I am putting the finishing touches on “Disabling Bioethics: Notes Toward An Abolitionist Genealogy,” my contribution to Genealogy: A Genealogy, edited by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Daniele Lorenzini. (Columbia University Press, 2025). I have copied below the pre-copyedited version of the first section of the chapter which appears under the heading “Conceptual Needs of the Argument to Abolish Bioethics.” Avid readers/listeners of Foucault will recognize that I have borrowed the term conceptual needs from Foucault’s important article/interview “The Subject and Power.”
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Conceptual Needs of the Argument to Abolish Bioethics
1. Situating the Argument
In this motivational chapter, I draw on Michel Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to interrogate the subfield of bioethics and advance my argument—an argument situated at the intersection of Foucault studies and philosophy of disability—that this subfield of philosophy is a strategy and mechanism of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished. For I contend that the anti-foundationalism of Foucault’s genealogical method, his formulation of power as productive, and his insights about the contingent character of the subject provide the most philosophically sophisticated tools with which to accomplish this aim. Indeed, Foucault’s genealogical method, I contend, is the best approach with which to examine how the subfield of bioethics (1) contributes to the production of the problem of disability (and its naturalized foundation, impairment)–that is, contributes to the production of disability as a problem; and (2) is designed to hasten its elimination, that is, to resolve the problem that the production of disability (and impairment) poses for the (neo)liberal control and management of societies.
Mainstream bioethicists believe that their task is to dispassionately apply the universalizing and ahistorical principles of deontology, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics to dilemmas and events that arise in biomedical contexts, such as the use of prenatal genetic screening and other genetic technologies. In other words, they presuppose that medical encounters provide opportunities for the expression and application of extant values such as autonomy, well-being, and liberty.[1] Insofar as I endorse Foucault’s insight that power is productive, however, I assume (contra these bioethicists) that the very articulation and so-called application of these values—through, say, the use of genetic technologies and the decision-making procedures that surround them—effectively generates and configures the values.[2]
The conception of disability that predominates within philosophy construes disability as a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait, that is, a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. Philosophers who hold this naturalized and individualized understanding of disability take for granted that disability is a prediscursive entity, with transhistorical and transcultural properties, that medicine and science can both astutely recognize and accurately represent and to which universal principles can be applied. The subfield of bioethics has, therefore, been designated as the appropriate philosophical domain within which to consider disability.
Nevertheless, a different understanding of disability is available according to which the ontology of disability, the production of the ontological status of disability, and the so-called application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are performative and co-constitutive. On this understanding of disability, the ontological status of disability is always already a contingent political and, hence, value-laden, state of affairs that should be historicized and relativized. Indeed, my politicized understanding of disability construes disability as an apparatus (in Foucault’s sense) of biopower, which Foucault identified as a relatively recent form of power that operates primarily through productive forms of coercion and control to maximize the conditions conducive to “life:” the life of the species and the life of the individual.[3]
Foucault defined an apparatus (dispositif) as an ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, laws, and administrative measures directed at a perceived social requirement deemed urgent in a certain historical moment.[4] My argument is that the urgent requirement to which the apparatus of disability responds in this historical moment is biopolitical normalization of populations and individual subjects to make them cost effective and manageable, thereby facilitating the expansion of neoliberalism as a form of governmental reason. The apparatus of disability is, in other words, a historically specific and dispersed system of force relations that produces and configures practices towards certain strategic political ends. Claims according to which disability is a personal characteristic, biological difference, or property of individuals naturalize and individualize a culturally and historically specific phenomenon, rendering it as an ahistorical and universal fact of the matter rather than a historically contingent and culturally relative artifact of force relations. In short, the naturalized ontological status that philosophers and bioethicists attribute to disability is a political artifact all the way down.
