Here, as in other postmodern texts, liberation discourse stands accused of essentialism. It is said to be equally bad to have a sexual essence ascribed to oneself (a core self) by others as to ascribe an essence to oneself. Ascriptions of this sort are always embedded in relations of power; “normalization” is here a principal weapon in the deployment of sexuality. Hence to be labeled a “queer,” a “pervert,” or a “slut” is to be exiled beyond the borders of normalcy; it is to be eternally defective in one’s essence. Liberation movements remain, Foucault thinks, within the knowledge/power regimes that they are trying to combat: of Reich’s vision, for example, he says “it always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality and not outside of it or against it” (131). Foucault is quite right about this. Reich agitated for a sexual revolution but regarded homosexuality as infantile and regressive. But what of the modern gay rights movement itself? How vulnerable is it to Foucault’s criticism? Movements for gay liberation accept the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality; they try only to valorize the persecuted partner in this duality. Hence, they have not gotten beyond a fundamentally oppressive way of carving up human sexuality; they have not broken through the “deployment of sexuality” to the freedom of “bodies and pleasures.” Furthermore, in its struggle to gain respectability for the movement, many of its participants stigmatize the flamboyance of swishers, crossdressers, and drag queens. In this way, a liberation movement may create new norms that push to the margins some of those it ought to be liberating
Sandra Bartky (2002) in “Foucault on the Repressive Hypothesis” p 63 of Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays. You can read it here.
Sometimes I like Bartky, sometimes I don’t, but she raises an important point here which shows the reasoning for Foucault’s comments on, and really his lack of support for, queer rights movements, which are pivotal in Foucauldian discourses of power-knowledge and queer(ed) identity, and it is a point that I feel I must touch on whenever I am involved in queer discourses, and that is that to accept a categorization and then ask for equality is to accept the knowledge that a differentiation exists in the first place. It is to accept that there is a normalcy and a rigidity of sex, sexuality, and gender, that if one transgresses this normative way of being, one must ask for acceptance from an un/de-queered and exclusionary society after allowing it to render any deviations from the perceived norm as queer. Bartky’s understanding of Foucault here is the fundamental notion of power-knowledge being used to create categories which are simultaneously productive and restrictive. It is an understanding of the sinister realities of categorization, norming that has ultimately proved increasingly restrictive to those who would see a fixed, non-fluid, and deeply caricatured and stereotyped label as a source of empowerment. Moreover, this form of categorization also remains productive for those who would want queer(ed) people branded as deviants as it establishes a differentiation between a perceived normality and a queered deviation from that; it sets an exclusionary enabling restrictive standard of moralistic acceptability.
