There’s an important book emerging in these past few installments: about sameness, belonging, power as a constructive force, and the reconstitution of gay male culture as providing one way out of our current malaise. I hope you’re working toward that.
If nothing else, it would serve as a corrective to the misinterpretation of Foucault as a thinker who lamented power as opposed to someone who also celebrated it. The misinterpretation arose when so-called ‘critical theory’ wrested Foucault from his interesting place in philosophy and history and placed him in the service of an already-extant agenda. To my knowledge, Hubert Dreyfus was the first to diagnose the transmogrification.
(That said, it’s ‘retarded’—in Blakeian lingo—to claim that so many older gay men are secretly motivated by some ‘not like other gays’ desire, and by the presumption that gay = transgressive. These are tropes, and no one I know takes them seriously.)
Title for the book? “Power Bottoms: The Past as Prologue”
Well I don't know what motivates say Cooper, Harris, Moser, Gluck in their different modes of distancing themselves from gay identity, but all of them in their own ways say something like it no longer has transgressive potential...which like, maybe is true, but it seems like there's plenty of transgressive potential (good or bad) around anyway, and that supplying it shouldn't be the main thing we expect from an identity. It's perhaps beating a dead horse or straw man to say so, but then I do find them doing that "not me" thing!
Thanks very much of the kind words on this all shaping up to something :) it's not at all clear in my own mind, but I hope it does coalesce!!
It’s true: identity is a very poor hanger on which to drape one’s transgressive impulses. In fact, “transgression” itself is today a mere marketable style. (The relationship between stylistics and identity is more complex, and I remain unclear how they relate to one another.)
There’s an important book emerging in these past few installments: about sameness, belonging, power as a constructive force, and the reconstitution of gay male culture as providing one way out of our current malaise. I hope you’re working toward that.
If nothing else, it would serve as a corrective to the misinterpretation of Foucault as a thinker who lamented power as opposed to someone who also celebrated it. The misinterpretation arose when so-called ‘critical theory’ wrested Foucault from his interesting place in philosophy and history and placed him in the service of an already-extant agenda. To my knowledge, Hubert Dreyfus was the first to diagnose the transmogrification.
(That said, it’s ‘retarded’—in Blakeian lingo—to claim that so many older gay men are secretly motivated by some ‘not like other gays’ desire, and by the presumption that gay = transgressive. These are tropes, and no one I know takes them seriously.)
Title for the book? “Power Bottoms: The Past as Prologue”
Well I don't know what motivates say Cooper, Harris, Moser, Gluck in their different modes of distancing themselves from gay identity, but all of them in their own ways say something like it no longer has transgressive potential...which like, maybe is true, but it seems like there's plenty of transgressive potential (good or bad) around anyway, and that supplying it shouldn't be the main thing we expect from an identity. It's perhaps beating a dead horse or straw man to say so, but then I do find them doing that "not me" thing!
Thanks very much of the kind words on this all shaping up to something :) it's not at all clear in my own mind, but I hope it does coalesce!!
It’s true: identity is a very poor hanger on which to drape one’s transgressive impulses. In fact, “transgression” itself is today a mere marketable style. (The relationship between stylistics and identity is more complex, and I remain unclear how they relate to one another.)