A neoliberal governmentality of security—in support of which the apparatus of disability and other apparatuses of (for instance) racialized and gendered force relations have amalgamated—undergirds the academic field of bioethics and has facilitated its emergence and expansion, including the incessant production within some areas of the field of questions and concerns about impairment and the refinement of positions that rationalize its prevention and elimination. In this regard, Foucault’s remarks about the three major forms that technologies of government take in their development and history can serve as an apt characterization of the emergence of bioethics as a biopolitical subfield of philosophy. Foucault argued: first, a given technology of government takes the form of a principled dream or utopia; then, the dream of the technology of government develops into actual practices or rules to be used in real institutions; finally, the practices and rules of the technology of government become consolidated in the form of an academic discipline.[5]
A genealogy of how the academic subdiscipline of bioethics has functioned as a strategy and mechanism of eugenics would trace the emergence and consolidation of this subdiscipline through a range of relatively recent notions that biopower has generated, including normality, risk, chance, statistical knowledge, and probability.[6] All of these biopolitical constructs have played a constitutive role in the government of disability.[7] Bioethics is, in short, an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, that is, bioethics is a technology of government that provides intellectual resources designed to facilitate the “strengthening” (fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others. As a product of biopower, furthermore, bioethics implicates the discipline and profession of philosophy in the apparatus of disability and the social and political subordination of disabled people in more ways than, and to a greater degree than, any other subfield of the discipline of philosophy, although cognitive science and its cognates have, in recent years, gained considerable ground in this regard.
Indeed, the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical discourses and the naturalized conception of disability on which these discourses rely contribute substantially to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, where intransigent beliefs according to which disabled people are suboptimal, defective, and unreliable, and hence, not viable colleagues persist. The recent publication, by a feminist bioethicist, of an article that pathologizes neurodivergent people is a case in point,[8] especially insofar as it draws on claims about “theory of mind,” which constitute a discourse in philosophy of mind that various autistic theorists and philosophers have repeatedly argued demeans them.[9]
2. Method and Fit
Insofar as I wish to employ Foucault’s methodology and tools for the project to abolish bioethics, my argument runs counter to the claims of philosophers of disability and theorists in disability studies who disparage the use of Foucault for critical analyses of disability. The various charges that these authors have hitherto made of Foucault can be summed up thus: Because Foucault disregarded personal experiences, denied the foundational subject and its agency, and obscured the body and its materiality, his work is counter-intuitive and inappropriate for disability theory and research that ought to attend to the lived experiences and knowledges of disabled people, including their experiences and knowledges of their own embodiment;[10] furthermore, Foucault’s genealogies offer few (if any) resources with which to articulate social critique and instigate the social change that disabled people seek.[11]
The most straightforward general response to these charges against Foucault is that they misunderstand his work on genealogy, power, the subject, and the materiality of the body; that is, Foucault’s genealogical approach to abnormality, subjectivity, identity, experience, race, sexuality, and the material body has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for critical examination of disability than his critics in philosophy and theory of disability have thus far recognized. Ladelle McWhorter, in a retort to the charge that Foucault denies the materiality and subjective experience of embodiment, explains the subversive potential of his genealogical approach in this way:
Foucault the Nietzschean genealogist never says there is no body; he simply looks at the historical record to see how the concept “the body” has functioned in relation to the political, social, and economic forces in which it appeared. Nietzsche never found a time before evil; Foucault does not find a time before the body, but he does discover that the concept has altered a great deal over the centuries and has functioned very differently in different contexts. This fact… tends to upset the notion that the body exist somehow beneath language as a biological given, but it does not refute it. What it does do is undermine claims to definitive knowledge of the body by creating awareness—some might say a suspicion—that the current claims are no more “untainted” by power relations that the claims of previous generations and that they, too, may pass away.[12]
This chapter is primarily designed to indicate how Foucault’s genealogical approach facilitates recognition and explanation of the eugenic impetus that animates the field of bioethics. In what follows, therefore, I revisit the aforementioned charges against Foucault only to the extent that doing so enables me to survey the “conceptual needs” (to use Foucault’s term) of the project to abolish bioethics. My central aim is to show how genealogy—the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously employed in his work on the descent of Western morals and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work on, for instance, the history of sexuality and the history of the modern prison—provides historically astute and culturally engaged analyses with which they can do so; that is, genealogy offers philosophers of disability the best tools of analysis and engagement that they can use to dismantle (or at least seriously compromise) the field of bioethics.
