On September 1 (or thereabouts), “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches,” the special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that I have guest-edited to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Foucault’s birth on October 15, 1926, will be published! I’m thrilled with the contents of the issue and eager to share them with you. So, … below I have posted the (uncopy-edited draft) introduction to the issue! FPQ policy stipulates that all material that appears in the journal must be unpublished. To comply with this regulation, I have omitted the first (and very important) paragraph of the introduction and the bibliography.

As you will recognize–especially if you are a feminist philosopher, Foucault scholar, or some variation thereof–in keeping with the insubordinate character of the CFP for the issue, neither the introduction nor the special issue in its entirety will be what you likely expected!

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Finally, Foucault: Re-framing Foucault from the Margins

Why a Feminist Philosophy Journal is Commemorating Foucault

In the past, many feminist philosophers ridiculed Foucault and dismissed the feminist philosophers who dared to cite him and draw upon his thought, diminishing the pertinence and value of his work for feminism by arguing that his books and articles reproduce androcentrism in philosophy and reflect sexist and masculinist biases (see Tremain 2013, 2017). Pronounced largely by nondisabled and heterosexual feminist philosophers and theorists, this negative feminist attention to Foucault’s writing and public statements usually misconstrued them and virtually always avoided, if not outright obscured, his social positioning as a disabled and psychiatrized gay man in philosophy, rendering this social positioning as insignificant and irrelevant to feminist reception of the writing and the activism.

In doing so—that is, insofar as, by and large, feminist philosophers have not seriously engaged with Foucault’s work—they have contradicted their own argumentative claims about the significance of situated knowledge; have contributed to the neglect and obfuscation of “nonanalytic” feminist approaches to power, knowledge, language, and the self; have precluded questions and concerns that these approaches would contribute to broaden feminist analyses, including certain questions and concerns about disability, incarceration, race, history, contingency, and subjectivity; and have restricted the professional opportunities available to feminist philosophers (in particular disabled and queer feminist philosophers) who concentrate on Foucault and find his genealogical and other critical tools indispensable and illuminating.

“Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches” defies both earlier feminist disparagement of Foucault and the feminist failure/refusal that it encompasses—namely, the failure/refusal to acknowledge the ways that Foucault’s claims and insights would enable feminist philosophers to advance their various political and philosophical aims. Indeed, the issue comprises peer-reviewed articles that rebuke and go beyond past feminist misunderstandings and dismissals of Foucault’s body of writing and public actions. The articles included herein do so, especially when taken in combination, by demonstrating the importance and innovation of Foucault’s claims and insights about normality, perversion, sexuality, race, genealogy, discipline, punishment, and madness (to name a few) for feminist philosophy of disability, 2SLGBTQI+ theory, critical race theory, prison studies, abolition studies, social ontology, methodology, social change and transformation, and activism, as well as for understanding mainstream (feminist) philosophy and academic institutions themselves.

How This Issue Commemorates Foucault

Initially, I took for granted that I would write this introduction as a cursory survey—a sort of genealogy—of heretofore feminist philosophical work on Foucault. There, I would have explained the central feminist criticisms of Foucault’s ideas that can be found in classic collections such as Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby’s Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (1988); would have identified the pathbreaking Foucauldian analyses of feminist philosophers such as Jana Sawicki (1991), Ladelle McWhorter (1999; 2009), and Lynne Huffer (2009); and would have described my own adoption of Foucault, as well as elaborated my defense of him (in “Educating Jouy” [2013]) against one line of feminist criticism, a defense regarded by many Foucault scholars as the catalyst for new anti-ableist understandings of Foucault, that is, a turning point, a point for turning away from the hostile and ableist character of earlier feminist reception of his writing.

After further consideration, however, I decided that if I were to use this introduction to revisit uninformed and, in some cases, outrageous, criticisms of Foucault, I would lend legitimacy to them, compromising the assertion of Foucault’s import that I primarily envisioned for this commemorative issue. To be sure, feminist (and other) philosophers who wish to remain committed to these outmoded, if not outlandish, critiques of Foucault’s body of work will find several of them addressed in disparate contributions to the issue. Nevertheless, “Foucault and Feminist Philosophy: Other Perspectives and Approaches” is first and foremost emblematic of feminist philosophy that cherishes elements of Foucault’s toolbox and finds ways to put them in the service of feminist, anti-ableist, anti-racist, and other non-normative and transformative social projects and interventions.

Following this introduction, the issue continues with Mich Ciurria’s article on large language models (LLMs) and the neoliberal university. Foucault’s attention to historical and cultural specificity in his analyses of practices, identities, and discursive objects renders his approach quite distinct from the dominant universalizing and ahistorical traditions of philosophy. In “Old Discipline, New Medium: LLMs and the Neoliberal University”—a unique contribution to discussions in philosophy about LLMs and artificial intelligence (AI)—Ciurria relies upon Foucault’s historically-informed formulations of power relations to posit LLMs as a new mechanism of a persistent form of power, namely, disciplinary power. For Ciurria, that is, LLMs constitute a recent strategy of an old form of power rather than a new phenomenon altogether. Throughout their article, Ciurria is concerned to show how refusal to adopt a Foucauldian framework to apprehend LLMs is particularly detrimental to disabled students and faculty, as well as other disadvantaged and marginalized students and faculty.

