Foucault Marriage

SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY Journal of NSRC

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 32

© Copyright 2004 National Sexuality Resource Center, San Francisco State University, all rights reserved.

Foucault, Gay Marriage, and Gay and Lesbian Studies in the United States An Interview with David Halperin

Interview by Cymene Howe

Cymene Howe (CH): In terms of social and political

transformation in the United States, how do you think

Foucault’s work, or social constructionist ideas in

general, transformed the political and social climate of

the United States to bring us to the point where we are

today? Perhaps you can also include your thoughts

about how Foucault might have responded to the

current discussion regarding gay marriage in the U.S.

David Halperin (DH): First of all, I should say I’m

no expert on the United States, on the contemporary

scene here, or on social movements in general in the

United States. It might seem that Foucault’s thought

has been responsible for some of the recent political

transformations in this country, and it is certainly true

that a number of people who were involved in ACT UP

New York in its glory days during the late 1980s were

academics or graduate students who were versed in

Foucault and who thought of Foucault’s work,

especially The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An

Introduction (1976), as a charter for sexual politics. But

I believe the influence has largely been in the opposite

direction. Foucault was inspired and his thinking was

transformed by the social movements he saw going on

around him, including ones that he couldn’t have

anticipated, even though some of them did come out of

his own work—or at least, if they didn’t come out of his

own work, they referred to it. Here I am thinking of the

anti-psychiatry movement, the movement associated

with R. D. Laing (1959) in Britain and later Thomas

Szasz (1960) in the U.S. Foucault was unaware of such

a movement, perhaps it had not even started when he

wrote his first book on the history of madness, but

when that book was seized upon and taken up by the

anti-psychiatry movement, which developed and

gathered speed later, he was very pleased. He said on a

number of occasions that he hoped people would use

his books as toolboxes from which they could get

implements to short circuit the workings of various

forms of domination.

But I think Foucault himself was surprised by the

student movement in May of 1968. He wasn’t even in

France at the time; he was in Tunisia. He was

overtaken as well by the development of the women’s

movement and the children’s rights movement. He did

play a big role in the prisoner’s rights movement in

France, but he was also influenced by it, and ultimately

his thinking was very strongly affected by the

emergence of the lesbian and gay movement in the

United States. I do not believe that Foucault could have

predicted the development of those movements on the

basis of his experience in France, and they certainly

were not generated by his work. However, his own

work was changed by them, and when at the end of his

life he developed an interest in what he called the

“aesthetics of existence” and invoked the way Greek

ethics refused to normalize populations but rather

stylized freedom to create new possibilities for the

shaping of free existence through various technologies

of the self, he was reflecting his experiences with gay

communities in the United States as much as he was

providing them with theoretical reflections that may

have proved useful to certain intellectuals in queer

theory.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David M. Halperin, Department of English, University of Michigan, 3187 Angell Hall, 435 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: [email protected]; Cymene Howe, National Sexuality Resource Center, 2017 Mission Street, Ste. 300, San Francisco, CA 94110. E-mail: [email protected]

Sexuality Research & Social Policy Journal of NSRC ht tp : / /nsrc. s f su.edu


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 33


I feel very strongly that the creative dynamics of

gay culture are much more fertile, much more

powerful, than anything that most academics could

come up with on their own. I think that work in queer

theory has been strongest when it’s been most directly

inspired and shaped by the explosive creative energies

of lesbian and gay life in the U.S. The situation that we

now confront, in which there is more and more of a

divide between the academic wing of the lesbian and

gay movement and the mainstream lesbian and gay

movement in the U.S, is impoverishing for both, but it’s

especially troubling for our current academic work,

because it deprives us of a real source of energy and

imagination. You can see the nature of this gap if you

compare the 1993 gay and lesbian march on

Washington with the Millennium March in 2000. Even

though a lot of the speeches at the 1993 march were

devoted to the themes of gays in the military and gay

marriage—two topics that had not been especially

prominent or promoted by the academic queer left—

there was still a very strong participation of left-wing

intellectuals and gay academics in this march, whereas

the 2000 march was pretty much boycotted en masse

by gay intellectuals and by the academic left. So at that

point, by 2000, you could see that the popular

movement and the academic wing of the movement

had pretty much gone in different directions. In some

sense it could be claimed now that certain important

cultural traditions of the gay movement are alive and

well only in the academic world, to the extent that

they’re alive at all.

