our answer to this question reflect and shape relations to the past and to the conditions of present categorisation? How do these insights inform our broad intellectual approaches to gender and sexuality? We will consider how these questions are shaped by different disciplines and methodologies, and what is at stake, ethically and politically, in each of their claims. In returning to the work of Foucault and his legacy in queer theory, we hope to engage the breadth of scholarly interests and commitments of the doctoral community at the university. The first section of the semester’s reading will focus on volume one of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge. In our first week we read two of the seminal essays from that volume: “We ‘Other Victorians’” and “The Repressive Hypothesis.” These will serve as an entry point for thinking both about The History of Sexuality as a text, and about Foucault as a writer, historian, and theorist. In the second section of the program, we turn to consider the way that Foucault’s work has been taken up by queer historiography, and the critical battlegrounds that have formed around his writing. A particular focus of this program is the debate between altericist and transhistorical approaches to history. This question asks whether the past should be understood as fundamentally distinct and separate from the present, or whether there is room in scholarly practice for thinking about our relations and identifications with queer peoples and queer lives across time. The selected readings address what those two approaches offer to queer scholarship, and what it might meant to collapse those distinctions altogether. The final readings in the program address the afterlives of Foucault in some other areas of historical enquiry. These include debates surrounding the normalisation of gender and the racial and colonial context of Foucault’s writing. As a doctoral reading group, one of our aims is to think about the ways in which queer theoretical scholarship may relate to our own areas of research. We encourage discussion that highlights the crossovers between theory work and ours. In reading Foucault and the subsequent revisions and revitalisations of his thought together we hope to strengthen our own engagements with Foucault and his queer genealogies. Keywords: alterity, colonialism, Foucault, gay, genealogy, history, historiography, identity, lesbian, madness, modernity, politics, power, queer, queer of colour critique, race, repressive hypothesis, sexuality, teleology, temporality, trans. Dates Session one 10 August 2016 Session seven 21 September 2016 Session two 17 August 2016 No session during mid-­‐semester break Session three 24 August 2016 Session four 31 August 2016 Session five 7 September 2016 Session six 14 September 2016 Session eight 5 October 2016 Session nine 12 October 2016 Session ten 19 October 2016 Time Wednesday 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Location Quadrangle S241. Enter Lobby D (behind the Jacaranda tree), then take the door on the left. Preparation In order to facilitate rich and open discussion the steering group encourages all participants to bring with them at least one question or difficulty they have with each week’s reading. No question will be considered too banal or too simple; ultimately the purpose of the group is to learn together. Acknowledgement of Country We, the Steering Group, acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet – the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built. As we share our own knowledge, learning, and research practices may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded and articulated within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country. PART ONE: Foucault Session one | 10 August REQUIRED READING ● Foucault, Michel. “Part One: We Other Victorians” & “Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis” in The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will To Knowledge. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1998. 1-­‐50 OPTIONAL READING ● Miller, James. The Passion for Michel Foucault. London: Harper Collins, 1993. 13-­‐36. Session two |17 August REQUIRED READING ● Foucault, Michel. “Part Three: Scientia Sexualis” & “Part Four: The Deployment of Sexuality.” The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will To Knowledge. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1998. 51-­‐131. Session three | 24 August REQUIRED READING ● Foucault, Michel. “Part Five: Right to Death and Power Over Lives.” The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. The Will To Knowledge. Trans. by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1998. 133 -­‐-­‐159 OPTIONAL READING ● Foucault, Michel. Extracts from Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. 155-­‐167 and 322-­‐334. PART TWO: Queering History Session four | 31 August REQUIRED READING ● Fradenburg, Louise and Freccero, Carla. “Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History.” Premodern Sexualities. Eds. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. New York: Routledge, 1996. OPTIONAL READING ● Greene, Jody. “Introduction: The Work of Friendship.” GLQ: The Work of Friendship: In Memoriam Alan Bray 10.3 (2004): 319-­‐338. Session five | 7 September REQUIRED READING ● Halperin, David. “Forgetting Foucault.” How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 24-­‐47. OPTIONAL READING ● Halperin, David. “Saint Foucault.” Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 3-­‐15. Session six | 14 September REQUIRED READING ● Goldberg, Jonathan and Menon, Madhavi. “Queering History.” PMLA 120.5 (2005): 1606-­‐
1617. OPTIONAL READING ● Menon, Madhavi. “Teleology.” Unhistorical Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008. 27-­‐50. Session seven | 21 September REQUIRED READING ● Traub, Valerie “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128, no.1 (2013): 21-­‐39 OPTIONAL READING ● Traub, Valerie. “The Sign of the Lesbian.” Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2016. PART THREE: Foucault’s Others Session eight | 5 October REQUIRED READING ● Stoler, Ann Laura. “Placing Race in The History of Sexuality.” Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. OPTIONAL READING ● Young, Robert J.C. “Foucault on Race and Colonialism.” New Formations. 25 (1995): 57-­‐
65. Session nine | 12 October REQUIRED READING ● Ferguson, Roderick. “Introduction: Queer of Color Critique, Historical Materialism, and Canonical Sociology.” Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004: 1-­‐29. OPTIONAL READING ● Mendoza, Victor. “Introduction.” Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-­‐Sexual Governance and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-­‐1913. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015. 1-­‐33. Session ten | 19 October REQUIRED READING ● Preciado, Beatriz. “The Pharmaco-­‐Pornographic Regime: Sex, Gender, and Subjectivity in the Age of Punk Capitalism.” The Transgender Studies Reader 2. Eds. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura. New York: Routledge, 2013. OPTIONAL READING ● Heyes, Cressida. “Introduction: the Somatic Individual.” Self-­‐Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and the Normalized Body. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.