Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Educationpdf

QUEER STUDIES & EDUCATION
SERIES EDITORS: WILLIAM F. PINAR

NELSON M. RODRIGUEZ · RETA UGENA WHITLOCK
Michel Foucault and

Sexualities and
Genders in Education
Friendship as Ascesis
Edited by
David Lee Carlson
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Queer Studies and Education
Series Editors
William F. Pinar
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, NJ, USA
Reta Ugena Whitlock

Department of Educational Leadership
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, GA, USA
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David Lee Carlson · Nelson M. Rodriguez
Editors
Michel Foucault
and Sexualities
and Genders
in Education
Friendship as Ascesis
Editors
David Lee Carlson Nelson M. Rodriguez
Arizona State University Department of Women’s, Gender,
Tempe, AZ, USA and Sexuality Studies
The College of New Jersey
Ewing, NJ, USA
Queer Studies and Education

ISBN 978-3-030-31736-2 ISBN 978-3-030-31737-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9
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Contents
1 Foucault, Friendship, and Education 1

David Lee Carlson and Nelson M. Rodriguez
2 #NoHomo: Men’s Friendships, or “Something Else” 9

Frank G. Karioris and Jonathan A. Allan
3 Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture, Exclusion,

and the Politics of Friendship 23
Hilary Malatino
4 Queer Ascesis and the Invention of New Games 39

Jonathan Kemp
5 Transcendent Friendship: The Potential of Foucault’s

Ascesis to Subvert School Gender Regimes
and Facilitate Learning 57
James R. Gilligan
6 Gender and Sexual Minority Faculty Negotiating

“A Way of Life”: Friendships and Support
Within the Academy 77
Sean Robinson
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Gay Ascesis: Ethics of Strategic Disorientation

and the Pedagogies of Friendship 91
David Lee Carlson
8 Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life 103

Adam J. Greteman and Kevin J. Burke
9 Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party: A Foucauldian

Reading of Friendship, Fractured Masculinities
and Their Potential for School Practices 123
Joseph D. Sweet
10 Michel Foucault and Queer Ascesis: Toward

a Pedagogy and Politics of Subversive Friendships 139
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Author Index 155
Subject Index 157

Notes on Contributors
Kevin J. Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. His
research focuses on the intersections of religion, queer theory, curric-
ulum, and teacher education. His most recent book, written with his
dear friend, Adam J. Greteman, is The Pedagogies and Politics of Liking
(Routledge, 2017).
David Lee Carlson is Associate Professor of Qualitative Research
in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.
His current research focuses on the ways in which the post-qualitative
movement continues to problematize the ontoepistemology of research
methodologies. He has published extensively on Michel Foucault’s work
in educational research, including his co-authored book, Composing a
Care of the Self: A Critical History of Writing Assessment in Secondary
English Education (Sense/Brill). Carlson’s forthcoming book is titled
Foucauldian Philosophy and Implications for Educational Research: Michel
Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France.
James R. Gilligan earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction
from Purdue University in 2015, after a nine-year career teaching
high school English Language Arts. He is now an Assistant Professor
of English Education in the Department of English Language and
Literature at San Francisco State University, where he teaches under-
graduate courses in advanced composition, literacy, and Young Adult
literature as well as graduate courses in curriculum and instruction.
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
His current research focuses on using proleptic discourse to support the