Insofar as bioethics is generally conceived as a domain that developed to provide normative guidance to medical practitioners in their clinical decision-making, their interactions with patients and families of patients, and their use of emerging technologies, it might seem that Foucault’s work is irrelevant to bioethical discourse and therefore unlikely to significantly unmask the deceptive role that this discourse serves in academia and society more generally. In a well-known criticism of Foucault, Nancy Fraser has argued, for example, that Foucault cannot on his own terms distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of power; thus, his work is “normatively confused.”[13]
Melinda Hall has responded to Fraser’s critique by asserting that “this feature of Foucault’s work is precisely what recommends it.” As Hall explains it, Foucault’s refusal to engage in evidently normative inquiry and to advance explicit directives for human actions “allows one to see what has been obfuscated—for example, power’s productive functions—and thus reframe ethics by overthrowing previous normative presuppositions.”[14] In a famous interview conducted in 1980, Foucault articulated his position in this way: “In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.”[15] Foucault’s critical approach requires that we ask how the seemingly earnest field of bioethics emerged and is reproduced through power relations that it variously obscures or purports to merely describe and adjudicate, as well as about the values and motivational assumptions of the field.
In Foucault’s genealogical studies of (for instance) abnormality, madness, perversion, deviance, and sexuality, he was concerned with the “problematization” of phenomena, that is, was concerned to show how these phenomena became thinkable as problems to which solutions came to be sought. In an explanation of this work that has not yet been suitably acknowledged, Foucault stated that a “conditional imperative”[16] underpins each of his genealogical inquiries, for he recognized that every theoretical or analytical discourse is in some way reliant upon or permeated by something like an imperative discourse. Foucault characterized the imperatives that underpin his restrained genealogical inquiries in this way: “If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages.”[17] In other words, Foucault maintained that the conditional imperatives on which his genealogical work relied were “no more than tactical pointers” to “tactically effective analysis” in “the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, philosophical practice.”[18] The conditional imperatives (or imperative discourses) that support Foucault’s genealogies are contingent strategies to understand given phenomena in particular ways and to make them understood as such. Thus, Foucault’s remarks about conditionally imperative discourses and their tactical efficacy provide additional ways in which to address the sort of criticism that Fraser and others have made according to which his genealogical approach lacks normative instruction, challenges, or repudiation.
Indeed, Foucault described genealogy as “the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”[19] For Foucault, genealogies are histories of the present. Genealogies, he pointed out, are not positivistic returns to a form of science that more accurately represents phenomena. Genealogies are, rather, antisciences. What characterizes genealogies is not that they reject knowledge, or appeal to or celebrate some immediate experience that knowledge has yet to capture. “That,” Foucault stressed, “is not what they are about.” Rather, genealogies, he explained, “are about the insurrection of knowledges. […] [A]n insurrection against the centralizing power effects that are bound up with the institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours.”[20] Genealogy is an “attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges […] to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse.”[21] Thus, genealogies require the excavation and articulation of subjugated knowledges, which are knowledges that “have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naїve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”[22] Criticism performs its work, Foucault stated, by uncovering and restoring these subjugated, unqualified, and even explicitly disqualified knowledges.
Genealogies are, therefore, historical ontologies that exhume these phenomena—that is, these subjugated knowledges, obsolete and even archaic discourses, events, and institutional practices—in order that the historically contingent character of the self-understandings and self-perceptions that we hold in the present can be discerned. My genealogical critique of bioethics comprises a historical ontology meant to motivate an insurrection against the centralizing power effects of this subfield of philosophy and its coercive mechanisms, which includes the notions of personal autonomy, self-determination, and informed consent. In other words, a philosophy of disability that traces a genealogical critique of bioethics comprises a historical knowledge of struggles and, in effect, is itself a subjugated knowledge.
As historical ontologies of ourselves, Foucault’s genealogies are concerned with questions about how our current ways of thinking and acting came into being rather than questions about why we think and act as we do. This distinctive orientation is crucial, for “why” questions usually seek answers about why we think and act as we do by appealing to a discourse that takes subjectivity as a given, that is, assumes subjectivity from the outset. For Foucault, phenomenology and psychoanalysis were exemplars of such “transcendental,” ahistorical discourse. By contrast, the genealogist asks: Of what is given to us as universal, necessary, and obligatory, how much is occupied by the singular, the contingent, the product of arbitrary constraints?[23] A critical ontology of ourselves, Foucault explained, must not be considered as a theory, doctrine, or permanent body of knowledge but rather as a “limit-attitude,” or ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us.[24] In short, the questions with which genealogy concerns itself are “how” questions that aim to identify how historically contingent practices, encounters, events, and accidents have enabled the emergence of bioethical modes of thinking and acting and the limits that they impose.