CH: Which traditions in particular?

DH: Well, a lot of the gay movement in the 1970s and

1980s was very much opposed to the normalization of

queer life and therefore emphasized the importance of

sex, arguing that sex was good for you, that sex should

not be restricted by narrow theories of health or

adjustment or conservative therapeutic notions of

maturity, and that gay life was at its most creative when

it invented new possibilities for relationships beyond

the ones laid down since antiquity in the form of

kinship and conjugality. These were some of the most

creative parts of the gay movement, the most original

parts, and the most valuable parts. This is very

different from a model of political activism in which

gay men, as Leo Bersani (1995) says, have no more

radical goal than that of “trying to persuade straight

society that [they] can be good parents, good soldiers,

good priests” (p. 113).

That radical dimension of the gay movement,

though it’s not extinct, flourishes today within the

academy, perhaps even chiefly within the academy, and

I think this is a very unfortunate state of affairs, both

for the movement as a whole and for the state of

academic theory.

CH: Could you elaborate on that idea a bit more?

DH: At the risk of repeating myself, I’d say that the

best work gets accomplished when academic theory can

draw on the kind of creative energies produced in a

social movement, because the cultural élan of the

movement is always more generative and more

surprising. Gay culture spontaneously produces many

more and diverse kinds of cultural contestation,

whether in the form of street theater or the overturning

of heterosexist social forms, than academics could have

come up with on their own. I know that, in my case at

least, it was very important for me to be able to

immerse myself in a gay world, especially the world of

the Castro in San Francisco in the 1970s and

throughout the 1980s. When I left the country in 1993,

I would come back to the Castro, looking to it as a

source of continual renewal and instruction. When that

cultural energy began to evaporate, or to move

elsewhere, I was not able to do the kind of work that I

had done earlier. For example, I was not able to reflect

in a theoretical idiom on the transformative potential of

gay culture, because I lacked the concrete, empirical

inspiration I had had earlier.

CH: It’s very similar to what has happened in women’s

and gender studies in so many ways. Women’s studies

was generated out of feminist organizing and gender-

based social movements but for the last twenty years

we have seen a real rift develop between academia and

advocacy.

DH: Absolutely. This is a much more generalized

phenomenon. I have an appointment in Women’s


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 34


Studies at the University of Michigan and for the last

couple of years I’ve been on the executive committee of

the Institute for Research on Women and Gender

there. The phenomena are very similar in these

settings, except that I think that there is still so much

work to do to achieve equality for women within

academia—especially within fields in which they have

traditionally not been represented, such as

engineering—that one still feels a kind of political

fervor in these institutions, particularly within

departments of women’s studies, which to me is quite

significant.

Although many problems on college campuses

remain, particularly around transgender issues, on the

whole I think there is a lot of complacency, even among

lesbian and gay students. Nothing has really prepared

me for my current situation. I find myself as a professor

somehow representing the possibilities of a radical

movement to my students, many of whom have grown

up in a conservative or cynical culture and in the

absence of any broad idealistic movement to change the

world. This was not the case when I was a student. I

had some quite inspiring professors, but for the most

part I did not look to them to represent the cutting edge

of a movement for political or social change. For that,

we had the Black Panthers, the feminists, the hippies,

and the homosexuals. Of course, students today are

rightly impatient with professors who preen themselves

on various radical credentials that date back to the

Vietnam War but who don’t seem to have done

anything interesting since then. Students are also sick

and tired of being condescended to by professors

because of these students’ supposed political

backwardness: professors sometimes bathe themselves

in an aura of radical chic as if having good politics were

simply part and parcel of tenured privilege. I don’t

blame students for finding this attitude difficult to

tolerate. At the same time, it’s distinctly odd to find

that one is the only person in the classroom who thinks

both that the lesbian and gay movement has not yet

achieved all of its political or cultural goals and that it

is not yet completely obsolete.