development of pre-service teachers’ professional identities.
Adam J. Greteman is an Assistant Professor of Art Education and
Director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. His research interests lie at the intersections of
feminist, queer, and transgender theories, philosophy of education, aes-
thetics, and teacher education. He is the co-author (with Kevin Burke)
of The Pedagogies and Politics of Liking (Routledge, 2017) and author of
Sexualities and Genders in Education: Towards Queer Thriving (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018).
Frank G. Karioris and Jonathan A. Allan write together collabora-
tively on issues of men and masculinities. Frank G. Karioris is Visiting
Lecturer of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University
of Pittsburgh and Jonathan A. Allan is Canada Research Chair in Queer
Theory at Brandon University. Together they are writing The Full
Package: Aesthetics, Masculinity, and the Market (University of Chicago
Press). They have published articles together in the Journal of Gender
Studies and the Journal of Men’s Studies. With Chris Haywood, they are
Founding Editors of the Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities
which will begin publishing in 2020.
Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative
writing at Middlesex University, London. He is the author of two nov-
els—London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best
First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015)—and the short-story collection
Twentysix (2011, all published by Myriad). His fiction has also appeared
in Chroma, Polari, Brand Magazine, Best Gay Erotica 2010, and Best
Gay Short Stories 2010. Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male
(2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire
(2015, both Punctum Books).
Hilary Malatino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s,
Gender, and Sexuality Studies, affiliate faculty in the Department of
Philosophy, and a research associate with the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn
State University. Their research and teaching are located at the intersec-
tions of queer theory, trans and intersex studies, science and technology
studies, feminist bioethics, continental philosophy, and decolonial thought.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Sean Robinson (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D.) is an

Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Morgan
State University, in Baltimore, MD. His teaching interests include:
higher education administration, student affairs administration, organ-
izational development and change management, leadership develop-
ment, and qualitative research methodology. His current research areas
include an exploration of the lived experiences of LGBTQ faculty and
administrators within colleges and universities, and understanding the
socialization and mentoring experiences of minority graduate students,
particularly those attending HBCUs.
Nelson M. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender,
and Sexuality Studies in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences
at The College of New Jersey. His current research areas span queer
studies and education, critical masculinity studies, and Foucault stud-
ies. Professor Rodriguez is co-editor of the series Queer Studies and
Education (Palgrave Macmillan) and Routledge Critical Studies in
Gender and Sexuality in Education (Routledge/Taylor and Francis). His
recent publications include—Queer Pedagogies: Theory, Praxis, Politics
(Springer International Publishing); Critical Concepts in Queer Studies
and Education: An International Guide for the Twenty-First Century
(Palgrave Macmillan); Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs
(Peter Lang); Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education
(Springer Netherlands); and Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and
Identity in Education (Peter Lang). Rodriguez’s forthcoming books
include Queer Studies and Education: An International Anthology;
LGBTQ+ Studies in Education: Theoretical Interventions in Curriculum
and Pedagogy; Foucauldian Philosophy and Implications for Educational
Research: Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France; and
Transnational Sexualities in Education.
Joseph D. Sweet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English,
Theatre, and Foreign Languages at The University of North Carolina at
Pembroke. His research interests include pedagogies of gender equity
in secondary English language arts, arts curriculum, qualitative inquiry,
critical theory, masculinities, and secondary English education. Prior to
enrolling in graduate school, Joe served as a secondary English and thea-
tre teacher for nine years.
CHAPTER 1
Foucault, Friendship, and Education
David Lee Carlson and Nelson M. Rodriguez
Abstract This chapter serves as the introduction to our edited volume

Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Education: Friendship as
Ascesis. Here we introduce to the reader Foucault’s 1981 interview with
the French gay magazine, Le Gai Pied, titled “Friendship as a Way of Life.”
The interview serves as a theoretical and political grounding for the chapters
across our collection. More specifically, we elaborate on Foucault’s notion
of a homosexual ascesis based on experimental friendships and situate his
reflections within the context and concerns of critical studies of sexualities
and genders in education.
Keywords Ascesis · Friendship · Foucault · Le Gai Pied · Education
D. L. Carlson (B)
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
e-mail: David.L.Carlson@asu.edu
N. M. Rodriguez
The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA
e-mail: nrodrigu@tcnj.edu
© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. L. Carlson and N. M. Rodriguez (eds.), Michel Foucault and Sexualities
and Genders in Education, Queer Studies and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_1
2 D. L. CARLSON AND N. M. RODRIGUEZ
The main theme of Michel Foucault’s 1980–1981 Collège de France lec-