3. Politicizing the Subject
McWhorter has noted that genealogies help us “to make sense of how we are now, in this historical moment, by looking at how we got here and how this, here, now, is historically possible.”[25] Subjectivities—that is, specific types of identity and active and affective possibility—are, in other words, secondary phenomena whose historical emergence and descent genealogy is especially designed to trace. A genealogical analysis of subjectivities aims to reveal the networks of power relations in which subjects find themselves, as well as the formations and transformations of these force relations, their strengths, and their vulnerabilities. Hence, genealogies of disabled subjectivity and the experience of disability as a phenomenon can enable us to recognize the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of the bioethical subject of disability: How has bioethics made us subjects of disability, that is, subjects of the apparatus of disability of which bioethics is a mechanism?
We can gain insight into the contingent, constitutive status of the disabled subject of bioethics and of subjectivity in general—how subjects are “made up,”[26] to borrow Ian Hacking’s phrase—by considering Foucault’s writing on the subject of sexuality. Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality affirmed the existence of various forms of sexual subjectivity, while showing how the very phenomenon of sexual subjectivity as a dispositf arose within a specific historical context, grew out of disparate administrative and bureaucratic projects, was produced through certain institutional and individual preoccupations, emerged in coordination with the birth of the human sciences, and complemented socioeconomic shifts. Although Foucault held that sexual subjectivity, including gay subjectivity, is real, he nevertheless showed that it is neither timeless nor unchanging, but rather has taken shape through the action of certain historical and political forces and, without them, would cease to exist or would be transformed into a different way in which to organize the social and procreative world.[27]
In other words, Foucault’s conception of the subject does not continue in the tradition of modern philosophy’s cogito, which gives primacy to subjectivity. The subject, for Foucault, is not a sovereign or self-constituting point of origin from which knowledge and truth-claims emanate. The subject is rather an effect of force relations continuously constituted and reconstituted through concrete and institutional practices and discourses over the course of its lifetime. Thus, although Foucault claimed that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon, that the subject is an effect of the nexus of power-knowledge, he did not deny that the individuation of its agency and the lived character of its experiences are real, as much of his later work shows. Nevertheless, he endeavored to point out that such constituents of the subject are contingent and historically specific, not inherent to subjects, nor historically continuous. Furthermore, subjectivity itself, that is, subjectivity as a property that the subject possesses, was, for Foucault, neither eternal, nor fixed, nor are the concepts of freewill and autonomy on which the subject of bioethics relies inherent and immutable. Indeed, Foucault’s genealogical work on the subject aimed to show that none of these concepts is a historical constant. Instead, each of these putatively inherent and foundational properties or attributes of the subject has come into being through certain historically contingent practices, accidents, events, and interests. Thus, each of them has its own history of which it is the task of the genealogist to chart.[28]
Foucault argued that analyses of subjection should not attempt to identify some centralized and overarching font of subjecting power, but rather “should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.”[29] In another, earlier context, Foucault had remarked that in his work he had been trying to render evident the “constant articulation of power on knowledge and of knowledge on power,” especially with respect to the experiences of the subject. Foucault was keenly aware of the ways in which the coalescence and emergence of disciplines such as bioethics are mutually constitutive with forms of power. The exercise of power, he argued, perpetually creates knowledge and knowledge constantly induces effects of power.[30] Indeed, Foucault was especially concerned to show how the emergence of the human sciences (of which bioethics is only one) over the last two centuries has been entwined in the problems and practices of biopower and the social management (government) of subjects.
Thus, Foucault’s remarks on biopower, the subject, and liberal government in his later work instruct theorists to discern the multifarious ways that “subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, desires, thoughts, [and so on].”[31]Although Foucault’s work is commonly characterized as centrally concerned with power, he stated in a number of his writings that inquiry into the complicated constitution of subjects (how humans are made subject) was the crux of his theoretical endeavors. He was concerned to show that despite the fact that modern governmental force relations appear to regulate political life in purely negative—that is, repressive—terms by prohibiting and controlling the subject, their logic is far more byzantine than these traditional conceptions of juridical power represent: modern liberal force relations actually govern subjects by guiding, influencing, and limiting their actions in ways that accord with the exercise of their agency and freedom. In other words, autonomy is an instrument of power rather than a principle of resistance to it, rather than its adversary.