Ying’s important article “The Self-formation of Sex Workers: A Foucauldian Reading of Xiaojie in Post-Socialist China” is an additional intervention that highlights the limits of accepted (liberal) feminist philosophical understandings of power; that is, by employing Foucault’s insights about power relations and technologies of the self, Ying argues against the assumptions about power and the subject that underlie various prominent positions in feminist debates about sex work and sex workers. Despite the seeming opposition between these positions in feminist debates on sex work, Ying points out, the proponents of these seemingly opposing positions share the same assumptions about power, assumptions that are outmoded, reductive, and underestimate the decision-making practices and self-constitution of sex workers. If feminists were to shift to a culturally informed Foucauldian framework, Ying argues, they would provide a better account of the agency of sex workers and could pay greater critical and theoretical attention to specific sociohistorical contexts in their research and writing with respect to marginalized social groups.

In “Notes for a Feminist Abolitionist Genealogy of Bioethics,” I deploy Foucault’s ideas about genealogy, power, and the subject to motivate a new problematization of the subfield of bioethics. By drawing on the claims of feminist abolitionists, the challenges that Foucault’s work presents, and the lessons of historical epistemology, I expand my earlier claim (2017) that the field of bioethics is a product of neoliberal eugenics that must be abolished. To support this expanded version of my argument for the abolition of bioethics, I introduce genealogical work that problematizes the lauded notions of autonomy and self—both of which notions are foundational to the field of bioethics—arguing that these (and other) shibboleths of bioethical discourse should be reframed as historically specific and contingent technologies of the self with deadly consequences.

In “Crip Zen: Sick Aesthetics and the Care of the Disabled Self,” Christina Lee uses a transcultural feminist disability studies approach to examine Foucault’s late work on the care of the self, work that, she argues, offers tools with which disabled and other marginalized women can construct a radical aesthetics and politics of self-care. Lee—who addresses well-known feminist criticisms of Foucault—combines feminist ethics, Buddhist ethics, and disability studies to consider how a feminist Foucauldian approach to meditation can create possibilities of self-care as a liberatory practice. For instance, Lee maintains that Foucault’s experiences of Zen Buddhism and his concept of an aesthetics of existence can counter neoliberal regimes of power. By drawing upon Foucault’s aesthetics and ideas of care, furthermore, Lee reads the memoirs of two disabled Buddhist women to consider how each of them uses meditative practice to redefine their respective relationships to their own bodies and disability.

In her transgressive contribution to this issue of FPQ, Stephanie Jenkins reclaims the earlier meaning of the term essay that Foucault introduces in The Use of Pleasure: namely, the essay/assay as a test for self-transformation. Although Jenkins (like Foucault) does not reject the scholarly essay as such, she declares “On Being Incorrigible”—her contribution to the issue—to be an “anti-essay,” a piece of writing that betrays, subverts, and exceeds the conventions of the academic philosopher’s standard piece of work, with its (inaccessible) structure, format, and terminology. As anti-essayist, Jenkins conveys her ideas through setlists and play-by-play reviews of the band Phish, to which she is a devoted follower. For Jenkins, the lyrics of Phish songs and the Phish concert itself provide venues and situations for both rethinking oneself and initiating self-transformation in ways that the discipline of philosophy and its institutionalized contexts do not.

In “Cisciety Must Be Defended: Or, A Foucauldian Account of Cisness,” Perry Zurn’s article in this commemorative issue, he points to Foucault’s formative influence on the emergence and development of gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, and trans studies. As Zurn emphatically notes, Foucault’s work is uncontestably foundational to these fields and continues to play an enormous role in all of them. It is, Zurn writes, impossible to conceive of these fields without Foucault. Zurn is centrally interested, however, in the relative absence of Foucault from discussions of the non-queer and the non-trans. Zurn’s aim, therefore, is to offer a systematic Foucauldian account of cisgender and cisnormativity, that is, a Foucauldian theory of cisness from a queer and trans perspective. The result is an account of cisness that foregrounds the imbrication of that category in colonial, ableist, and racist social structures, practices, and identities.

The previously unpublished transcript of an interview that Kristin Rodier and Emily R. Douglas conducted with Ladelle McWhorter in early 2023 is appended to the six articles included in the issue. Entitled “’We’ve Been Taught to be Dishonest About Ourselves’: Cripping Genealogy in Conversation with Ladelle McWhorter,” the interview was inspired by a graduate course on McWhorter’s book Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America that Rodier and Douglas created and taught, as well as by their keen interest in genealogy. Hence the interview—which covers a wide range of topics including how genealogy can trace the histories of ableism, the inextricable entanglement of ableism and racism, McWhorter’s most recent genealogical study, Unbecoming Persons, and their future philosophical contributions—will be invaluable as a sort of guidebook or instruction manual for practitioners of genealogy in particular to use in the future.

Like many Other philosophers, I believe that we owe a huge debt to Foucault for a host of reasons. To name only one, Foucault’s remarkably prescient understanding of how contemporary power relations coalesce and circulate provides (as the contributors to this issue of FPQ effectively show) feminist and oppositional thinkers in general with an alternative to the outdated “juridico-discursive” (Foucault 1978, 82) representations of power that prevail, and indeed dominate, in philosophy, including in feminist philosophy. On the centenary of Foucault’s birth, therefore, this commemorative issue, that is, this tribute to Foucault, was designed in part to repay the debt that we owe to him, to the extent that such repayment is even possible.