tures focuses primarily on the relationship among the subject, truth, and
discourses.1 In a series of twelve lectures, Foucault investigates how and
under what conditions subjects interact with and navigate through vari-
ous discourses of truth that produce subjective experiences. He traces the
genealogical threads that inform the essentialization of truth and the sub-
jectivities of the subject in order to illustrate the historical contingencies
of sexual practices and the construction of “regimes of truth.” Further-
more, he questions the relationship that subjects develop with themselves
as they learn about truth—meaning, how does one relate to oneself as one
interacts with discourses of truth? His lectures trace the emergence of the
techniques for the art of living in conjugal relationships and the hierar-
chical status of marriage relative to other forms of sexual practices. In the
final lecture, given on April 1, 1981, Foucault argues that techniques of
the self conformed to specific ways of relating to oneself based on strict
conjugal relationships—and pleasure was completely linked to monogamy.
Thus, the subjective relationship one had with oneself had to be based on
self-mastery. Self-mastery produced pleasure. More importantly, the final
lecture demonstrates that the development of desire, as a form of subjec-
tivism and objectivism, historically emerged. Foucault’s critiques of desire
as an instrument of power/knowledge are fairly pervasive throughout his
later works, and specifically in The History of Sexuality series. He argues that
forms of power/knowledge coopted desire, even produced desire as a tool
to determine the truth about a person: Tell me your desires, and I’ll tell you
who you are. Various strategies of confessional technology induced subjects
to speak their (sexual) desire. In the final lecture of the 1980–1981 series,
he spells out historically how that happened.
At about this time, Foucault granted an interview with Le Gai Pied, a
newly formed French gay magazine. Le Gai Pied was established to move
gay social life out of the salons and bars and into the streets. Foucault com-
posed a piece for the magazine’s first issue in which he extols the virtues
of suicide, but in 1981 he gave an interview, which was later published as
“Friendship as a Way of Life.”2 Our collection, Michel Foucault and Sex-
ualities and Genders in Education: Friendship as Ascesis, is framed around
Foucault’s reflections on friendship in that interview. It’s important to note,
however, that Foucault had become quite involved politically and person-
ally in the gay scene in Paris and in the United States. He had also written
and spoken extensively about how he viewed the gay rights movement and
what he thought being queer could mean for both gays and straight peo-
ple, noting for instance that “we should consider the battle for gay rights
1 FOUCAULT, FRIENDSHIP, AND EDUCATION 3
as an episode that cannot be the final stage” (Foucault 1997b, p. 157). In

1979, furthermore, he spoke at the Congress of Arcade, which was a Paris-
based group founded in 1957 to help “homophiles” live better lives and to
become more accepted in heterosexual culture. It was France’s oldest gay
organization and was a members-only organization. Foucault gave a talk
about the historical contingencies of gender and sex. He argued that plea-
sure needed to be liberated from the normalized gender constraints, even
within the gay community (e.g., active/passive), and he explained that plea-
sure is “… something which passes from one individual to another; it is not
secreted by identity. Pleasure has no passport, no identity” (cited in Macey
1993, p. 364). This point clearly echoes his main conclusion in volume 1
of The History of Sexuality that the antidote to the power arrangements of
sex and sexuality is not normalization or hierarchicalization or bio-politics,
but bodies and pleasure. As Foucault (1997a) states in the interview:
What we must work on, it seems to me, is not so much to liberate our desires
but to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure [plaisirs ]. We
must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the
pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities. (p. 137)
For Foucault, pleasure, unlike desire, could not be coopted by

power/knowledge simply because it has no “passport.” As Halperin (1995)
explains: “Unlike desire, which expresses the subject’s individuality, history,
and identity as a subject, pleasure is desubjectivating, impersonal: it shatters
identity, subjectivity, and dissolves the subject, however fleetingly, into the
sensorial continuum of the body” (p. 95).3 Sex itself and gender had been
produced, according to Foucault, by the dispositif of sexuality, or Scientia
Sexualis, and the body endured the marks of the dispositif of sexuality that
governed it under the pervading forms of power/knowledge. For this rea-
son, Foucault advocated “for the decentralisation, the regionalisation of all
pleasures” (cited in Macey 1993, p. 364).
Decentralization and regionalization are not about rediscovering one’s
sexuality, nor liberating it as in “coming out,” but rather involves taking
risks to manufacture, create, and invent other forms of pleasures and of
relating to each other that defy the dispositif of Scientia Sexualis. From this
perspective, Foucault admonishes gays to use their bodies as a resource for
numerous pleasures, ones that exceed the “Always drinking, eating, and
fucking that seems to be the limit of our understanding of our body, our
pleasure” (cited in Macey 1993, pp. 368–369). Indeed, Foucault advocates
in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that gays need to exist in a continual state