The autonomous subject of bioethics is thoroughly within the grip of power. Indeed, Foucault maintained that the most effective exercise of modern power relations consists in guiding the possible conduct of free and autonomous subjects and influencing the possible outcomes of their actions by putting in place the possible courses of action from which they may choose; that is, relations of (liberal) governmental power enable subjects to act in ways that also constrain them. By virtue of their subjection to governmental force relations, subjects are in effect formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with what these relations of power require. Furthermore, the production of these practices—these limits of possible conduct from which subjects choose their acts and hence are self-constituting—goes hand-in-hand with their concealment, allowing the naturalization and legitimation of the discursive formation in which they circulate.[32] In short, autonomy is a trap.
Foucault observed that modern force relations are constitutive of the subject in a distinctively liberal fashion―an observation whose importance a project to motivate the abolition of bioethics must not underestimate. For the liberal individualist arguments that condition bioethics, in which primacy is given to the autonomy of the informed subject, have a genealogy that potentially offers answers to questions such as these: How did we become the individualized autonomous subjects “with disabilities” that the field of bioethics produces and upon whom it depends? How does the constitution of the autonomous subject with a natural disadvantage fulfill the requirements of (neo)liberal eugenics? Insofar as a genealogical investigation of the autonomous disabled subject of bioethics can supply answers to these questions, it can facilitate the development of tactics with which to resist this subjectivation.
[1] For example, Tom Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[2] See also Melinda Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 3 (2015): 166–69; Melinda Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, Bioethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).
[3] See Shelley L. Tremain, “This is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies 19 (2015): 7–42; Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
[4] Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972––1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194.
[5] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145–62. See also, Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” 166–69; Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, Bioethics.
[6] See Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press); Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181-195.
[7] Shelley L. Tremain, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).
[8] Anna Gotlib, “Main Character Syndrome,” in AEON, September 27, 2024. https://aeon.co/essays//why-main-character-syndrome-is-philosophically-dangerous?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=05c565a09b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_09_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-69b28dd3d9-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D;
[9] For instance, Yemi [formerly Melanie] Yergeau, “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33 (4), 2013. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3876; Yemi [formerly Melanie] Yergeau and Bryce Huebner, “Minding Theory of Mind,” Journal of Social Philosophy 48 (3), 2017, 273-296. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12191
[10] For example, Bill Hughes and Kevin Patterson, “The Social Model of Disability and the Disappearing Body: Towards a Sociology of Impairment,” Disability and Society 12, 1997, 325-40; Jackie Leach Scully, Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral Differences (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Bill Hughes, “What Can a Foucauldian Analysis Contribute to Disability Theory?” In Foucault and the Government of Disability, second ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Joel Michael Reynolds, The Life Worth Lliving: Disability, Pain, and Morality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022); David Wasserman and Sean Aas, “Disability: Definitions and Models” in Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer edition, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/disability/
[11] Reynolds, The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality; David Wasserman and Sean Aas, “Disability: Definitions and Models” in Zalta, E. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer edition, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/disability/
[12] Ladelle McWhorter, “In Perpetual Disintegration,” in this volume.
[13] Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 31, 33.
[14] Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics, 162.
[15] Michel Foucault, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” History of the Present 4, 1, (1988), in Hall, “Continental Approaches in Bioethics,” 162.
[16] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.
[17] Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 3.
[18] Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, 3.
[19] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, 83.
[20] Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 9.
[21] Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, 9.
[22] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 82.
[23] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139––64.
[24] Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 319.
[25] Ladelle McWhorter and Shelley Tremain, “Normalization and Its Discontents: An Interview with Ladelle McWhorter,” Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2010).
[26] Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,”’ in Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, edited by Edward Stein (New York: Routledge, 1992).
[27] Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 30.
[28] Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 153.
[29] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 97.
[30] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 52.
[31] Foucault, “Two Lectures,” 97.
[32] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999, 10th anniversary ed.).
BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 