Dispatches from IMEC

Foucault fo sho has been providing amusing dispatches about her trip to IMEC to study Foucault for her thesis.
At last I found myself at my destination, the beautiful Abbey. Pictures will come tomorrow, as I am exhausted. Fortunately, the one woman who speaks english at the Abbey was working today and was very helpful. She [...]

When popular culture confirms anthropology!

I haven’t said anything about the case of Senator Larry Craig, but I think this Salon article has it right concerning sexual orientation. You can be MSM without being “gay.” I’m not an anthropologist but surely they have right: the binary categories of sexuality are inadequate.
I used to live in Midtown Atlanta, which had been [...]

Intersex case studies

Interesting discussion of intersex with case studies (including Herculine Barbin).
The Western world defines gender in two distinct categories. But in reality, gender is a spectrum. Why does society, and even science, struggle to understand and accept those who are somewhere between male and female?

What did Foucault mean when he said “race”?

Wildly Parenthetical blog presents some extracts from a forthcoming paper which among other things addresses the meaning of “race” in Foucault’s work (presumably Society Must be Defended).
Foucault positions racism as a technique for fragmenting the population into superrace and subrace, and thus as not simply attaching to what we might otherwise, in more everyday use, [...]

The pleasure of writing

A reflection journal: I didn’t know people did this any more. I think this is delightful:
This blog is meant to be primarily a reading journal. I think of it in a pretty old-fashioned way, based on the “dialectical journal”s I had to write as a high school student, carefully drawing a line down the middle [...]

Three new ground-breaking books on spatial reason

Three new books on spatial reason and politics have recently appeared. Remarkably, they all come from a single publisher, the University of Chicago Press in the last year or so.

The History of Cartography Vol III, Cartography in the European Renaissance (edited by David Woodward).

Abysmal, by Gunnar Olsson.

The Sovereign Map by Christian Jacob.

Gays, genes and politics

One of the most resonant developments of the Democratic primaries so far has been Bill Richardson’s blurted comment that homosexuality is a choice (see here).
Southern Voice, a gay newspaper, has some interesting contributions to the debate over whether being gay is a choice or biological (as the issue has been framed).
–they note a recent Gallup [...]

Thought of the outside

I’m sure this is right about the Cretan paradox, but I hate paradoxes.
Nevertheless, it usefully made me re-read The Thought of the Outside (DE 38).

Uh-oh, wingnut attack!!

David Frum, former speech writer for President Bush (and the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil”, not to mention ardent proponent of the Iraqi war) has been given a book by Foucault… and loves it!
The book he was given was as you might guess, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, which we have had [...]

Foucault and bio-ethics

Philosopundit (ole perfessor eat your heart out) proposes a paper on Foucault that makes the following surprising claim:
This paper examines the resources of Michel Foucault’s philosophy for bio-ethics.  Given the unorthodox nature of Foucault’s philosophy and ethics compared to the more traditional approaches of deontology and consequentialism it may seem that Foucault’s thought has little [...]