of creation, invention, experimentation and, hence, self-transformation.
This is what Foucault means by “ascesis,” as opposed to asceticism. As he
explains:
Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But ascesis

is something else: it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to
transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains.
Can that be our problem today? We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it’s
up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on
ourselves and invent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still
improbable. (Foucault 1997a, p. 137)
Foucault’s notion of advancing into a homosexual ascesis also constitutes an

ethical practice in that he envisions “gay becoming” (Halperin 1995, p. 79)
as a collaborative endeavor, a relation to oneself in relation to others. Thus,
his conception of ascesis is “not simply a matter of self-transformation.
Rather, it also involves the transformation of others through a negotiable
and collaborative process of relationship construction… a move from a
solitary aesthetics of existence toward a more collaborative aesthetics of
existence” (Kingston 2009, pp. 16–17). It is this collaborative, experimen-
tal process that Foucault frames as “friendship” and that helps to explain
what he means in the interview when he states that “The development
toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friend-
ship” (Foucault 1997a, p. 135). As such, “friendship as ascesis,” that is,
as the practice of ethical self-transformation in Foucault’s formulation, can
potentially yield a culture and an ethics, a “way of life” (Foucault 1997a,
p. 138), in its capacity to generate new subjectivities and relational forms,
as well as new pleasures, that are not necessarily governed by codes of
normalization.4
The authors in this edited collection were invited to think with Fou-
cault’s reflections on friendship in the 1981 interview “Friendship as a Way
of Life” situated within the context and concerns of education, broadly
defined. More specifically, the contributors were asked to draw from Fou-
cault’s reflections as a way to take up any number of topics across the broad
field of sexualities and genders in education. The result is a collection of
essays that provides, in general, a cross-section of thinking—specifically as
regards a range of issues related to sexualities and genders in education—
on Foucault’s provocations of creating a “culture and an ethics,” a “way
of life,” by engendering new relational forms and opportunities for ethical

