Foucault and Pride Month

Foucault died on the 25th June, 1984. I tend to focus on birthdays but there are always exceptions and this is one of them because it's fitting to write something on a gay philosopher during Pride Month. And there's a huge dirth of LGBTQIAPD2S+ philosophers 😠 which is statistically impossible so someone must be weeding them out. There are even more scientists that are 'out' LGBT+ than philosophers. 🤔 That's why Foucault is an important philosopher (and sociologist, psychologist /psychopathologist). 

He is, yet again, one of those philosophers who are often misunderstood and much maligned. I wonder why? He's not Jewish but he is gay, so that's a good enough reason for many. Another reason may be that he was briefly in the communist party in France but left when he, and others, discovered they had been lied to over Stalin's death. The fake (anti-Semitic) story was that Jewish physicians had tried to kill the dictator. But, as Foucault points out many French young people went through short periods of signing up to the Communist party. For Foucault, it was due to Althusser who was encouraging his students, to do so. Even though Foucault left the Communist party, he still remained friends with his tutor and always acknowledged the deep influence Althusser had on him.

Foucault came up with original ideas which often put people's backs up. He wanted to rethink institutions, such as, prisons, mental institutions, hospitals, legal and educational. For him,  it was a case of institutions should be serving the individual not a case of institutions being a centre of power over the individual. Some therefore concluded he was anti-individualist!🤔 No, I see him as an individualist who thinks that the individual is disempowered by systems in place that monitor people's every move. We only have to look at security cameras which are in place today, and unnecessary security staff around buildings to see what he was getting at, and that was at a time when people were under less surveillance. Apps, for instance, can track your data and we can see the danger of that for women in the US today who use Apps for period alerts. With Roe v Wade overturned this could lead to problems if a woman cannot enter the date of her period. Emails, something we all use, are meant to be read by the person they were sent to, not spied on by others, deceitfully. They have the same status as receiving a letter which should also be opened and read by the person it is addressed to not just by anyone at that address. So, Foucault was quite right in what he said but many in those institutions criticised him for not giving them clear guidance what to do to practically change things. He didn't see that as his job. But then he was equally criticised or just ignored by intellectuals. So Foucault couldn't win no matter what he did. His works, nevertheless have become seminal, influential and highly regarded. Feminists find him a source of inspiration.

Foucault was often criticised for depicting modern life as being worse than it actually is. People would rather comfort themselves that things aren't that bad really and, of course, most white, straight, cis men don't encounter the forms and patterns of social control that Foucault is often trying to explain, especially within the medical, psychiatric and law enforcement spheres. However, Foucault is right that people have very little power which is why protest is so important. Only dictatorships ban protests.

Moreover, as I've been researching LGBT+ history in the UK in relation to this year's 50 year celebration of Pride UK (and some American background to it), I find Foucault's approach to be spot on! There are far more forms of social control that people are mostly completely unaware of unless they accidentally fall foul of them as well as inconsistencies/bias in their application. It's easy to assume that when the UK decriminalized gay men (1967), there ceased to be any legal or psychological monitoring of them and that there was a complete end to any restrictions on their lives. However, that couldn't be further from the truth! It was only a partial decriminalization in practice, meaning that there were all sorts of loopholes to catch them out on, hence, ironically, arrests actually increased! Why? Because, in a nutshell, it only decriminalized the private sphere, not the public sphere, and many other laws were misapplied to gay and lesbian people to enable institutions to harass them. For instance, kissing in public remained an arrestable offence when the first UK Pride took place in 1972 and merely smiling or winking at another gay person in the street used to be misconstrued as soliciting, which should have been reserved for prostitution not misapplied to gays, and irrespective of whether any sex between them even happened! Gross indecency, whatever that means, wasn't lifted as an offence until 2003! The last anti-gay sex law in the UK was a Scottish one that eventually lifted in 2013! 

Nevertheless, in my experience, an educational institution (university) dragged on this disturbing, outdated anti-LGBT+ behaviour of deliberately misconstruing everything, for instance, that Susan James and I did and didn't do (eg merely walking and talking together in public in the street on the rare occasion; smiling at each other), gaslighting our reality, in order to harass, stress out, monitor, police, regulate, and threaten to escalate things against us on the basis of false, inaccurate facts (randomly in the middle of my revision time when I'm training/ playing tennis and revising at home, no longer even on campus, not attending any conferences, not even having anything to do with Susan James and not about to either for quite a while). Indeed, the female Head of Department managed to prevent Susan James and I from working together for my dissertation without providing a reason at all and despite threats only a fews months by someone else higher up in the hierarchy than her, claiming, to the contrary, that Susan James and I can chat together and work together for my degree. There shouldn't have been any change between these two periods of time in 2012 because Susan James and I hadn't had any form of contact with each other between that earlier claim and the Head's interference with my dissertation supervision, so it constitutes arbitrary institutional abuse of power. And no institution should create a hostile, threatening, environment for anyone, including trying to confuse, threaten and catch out a young LGBT+ student invalidly on non-existent rules. This is intimidation and goes against the right to education free from harassment. 

