i realize i've upset you rob, but here's some more on a foucauldian analysis to suggest that he wasn't the anti-materialist that you characterize him as. granted, this is a derivative work, but kinsmen's article is built on foucault's work and i'm hard pressed to figure out how kinsmen can provide a materialist account here if foucault is such a dang anti materialist as you claim.
so, some basic points from kinsmen's work:
kinsmen starts out by arguing that the literature of the men's movement has produced an image of men as white, bourgeois and straight: "A series of masculinities becomes subsumed under one form of masculinity" -- a hegemonic masculinity. and yet, gay liberationist also reproduce the same hegemonic model of gay masculinity, although it seems less rigid and fluid. <ooops, i've just slipped into a little irigaray there. so sorry!>
I. A. heterosexuality as an institutionalized norm -- important means of social regulation, enforced by laws, police practices, family & social policies, schools, mass media
B. the historical development of heterosexuality is tied up with the institution of masculinity as aggressive, active
C. While gay men share the privilege of being men, they are subordinated to the institution of heterosexuality and therefore their lives & experiences are not the same. Gay men, for example, share the privilege but do not participate in the interpersonal subordination of women
D.Gay men have challenged the association of heterosexuality & masculinity
Kinsmen argues that we must move beyond liberal tolerance espoused by mainstream gay rights strugles to see how heterosexism serves to keep all men in line. "Breaking the silence" requires challenging heterosexism and privilege
He then turns to an analysis to ask how this has happened:
II. The History of Sexuality:
He asks: How did heterosexuality come to be the dominant social relation? How did homosexuality come to be seen as perverse?
--cross cultural, historical research shows that there is no normal or natural sexuality --biological capacities are transformed & mediated culturally, producing sexuality as a social need and relation
The repression hypothesis advanced by freud is social constructionist and it suggests that heterosexuality emerges from repression of polymorphous perversity. But this is problematic because it presumes that there is still some underlying core of sexuality that can be retrieved for liberatory purposes (freudo marxists, Foucauldian critique; 60s sexual revolution. didn't someone reference this recently?) anyway,
Kinsmen says that there is an alt. view:
-- social power & sexuality are bound together,
--sexual relations understood as changeable and as sites of personal & social struggles.
--this opens up struggle -- not for release of natural sexuality, but for a much broader challenge to the ways our sexual lives are defined, regulated, controlled, questions of the making and remaking of sex, desire, pleasure, and power
note here rob that this is why you are wrong. he does not think that a natural sexuality will be released. his THANG was to write against the marcusean repressive hypothesis that suggested such.
Enter the Homosexual:
I the historical emergence of homosexual as a category of deviance & social control required preconditions:
A. rise of capitalist social relations -- created social spaces for emergence of homsexual cultures
not much of an anti materialist is he???
B. regime of sexuality that categorized & labeled homosexuality and sexual deviations made possible by technological advances that enabled medicine, social work, psychology, intellecutal production in general, mass media, and technologies of surveillance
II Specifically, drawing on foucault here, says that these proconditions are:
A. Capitalism:
separated the rural household economy from industrial economy undermined the interdependent different sex household economy emergence of working class separation of work from household wage labor
created spaces within which men lived together outside fo families
B. Regime of Sexuality
transition in the way kinship, sexual & class relations were organized feudal ties no longer sufficient to define ruling class (blood, lineage) rise of bourgeois middle class required further definition beyond blood, lineage class consciousness, need for differentiation: a proper, respectable sexual & gender identity became a key feature of class unity of bourgeoisie.
C. Regime of Sexuality linked to ideology of individualism
-normalized relations of bourgeois family & its sexual morality --these norms were later used against the urban working class, poor -- considered a threat to social order -- reproductive heterosexuality
ALSO: sexuality become terrain for expanding male-dominant fields of medicine, psychiatry, sexology
D. Cultural Organization of homosexuality
--responding to ideology of individualism --organized their lives around sexuality to see themselves as diffferent --term coined in 1869 appeal to gov't to keep out of peoples lives --elaborated by homosexuals themselves, professional men who named their difference in order --to protect themselves from police & legal prohibitions --agencies of social control took up phrase in terms of abnormality, sickness, degeneracy, perversion --associated with gender inversion --category also provided a basis for resistance: --used in positive way to articulate diffference
The regime of sexuality and the specification of different sexual categories in an attempt to buttress the emerging norm of heterosexuality have also provided the basis for homosexual experiences, identities, and cultures.
Altogether created the basis for contemporary challenges to the hegemony of heterosexuality.
E. Enter Gay Liberation & the Gay Community:
--challenge to public/private split; the personal is political --contraceptive, reproductive technology --expansion of consumer markets, advertising -- increase in public visibility of sexual images, sexual cultures --feminist challenge to the patriarchal values --social ferment of sixties
there's more, but that's enough to suggest that foucauldian analyses certainly are not necessarily antimaterialist.