self-fashioning “not resembling those that are institutionalized” (Foucault
1997a, p. 138). This would include rethinking our relationships in terms
of bodies and pleasures within contexts of education.
In their chapter “#No Homo: Men’s Friendships, or Something Else,”
Frank G. Karioris and Jonathan A. Allan explore the concept of collabora-
tion in men’s friendships where collaboration is positioned, in their formu-
lation, “as a form of moving outside of boxed bodies and relations towards
positions that elaborate on new relational modes”—and the pleasures of
“something else.” It is in this context that they advance a pedagogy of
ascesis.
Pedagogy has always been an integral feature of queer social spaces
where, as Hilary Malatino reminds us, “we learn how to be and think with
each other in order to invent forms of queer resistance, belonging, and
becoming.” However, in “Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture, Exclu-
sion, and the Politics of Friendship,” Malatino highlights the exclusions
queer spaces enact when operating on the presumption of bodily same-
ness. Malatino’s important critique provides an opportunity to revisit the
defining absences of Foucault’s reflections on friendship in light of signif-
icant theoretical and political developments across queer, trans, intersex,
and intersectional studies over the past 30 years.
Jonathan Kemp, in “Queer Ascesis and the Invention of New Games,”
is also concerned with exclusions that stem from forms of hegemony. In
his chapter, Kemp presents a timely critique of the potential exclusion and
delegitimizing of a “relational mosaic” (Roach 2012, p. 5) when marriage
(equality) is framed as the pinnacle form of relationality, of intimacy and
friendship. Highlighting Foucault’s (1997a) admonition that “We must
escape and help others to escape the two ready-made formulas of the pure
sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities” (p. 137), Kemp calls
for “the practice of a queer askesis that shuns traditional, unworkable mod-
els in favor of new explorations into becoming-together,” and considers the
usefulness of (queer) pedagogy in this process.
Foucault’s reflections on ascesis also inform James R. Gilligan’s work in
his chapter titled “Transcendent Friendship: The Potential of Foucault’s
Ascesis to Subvert School Gender Regimes and Facilitate Learning.” Gilli-
gan notes that school gender regimes “govern gendered behavior within
educational institutions” and are “predicated upon the cultural construct
of hegemonic masculinity.” This limits the creation of new relational forms,
especially among boys, based on ascesis. As a counterhegemonic practice,
Gilligan proposes curricula that include the teaching and learning about
friendship as ascesis as a way to help students deconstruct school gender
regimes that impact and restrict all aspects of their educational experience.
From this perspective, Gilligan’s project may very well assist with creating
the conditions “to make possible a homosexual culture” (Foucault 1997a,
p. 139) within school cultures.
In “Gender and Sexual Minority Faculty Negotiating ‘A Way of Life’:
Friendships and Support within the Academy,” Sean Robinson explores
the important role workplace friendships play in the career and identity
development for gender and sexual minority (GSM) faculty. Such friend-
ships, argues Robinson, serve “to create (and navigate) a way of life in the
academy” for GSM faculty. Importantly, this entails the role of workplace
friendships in facilitating, for Robinson, the “development of a range of
possible identities and ways of being,” including the development of forms
of relations, that function “to blunt organizational heterosexism and homo-
phobia.” As with Gilligan’s project, Robinson’s work can help to engender
queer cultural forms, thus functioning, in Robinson’s case, to counter the
hegemonic straight space of institutions of higher learning.
“Friendship as ascesis,” the subtitle of our collection, is meant to high-
light that friendship entails a highly collaborative relation without nec-
essarily a telos, one that involves the “creation of new subjectivities and
relationships as participants struggle to come to terms with one anoth-
er” (Kingston 2009, p. 15). This notion of friendship as relations-in-the-
making, or as Foucault (1997a) frames it, as relations that are constituted
by “a desire-in-uneasiness” (p. 136), is emphasized in David Lee Carlson’s
chapter “Gay Ascesis: Ethics of Strategic Disorientation and the Pedago-
gies of Friendship.” For Carlson, a homosexual ascesis based on friendship
involves what he terms a “strategic disorientation,” and explains that asce-
sis framed as such is “strategic because it involves an understanding of
power/knowledge, and it’s disorienting because it involves escaping one-
self beyond institutional forms of being.” Furthermore, if ascesis is the
work that one performs on oneself in relation to others, then it necessarily
involves processes of teaching and learning. Friendship as ascesis, thus, is
also a pedagogical undertaking that can be used, Carlson argues, “as a way
to teach and learn how to strategically disorientate ourselves from ourselves
as an ascesis.”
As Carlson’s deployment of strategic disorientation suggests, education,
in any number of its forms and practices, can serve as a vehicle to orient
us toward imagining new relational forms, friendships-in-the-making, even
while it works to aggressively constrain or filter what we are able to envi-