And then there’s another consideration. When I

began to engage with lesbian and gay studies in the

mid-1980s, I did so because I wanted to change what

qualified as knowledge, to change the practice of

knowledge as it existed at the time, and to change the

way academic institutions codified certain kinds of

knowledge. To that end, I collaborated closely with

both tenured and non-tenured colleagues, as well as

with graduate students. This effort was part of a larger

movement to try to create new possibilities for

scholarly and political practices that had not existed

before. And now, because of our success, we have

students who enroll in our courses in order to be

trained in the field of lesbian and gay studies or queer

theory as a discipline: they come to the university for

something that already exists at the university, not in

order to change what the university has to offer them.

This creates a very paradoxical situation in which,

without my wanting to occupy this role, I end up being

positioned as a kind of gatekeeper who controls access

to lesbian and gay studies as if it were a discipline like

any other, in which students, including gay students,

are graded up or down depending on how well they

know queer theory. So instead of being involved with

me in a collective movement to change what counts as

knowledge, students wind up treating me, more or less

necessarily, as someone who is authorized to determine

what’s valid knowledge and what isn’t, and to grade

them on the basis of how well they master a body of

thought that’s already in place. In other words, they

find in me an academic functionary like any other.

Once again, nothing in my entire career in queer

studies has prepared me for this role: I never played it

when the field was new. It’s a very troubling role for

those of us who went into this field not to impose

another discipline on our students but to engage with

them in a kind of large-scale collective experiment in

what could be thought and said.

CH: And yet it’s a pretty Foucauldian dilemma, isn’t it,

for you to be the gatekeeper of this particular body of

discourse?

DH: Foucault was very sensitive to the way that social

institutions both restricted certain kinds of possibilities

and also provided certain other opportunities. I think

he was very canny about how he used his own role as

an academic and as a prestigious intellectual in France

to make things happen, to undermine the kinds of

authority he himself enjoyed, and to try to use his own


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 35


position strategically to make other things happen. And

I’ve tried to learn some of those lessons.

CH: What, in your estimation, would Foucault have to

say—twenty years after his death—about what has been

called the gay marriage movement in the United

States?

DH: Well, I’m not someone who can speak for

Foucault and I’m very bad at Foucauldian

ventriloquism. One of the pleasures for me of reading

interviews with Foucault is trying and failing to

anticipate what Foucault will say in response to a

question. Every time I think I know what Foucault is

going to say, I keep being surprised by what he says,

which goes off in some totally unexpected direction.

That’s all the more reason for me to be sure that I’m

not able to speak for him. My intuition, though, is that

he would be delighted by the whole gay marriage

movement, that he would find the trouble it was

causing for all sorts of social institutions to be

extremely enjoyable. Of course, once the question is

posed—“Should gay people have the right to marry?”—

there could only be one answer, which is, “Yes.” And, in

fact, although gay marriage isn’t an issue I care very

much about one way or another, I do think it’s notable

that no valid argument against gay marriage has ever

been put forward. In fact, there is no basis on which to

oppose gay marriage except prejudice. This makes the

arguments against gay marriage examples, particularly

striking examples, of intellectual or moral disgrace on

the part of the people who make them. Nonetheless, we

don’t have to imagine what Foucault would say about

the gay marriage movement, because we know some of

the things that he did say. For example, in 1963 over

dinner at the home of Jacques Lacan he said, “There

will be no civilization as long as marriage between men

is not accepted” (Eribon, 1991).

But beyond that, there’s a very interesting

interview Foucault gave to Gilles Barbedette that was

published in Christopher Street in 1982 called “The

Social Triumph of the Sexual Will: A Conversation with

Michel Foucault.” In that interview one of the things

that Foucault said is that we live in a world in which

relational possibilities, the possibilities for different

kinds of relationship, are extremely impoverished.

There are family and marriage, and that’s about it.

