CGS 105 Lecture Notes - Unearth, Intersubjectivity, Kama Sutra
5 Jul 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
CGS 105 – Lecture 2 – Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality
Queer Puerto Ricans and the Burden of Violence
Club as a safe space
Can’t ignore race, gender, class of victims
Don’t a random act of violence, but a targeted hate crime
I Was Born on the Dance Floor: A Playlist for Pulse
Emphasis on joy, performance in LGBT community
Liberation at heart of LGBT culture
Why Do We Read Foucault?
Everything has to do with power and how it works
oHow does power work?
Foucault studied under Marxist philosopher who was interested in ideology
Gay
oEncountering philosophy as an outsider
oDies of AIDS 1980s
oTheorizing from lived reality
We care about European philosophy because we recognize how the logic to undoing colonialism
could be contained there
Approaching philosophy through challenging philosophy
Deconstruction/Poststructuralism
Breaks down systems of knowledge
Instead of asking “what time is it?” Deconstruction asks “what systems of knowledge structure
how we know what time it is?”
oWhat is time and why do we have to measure it?
Trying to understand the mechanism through which knowledge comes to being in the first place
Question how we understood the world prior to advent of poststructuralism
Language the focus of much of poststructuralism
oDiscourse
How did we come to the nuclear family? What does it have to do with how the world changed?
What does it have to do with labor?
Knowledge Production: How Do We Know What We Know?
17th Century
Catholicism dominated Europe
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
oMeans of domination/ruling used by Jesuit church
Age of Enlightenment and birth of modern philosophy
Invention of race
oClassification of race
‘other’
Language lets you control what is seen as out of control/alien
Lets you become the dominant one through own system of classification
Justification for colonialism
Proto-capitalism
oMost of the people in the world were still subsisting, were not engaging in capitalism
Invention of sexuality
oInheritance
Land possession attracts people to come to the New World
Right to possession guaranteed in the US Constitution
Before this time, few people had land/owned anything to pass on, besides for
wealthy and nobles
Possessive Individualism
Comes out of the Enlightenment (Rousseau)
o“responsibilities” of social contract
Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”
oEnlightenment “brings light” to the dark ages
oThe mind privileged as the mechanism of consciousness
oWe exist because we think
oMind/body dualism
Mind and body are separate
Why separate the mind and the body?
Mind = logic, civilization
Body = savage, uncivilized
Human is exceptional because of the mind, of logic, of language
Body the source of all of the things that the Enlightenment
thinks is wrong with humans
Mind as mechanism through which to control the animalistic
body
European responsibility to civilize the uncivilized
Possessive individual uses the mind to possess the self
oMind used to possess the self/body/actions
Idea of individual will is born
Civil society separates humans form animals through imposition of moral codes of behavior
oSocial contract
In order to exercise one’s possessive individualism, one had to agree with
responsibilities/moral codes (social contract)
Reiterated idea of civilizations
Distinguishing self from the ‘other’
Sense of self only understood as the opposite of the ‘other’
My rights end with the other’s rights begin
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Cgs 105 lecture 2 michel foucault"s. Queer puerto ricans and the burden of violence. Can"t ignore race, gender, class of victims. Don"t a random act of violence, but a targeted hate crime. I was born on the dance floor: a playlist for pulse. Emphasis on joy, performance in lgbt community. Foucault studied under marxist philosopher who was interested in ideology. Encountering philosophy as an outsider: dies of aids 1980s o. We care about european philosophy because we recognize how the logic to undoing colonialism could be contained there. Trying to understand the mechanism through which knowledge comes to being in the first place. Question how we understood the world prior to advent of poststructuralism. Language the focus of much of poststructuralism: discourse. Catholicism dominated europe: means of domination/ruling used by jesuit church. Age of enlightenment and birth of modern philosophy. Language lets you control what is seen as out of control/alien.