sion in terms of relationality. In “Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life,”
Adam J. Greteman and Kevin J. Burke consider schooling as a space for the
cultivation of friendship playing out at the intersection of constraint and
possibility. They ask, for example, “can homosexuality as it tends toward
friendship offer models of relationality that extend beyond the normalized
models of relationality, notably marriage or celibacy, taught in schools?
And if we can, what exactly might that mean for the educational project
as it creates opportunities for becoming a subject?” Thinking with these
questions, Greteman and Burke propose the concept of “the visitor.” That
is, in casting students (and teachers) as “visitors” to each other’s differ-
ent life stories, Greteman and Burke argue that such stories may work to
help visualize as well as actualize relationalities in school spaces that reach
beyond “readymade formulas” (Foucault 1997a, p. 137).
In “Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party: A Foucauldian Reading of
Friendship, Fractured Masculinities and their Potential for School Prac-
tices,” Joseph D. Sweet is also interested in the role schools can play
in creating pathways, for example in the curriculum, that would orient
students to critically deconstruct the institutional impoverishment of the
relational fabric while also providing them with the conceptual tools to
reimagine ways of “being-in-relation” that move beyond institutionalized
“proposals” for relating. In Sweet’s work, he examines the pervasive role
of hegemonic masculinity in organizing and limiting homosocial relations,
including male intimacy, among straight cismen in schools, and particu-
larly within the culture of school sports. As a counter to the powerful
ways that hegemonic masculinity socializes school-aged boys, Sweet pro-
poses the concept of “fractured masculinities” that posits masculinity, in
Sweet’s theorization, “as a continual process of becoming that is flexible,
malleable, situated and always incomplete. As such, fractured masculini-
ties counters traditional masculinity by allowing a multiplicity of accepted
masculine expressions.”
Rounding out the collection, Nelson M. Rodriguez is also interested
in exploring practices of ethical self-fashioning and transformation among
straight-identified men in his chapter titled, “Michel Foucault and Queer
Ascesis: Toward a Pedagogy and Politics of Subversive Friendships.” He
specifically takes up the topic of gay-for-pay which, in his analysis, refers to
“men who identity as heterosexual but who are paid to perform same-sex
sex within the context of the profession of the gay pornography industry.”
Stemming from a pedagogical interest in exploring ways of theoretically
framing in classroom discussions the topic of gay-for-pay, Rodriguez first

examines the queer dimensions of Foucault’s ideas regarding homosexual
ascesis and their entanglement with his reflections on gay politics. By draw-
ing on a queer reading of Foucault’s reflections on friendship, Rodriguez
argues that gay-for-pay can be understood as a queer ascesis, that is, as a
strategy or technology of ethical self-transformation that can engender new
and creative and experimental forms of relationships, pleasures, and modes
of being that are not beholden to the codes of institutionalized norms gov-
erning any number of relationships, including those between men. From
this perspective, given their potential to rupture the normalization of rela-
tionships, these non-institutionalized relations based on a queer ascesis can
be understood as “subversive friendships” (Kingston 2009).
Notes
1. The title of this series of lectures is Subjectivity and Truth (see Foucault 2017).
2. See Foucault (1997a).
3. See Halperin (1995, pp. 91–97), for further explication on the difference
between desire and pleasure in Foucault’s thinking.
4. For a discussion of the distinction between ethics versus codes in Foucault’s
later works, see Taylor (2017, pp. 226–227).
References
Foucault, M. (1997a). Friendship as a way of life. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel
Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity and truth (pp. 135–140). New York: The New
Press.
Foucault, M. (1997b). The social triumph of the sexual will. In P. Rabinow (Ed.),
Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity, and truth (pp. 157–162). New York: The
Free Press.
Foucault, M. (2017). Subjectivity and truth: Lectures at the Collège de France
(1980–1981). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Halperin, D. M. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Kingston, M. (2009). Subversive friendships: Foucault on homosexuality and social
experimentation. Foucault Studies, 7, 7–17.
Macey, D. (1993). The lives of Michel Foucault: A biography. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Roach, T. (2012). Friendship as a way of life: Foucault, AIDS, and the politics of
shared estrangement. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Taylor, C. (2017). The Routledge guidebook to Foucault’s the history of sexuality. New
York: Routledge.
CHAPTER 2
#NoHomo: Men’s Friendships,

or “Something Else”
Frank G. Karioris and Jonathan A. Allan
Abstract What might it mean for two men, two friends, to set out to write
about men’s friendships? We see collaboration, as a method/theory, as pro-
viding personal and scholastic depth. This chapter is of twofold importance:
On the one hand, we seek to write self-reflexively about friendship and sec-
ondly to write critically about men’s friendships more generally. We stress
the importance of the positionality of the authors; simply put, our own
experiences of friendship inform our theoretical writings about friendship
and the kinds of friendship we imagine possible. Neither of us would partic-
ularly align ourselves with Foucauldian thought, and yet, we find ourselves
often returning to Foucault. In his analysis of Foucault, Leo Bersani (Fou-
cault against himself. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, pp. 55–76, 2015)
notes that ascesis is “discovering or rediscovering pleasure” and that this
F. G. Karioris (B)
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
e-mail: fgk3@pitt.edu
J. A. Allan
Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada
e-mail: allanj@brandonu.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_2
10 F. G. KARIORIS AND J. A. ALLAN
pursuit is “a way of rediscovering sociality” (p. 63). The relation between