Further, rather than calling for specific rights for gay

people—though he acknowledged they were also

important—he emphasized the necessity for defining

the right for all persons to have new relational

possibilities. He was aware of the fact that friendship in

the ancient world was often elitist and a part of other

social institutions that were deeply distasteful, but he

invoked friendship nonetheless as an example of how

earlier Western cultures had managed to

institutionalize other kinds of relationships besides just

kinship and conjugality. Foucault felt that if, in the

past, forms of friendship and elective kinship had been

more fully recognized, then they might be

institutionalized again; that if there was a wider range

in the pre-modern world of forms of relationality, then

in the post-modern world there might also be new

forms of relationships. And this, by the way, is an

argument that has been made now much more

explicitly and passionately by the late Alan Bray (2003)

in a wonderful book, The Friend. Foucault went on to

talk about—and I think here he was simply exploring

opportunities in the current legal system—the

possibility of using adoption, a legal option that already

exists, as a way of expanding relational choices.

Foucault asked: Why should one person not adopt

somebody unrelated to him who was younger? Why

could he not adopt someone who was older, in fact? He

said that instead of claiming that we should have rights

on the basis of who we are now, though that was

necessary, it was also important to imagine new rights,

to have new forms of relationship that did not already

exist.

In the end, although I think Foucault would have

been perfectly delighted by the push for gay marriage, I

also think he would have wanted the gay movement to

seize this opportunity to promote and to valorize many

different forms of relationships between two or more

people, what Foucault at one point called “relations of

provisional existence,” that is to say, relations between

people that are not necessarily intended to last for life

but that may be valued even though they last for a

shorter time. I think he would have wanted the gay

marriage debate to open a space for the discussion of a

plurality of possibilities for different kinds of

relationships that could be promoted alongside of


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 36


marriage.

A number of left-wing intellectuals in the gay

movement and elsewhere are quite right to criticize the

inherently conservative and normalizing dimensions of

the push for gay marriage. But it is equally wrong not to

acknowledge the quite astounding anarchic

possibilities in the current wave of resistance to the

restrictions on gay marriage. I mean, when was the last

time that an elected public official in this country

engaged in a large-scale act of civil disobedience? The

way that the gay marriage debate has fueled a kind of

challenge to the legitimacy of existing anti-gay

discrimination is something that shouldn’t be despised.

So while I do not want to criticize the quite legitimate

critiques of gay marriage that people on the left have

put forward—I think Michael Warner in particular has

sketched out brilliantly in his book, The Trouble with

Normal (1999), what the downside is of the current gay

marriage movement—at the same time, it is worth

pointing out that even Warner did not anticipate that

gay marriage would provoke the kind of political

mobilization that it has. I think the political

mobilization and the questioning of the legitimacy of

existing laws that bar homosexuals from love and

family—at least in their socially recognized forms—are

very valuable, and I think that left-wing intellectuals

make a serious mistake when they simply dismiss those

developments.

CH: Going back to what you were saying at the

beginning of this conversation about the lack of

interchange between the popular gay movement in the

United States and intellectual approaches to

gay/lesbian/queer/transgender issues, is there

evidence that the gay marriage movement would

suggest, on some popular level, the failure of queer

theory as an intellectual intervention?

DH: Yes, I think it is possible. A lot of the radical

promise of queer theory, and of lesbian and gay studies

before it, to reach down or to reach across to the

relevant communities has not panned out. This lack of

communication was not always the case. Up through

about 1990, gay community newspapers were covering

developments in lesbian and gay studies; those

developments were big news. I know that I spent a lot

of time talking to gay community groups as well as to

doctors and psychiatrists. My work on ancient Greece

was reviewed in local gay papers; there was a great deal

of dialogue back and forth. Some have suggested that

the move into theory, into high theory, made lesbian

and gay studies inaccessible to people who were not

taking classes at universities. I think that is an

exaggeration, because it is also the case that the

hometown gay press across America largely went out of

business, except in San Francisco, when the highly

organized local gay communities that had existed in the

70s and 80s also disappeared. That disappearance was

one of the combined effects of the simultaneous advent

of AIDS and of real estate speculation in major U.S.

cities. Those changes served to disperse the highly

concentrated and urbanized gay populations, as Gayle

Rubin has shown (1997, 1998), and therefore

eliminated the structural foundation for a coherent,

informed social movement. What disappeared with

those populations was the base for most local gay

newspapers, which have vanished from one city after

another across the country and been replaced by

national lifestyle magazines, glossy magazines that

survive by promoting a generic version of gay identity

and aren’t really interested in the debates taking place

in local communities or in movement issues.