It's institutional abuse, a general abuse of power and many of the tactics they used I can now see were used against gays in the UK in the past, despite none of these anti-gay loopholes existing during that time. Strangely, these disgusting, homophobic, outdated, sick tactics were almost always used against gay men, not lesbians, so I'm not sure why we were treated more like gay men anyway, unless it was not only homophobic but also part of the other ways they (including lecturers from other unis after my degree and the occasional online harassment) were genderphobic about us. And this was during a democratic peace time, the Human Rights Act is in place for a while, the UK was a member of the EU, and UK law was expanding rights and protections for people with protected characteristics eg LGBT + people. 🤷 

Even more strangely, (well after my degree) my mother received a strange, staring, disapproving look from a law lecturer. He specialised in contemporary EU law supporting his legal practice/cases so why is he even attending Spinoza spaces when it's not even remotely related to his research specialisations and, given his line of work, it could be argued his presence alone creates a threatening environment. Why did he give her that look? He was monitoring everything so abnormally closely that the eyes at the side of his head immediately noticed and alerted him that my mother and Susan James happened to look at each other, (without even smiling at each other, winking etc, and obviously without any what was termed 'gay intent' in homophobic regulations in the 70's, so it doesn't even fit the outdated excuses and monitoring system) while just casually glancing around the room. So, either, like domestic violence, tactics are being extended to monitoring and pressuring the family of LGBT+ people to put them off supporting gay relationships; and/or he somehow knows my mother is pansexual, which he shouldn't know because it wasn't known within academic circles. Not that she was in the closet - she was out and proud at a synagogue we belonged to, but he shouldn't have been aware of that. He shouldn't even know my mother's name, and even if he looked it up somehow, nothing LGBT+ would show up, all that would is that she was divorced from a man and had me as her daughter. 

Why have I included a personal digression? 

One, because it is keeping with Foucault wanting his books to be an experience that impacts people, and their understanding as they grow through that experience:

'An experience is something that one has completely alone but..... others can also ...... encounter it - and go through it themselves. (Michel Foucault, Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 3, ed. J.D. Faubion, Penguin Books, 2002, p245)

Two, it serves to illustrate Foucault's focus on:

'practices......... grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment;......- practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given.......meet and interconnect.

To analyse "regimes of practices" means to analyse programs of conduct......prescriptive..... regarding what is to be done...... regarding what is to be known......' (ibid, p225)

Such practices are not just a matter of what's legally, medically or institutionally policed, it's also about what is allowed: we still cannot manage to ban conversion therapy in the UK, and even if it eventually happens, it again is highly likely to be only a partial ban e.g. perhaps leaving out certain groups e.g. trans and including loopholes, e.g. consent, so it can, in effect, continue. USA LGBT+ history is also proof of Foucault's claims: In the 60's New York police department had a special section called the Public Morals Division which had the practice of running around enforcing so-called vice laws, which meant they could forceably arrest and hospitalise gays. Unsurprisingly, this sparked off the Stonewall Riots. Enough was enough. Gays were not prepared to put up with the practice prejudicial arrests any longer!👏👏👏👏👏

Foucault also examines the psychological effect of feeling like you are constantly being observed and monitored. (I studied the psychological effects of observation in Psychology A Level.) He argued that panopticism is a form of (institutional) power through uninterrupted supervision, which makes the observer believe they gain knowledge about the observed. It also aims to change the behaviour of these monitored individuals. I wonder if this is a form of ad hoc conversion therapy in society to change LGBT+ people into cis heteros which is an anti-LGBT+ tactic that also won't be covered by any future ban.  

In Foucault's words:

'...a knowledge that was no longer about determining whether or not something had occurred; rather, it was about whether an individual was behaving as he should, in accordance with the rule or not, and whether he was progressing or not. This new knowledge was no longer organized around the questions: "Was this done? Who did it?" It was no longer organized in terms of presence and absence, or existence and nonexistence; it was organized around the norm, in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must or must not do.' (ibid, p59) 

So, by looking at LGBT+ history as well as my own personal experience, I can see clearly that Foucault was not exaggerating at all when he raised concerns. Indeed, there are endless current and historical examples that support his facts and arguments. Here I have only selected a few pertinent examples. I think contras against Foucault's claims are becoming less and less plausible, especially after recent American and British attacks on human rights (Roe v Wade in the US; Bill of Rights in the UK which the Conservative party is trying to rush through without proper debate which isn't even a democratic process). Why isn't there a public consultation about the change in human rights? Why is a Bill being imposed on the British public without their consent? The government is there to serve us not to impose their political power over us.