education, ascesis, and friendship will act as a springboard for locating
not only the types of friendships, but also the means by which they are
enacted and act. In this chapter, we will dwell on friendship, pleasure (not
desire), and (homo)sociality to think through a range of theoretical texts
that explore men’s relationships. As such, we will think carefully about
thirty or so years of critical theory on men’s relations, working to think
against and through orienting those very relationships. In this way, we seek
to elaborate on the pleasures of friendship that are particular to masculin-
ity and explore a pedagogy of ascesis of men’s friendships. Curiously, one
item we aim to think carefully about is the “degaying” gesture (Bersani in
Homos. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996) that is found in many
of these texts, as if they work hard to imagine a friendship between men
without oriented sexualities.
Keywords #NoHomo · Friendship · Collaboration · Masculinities
We set out in this chapter to think deeply and critically about friendship. We
write as friends. As friends, we worry about one another, we share successes
and struggles, and we’ve cried together and celebrated together. We travel
to conferences where we can both participate, we work together via Skype,
and we are writing this chapter on Google Docs while working and living on
two different continents, time zones separate us. Distance, Roland Barthes
reminds us, is “the most significant problem of living together,” by which
he means that the challenge of living together is the constant “attempt to
regulate interindividual distance” (2013, p. 131). This distance, of course,
disappears quite quickly when we are together, in the same space, working
on the same issues, we pick up just where we left off. Friendship is elusive,
strange, and, if we believe the media, men’s friendships are in crisis (Way
2011; Garfield 2015).
We met at a conference on men and masculinities. We became fast friends
and have since collaborated in various ways. We have committed ourselves
to an interdisciplinary research agenda that attends to masculinity. We begin
from very different starting points. Jonathan works in the Humanities,
while Frank works in the Social Sciences. Jonathan will write in one color of
our Google Doc, Frank in another color. We leave questions for each other,
not quite certain how to frame or write about a given issue. (Remember that
thing you said about Badiou? Was that Phillips? Is there something to be said
2 #NOHOMO: MEN’S FRIENDSHIPS, OR “SOMETHING ELSE” 11
about …?) Our opening questions, the core questions of our disciplines, are
often radically in opposition to one another. But, as frustrating as this can
be, it builds not only a research agenda, but also a friendship. We set out
to work together, despite our differences, to understand what we share in
common: masculinity. Masculinity forms not just our intellectual interests,
but also our lived experiences, our day-to-day life.
Simply put, masculinity is as central to our identities, as it is to our
collaboration. During our collaborations, intentionally or not, we often
find ourselves reflecting on our own masculinities, how our masculinities
are informing the collaboration (who’s name goes first?), and what we are
unable to say because of our masculinities. As such, this occasion to write
proved too good to be true because it brought together so many of our
individual and collective interests. We ask, thus, what would it mean to
center collaboration as a pedagogic device? To suggest that it’s through
point of meeting is itself not simply a device for rendering relationships
themselves open but a methodological element in any practice of learning,
learning from, and learning to. In this way, by beginning from the point
of collaboration, is a pedagogy already begun? Not only is collaboration
a writing device or a statement about the sexual—“men who collaborate
engage in a metaphorical sexual intercourse” (Koestenbaum 1989, p. 3)—
but it is a commentary on the interactive laboratory of learning through
and with. In looking at collaboration, Wayne Koestenbaum (1989) sug-
gests that if one were to take a historical approach, it might “begin with
Platonic dialogues—implicit collaborations with Socrates, in which ped-
erasty, pedagogy, and colloquy intersect” (p. 12). Collaboration is tightly
tied together with pedagogy, the practice of teaching and learning, and
education is an implicit element regardless “whether [the collaborative act
is] draped in the discrete charm of the ‘homosocial continuum,’ or left
impolitely naked” (Koestenbaum 1989, p. 5).
In “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Michel Foucault (1997, p. 136) pon-
ders: “how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share
their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge,
their confidences?” In many ways, this question haunts so much of what we
imagine as “homosociality” in critical theory, especially in theories of men
and masculinities. The core question, at the heart of so many texts, rang-
ing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985) Between Men through to Jane
Ward’s (2015) Not Gay, is: “how is it possible for men to be together?”
Foucault continues, “What is it, to be ‘naked’ among men, outside of insti-
tutional relations, family, profession and obligatory camaraderie?” (1997,
p. 136). Of course, Foucault is not alone. Leslie Fiedler (1948) in his canon-
ical essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” wrote about this
same curiosity, but more closely aligns it with homosexuality: “the exis-
tence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect
of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker room and the
ball park” (p. 27). Leo Bersani (2015), likewise, provides a telling anecdote
about teaching Foucault’s work:
Friendship between men and friendship between women interested him to a