CH: Some of this lifestyle material has now evolved to

include television in shows like The L Word and Queer

as Folk.

DH: Or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. So what you

have is not just that queer theory has become

inaccessible, but that the infrastructure of gay culture

that was responsible for disseminating lesbian and gay

studies to people outside universities, and also for

communicating the cultural dynamism of the gay

movement in the local communities to people at

universities, has broken down. That pattern of

circulation has been interrupted. Consequently, if

people outside of universities are hostile to queer

theory or hostile to what they see as left wing

academics’ abandonment of them, that’s not just

because our work is impossible to understand, or

because gay and lesbian individuals are uninformed or

uninterested, it also results from the fact that the


____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 37


means for disseminating our intellectual work to a

larger audience and explaining its relevance have

disappeared.

I think the first large-scale misunderstandings

took place during the controversy over the biological

origins of homosexuality, as represented by Simon

LeVay’s (1993) work on the “gay brain,” Dean Hamer

and Peter Copeland’s (1994) description of the “gay

gene,” and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard’s (1991)

twin studies, all of which were discussed extensively in

national gay magazines like The Advocate. To the

extent that queer theorists had reservations about that

work, their concerns were not communicated well by

the national gay magazines—in fact, they were often

mischaracterized or simply dismissed. And this was not

because the objections to the biological studies were

necessarily encoded in highly abstract or sophisticated

language. It had to do with differences of purpose and

background and context between the delocalized gay

readership of those magazines and academic

communities. The fact is that the newly dispersed

members of gay communities were dealing with the

burden of church and other institutionally based

homophobia that drew a sharp division between

homosexuality as a natural condition—one which

appeared to be confirmed by the identification of a gay

gene—and as a sinful choice. By contrast, the academic

community was trying to deal with this new version of

positivism or essentialism in the context of a constantly

revised critique of identity categories, which had partly

originated in tendencies within the movement itself,

specifically in the work of women of color.

Interestingly, academic versions of social

constructionism had often played very well in local

communities when they were attached to the new gay

social history, but then turned out to play very badly

when they involved hostility to the new theories about

the gay gene. And this controversy marked, I think, the

beginning of an ongoing divide and misunderstanding

between queer theory and the larger social movement.

CH: Thank you very much for your comments.

References

Bailey, J.M., & Pillard, R. (1991). A genetic study of

male sexual orientation. Archives of General

Psychiatry, 48, 1089-1096.

Barbedette, G. (1982). The social triumph of the sexual

will: A conversation with Michel Foucault (B.

Lemon, Trans.). Christopher Street, 6(4), 36-41.

Bersani, L. (1995). Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Bray, A. (2003). The friend. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Eribon, D. (1991). Michel Foucault (B. Wing, Trans.).

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1976). The history of sexuality, volume

one: An introduction. London: Penguin.

Hamer, D., & Copeland, P. (1994). The science of

desire: The search for the gay gene and the

biology of behavior. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Laing, R.D. (1959). The divided self: An existential

study in sanity and madness. London: Pelican

Books.LeVay, S. (1993). The sexual brain. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

Rubin, G. (1997). Elegy for the valley of the kings: AIDS

and the leathercommunity in San Francisco, 1981-

1996. In M. P. Levine, P. M. Nardi, & J. H. Gagnon

(Eds.), Changing times: Gay men and lesbians

encounter HIV/AIDS (pp. 101-144). Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Rubin, G. (1998). The miracle mile: South of market

and gay male leather in San Francisco 1962-1996.

In J. Brook, C. Carlsson, & N. Peters (Eds.),

Reclaiming San Francisco: History, politics,

culture (pp. 247-272). San Francisco: City Lights

Books.

Szasz, T.S. (1960). The myth of mental illness.

American Psychologist, 15, 113-118.

Warner, M. (1999). The trouble with normal: Sex,

politics, and the ethics of queer life. New York: The

Free Press.

Documents

Foucault Marriage