>Any oppressed group wants to know its own history. Mastering history, it
>seeks to recover, master, and work through subjugated knowledge (how it
>came to be the object of oppression) and suppressed popular memories (how
>its forebears or predecessors lived, struggled, survived, and sometimes
>even won some victories). Foucault spoke very eloquently of how (and to
>whose benefit) popular memories of rebellions have been erased from history.
>
>The ruling class and its dominant ideology always seek to deny us our
>history and memories.
with an invocation to compare Caravaggio and David Hockney. Chuck, I can't see why this comparison would prove or disprove the claim that Butler and Foucault have had effects on conceptions of sexuality. You want to claim they have had *less* effect than other things/ideas/people I think, but why? And who, exactly -- Hegel?
Catherine
>At the risk of sounding both pompous and pretentious, try making the
>following comparison. Go get two big art books at the library; one of
>Michelangelo Caravaggio (the one by Mia is good), and the other on David
>Hockney (there is a good one put out by Abrams). Set them up on a
>desk and open them to a large reproduction in each. Spend say, twenty
>minutes looking at them together.
>
>Then come back to the list and tell me Foucault and Butler, or David
>Hockney's equivalents have interrogated the nature of sexuality,
>sensuality, homosexuality, and their profound interconnections with
>psyche, history, and power. Think about how the mix of space and light
>on form and darkness have interpenetrated the entire western psyche
>through Rembrandt and others, on into film noir, and the high contrast
>photography of the mid-century, to fold these into the meanings and
>interrogations of depth in space as depth and nuance in sensibility
>and sensuality. Now, contrast this to Hockney's legacy in pasteled and
>flat manikins, doll cut-outs, pasted into pretty and decorously walled
>interiors.
>
>I brought up this comparison, because I decided to take a detour from
>Butler to Hegel and have about finished the sixty page preface to
>Phenomenology of Mind, the work Butler uses in the Bondsman and
>Unhappy Conscious sections of Psychic Life of Power.
>
>Chuck Grimes
>
>
>