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Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, by David M. Halperin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 246 pp. $23.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-9-509371-2. $13.95 paper. ISBN: 019-511127-3.
Scholars of Foucault and queer theorists should be grateful to David Halperin for writing this book. As the introductory chapter explains, the title is meant ironically, both to affirm the significance of Foucault's ideas for the gay and lesbian movement and to rescue his biography from its homophobic detractors, including the gay academic who coined "Saint Foucault" to deprecate social constructionism in lesbian and gay studies. The rest of the book consists of two long chapters: one on contemporary queer theory and the contribution of Foucault's ideas to its development; and a second using the insights of the former to assess recent biographies of Foucault.
The chapter entitled "The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault" provides one of the most incisive accounts of Foucault's political philosophy I have ever read, and is an important contribution to thinking about contemporary gay and lesbian politics. Halperin elaborates a Foucauldian political economy of sexual discourse, identifying how homophobia operates discursively and providing the analytical tools for combating it. His critical framework moves from gay/ lesbian specificity to "queer theory"...