LGBT People : Michel Foucault

Born on the 15th October 1926, Foucault was only to live till 57 when he died of AIDS but was able to make a lasting impact thanks to his work as a sociologist, historian and philosopher.

Whilst he is probably best known for his work on power and the relationship between this, knowledge and discourse, Foucault was not one who liked to be labelled by others, shying away from definitions of his work as part of the school of Structuralism or Post Structuralism, instead describing himself as a Nietzchean.

Focusing on the subject of disciplinary institutions in his early career, Foucault used his book, Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish) to lookat both schools and prisons in the Western world and the micro-power structures that develop within them, but it was to be his work on sexuality towards the end of this life that  saw his most celebrated work – the History of Sexuality.

Exploring the relationship between power and discourses, Foucault suggested in this three volume work that the previous 150 years had not seen a suppression of sexuality as some may of thought, but instead seen the West become obsessed with the need to explain sexuality and find some knowledge or truth about it. This obsession he believed had acted to not only construct a meaning for sexuality as a whole, but also produce a whole range of minority meanings for it in the process.

Acting to further reinforce this belief that sexuality is merely a social construct that means nothing without powerful voices defining it as such, Foucault used the History of Sexuality to illustrate the many different discourses of sexuality, including political, moral, educational, medical and scientific, and how it is these which have come to form definitions of what is deemed normal concerning sexuality (heterosexuality) and not (homosexuality and bisexuality), with the abnormal being central to allowing a normal construct of sexuality to exist.

And it is a theory that many have come to adopt, with Foucault’s concept of sexuality being a construction based on discourses being  one way of explaining the different ways people respond to being homosexual, with those adopting a negative discourse acting to protect themselves from the perceived negative consequences (persecution and discrimination) through denial or living as a heterosexual, whilst others adopt a positive discourse of homosexuality of being both normal and natural to allow them to live their lives more freely.

Foucault’s death in 1984, from an AIDS-related illness,  saw him become the first high profile French personality to have been reported as dying from the disease, something which was to cause much controversy with Le Monde running a front page article on his death that famously failed to mention the AIDS word at any stage.