great degree. Once when I was giving a class on Foucault’s texts, a woman
student gave a very interesting oral presentation. She said that, in certain
institutions Foucault studied, a friendship could be developed that wasn’t
sexual, but something else. (pp. 60–61)
This “something else” is, in many ways, what is so difficult about men’s
friendships with other men, which returns us to the opening question: “how
is it possible for men to be together?” These questions, these anxieties,
fascinate us, as authors, as men, as scholars of men and masculinities, and
as friends who happen to be men and who happen to write about men and
masculinities.
Theories of friendship, and relationality more generally, are plentiful.
Histories of friendship continue to be written. In this chapter, we are begin-
ning with the work of Michel Foucault, who, perhaps while not known as
a theorist of friendship, offers much to this discussion. What is so useful,
or what we take as being so useful, is Foucault’s insistence upon theorizing
the complexity of sexuality as central to relationality and moving sexuality
beyond a mere identity politic. Foucault’s encounters with sadomasochism
were less about sex and more about “a certain way of being in relation
to others that went far beyond sexual practices” (Bersani 2015, p. 61).
He talked about the way that communities of men could “invert forms
of friendship that were more difficult in the heterosexual world” (Bersani
2015, p. 60). One might ask, or suggest, that this “heterosexual world” is
opposed, in portion or part, not necessarily to a homosexual world, but,
in fact, to a homosocial world. Foucault further notes, “a friendship could
be developed that wasn’t sexual, but something else” (Foucault in Bersani
2015, p. 61). This “something else” is what we are pushing at through this
exploration. It is that which is not sexual, yet not outside of or beyond plea-
sure. Bersani, in discussing Foucault (and through him, himself), says that
it is important to think about relations of impersonal intimacy that which
is intimate yet not of one’s self. Through an “unbinding [of] yourself from
yourself” (ibid., p. 67), one can find intimacy and relationality that does
not speak in the same ways. It is here where we may come back to collab-
oration, asking if—via Koestenbaum (1989)—the two men collaborating
are “enacting if not feeling homosexual desire” (p. 8)?
Degaying Gesture: #NoHomo

A significant amount of energy is spent exploring the nature of men’s friend-
ships, especially in an almost taxonomical way. We are so desperate, as a cul-
ture it seems, to categorize men’s friendships, we use new terms and have
used new terms to describe men’s friendships for centuries. Most recently,
the term that occupies our attention, not just in theoretical terms, but also
in lived terms, is “bromance” and the subsequent, “I love you man, no
homo.” So much of men’s friendships, especially as lived experiences, are
endowed with a fear of the sexual.
In his 1983 book, Men and Friendship, Stuart Miller provides a com-
pelling anecdote. He was telling a colleague about his current research, to
which the colleague responded: “Male friendship. You mean you’re going
to write about homosexuality? That’s what everybody will think, at least.
Could be dangerous for you” (p. 2). These kinds of anecdotes are plentiful
when men study men’s friendship, they are almost archetypal in how often
they are repeated, told, and explored.
We provide another anecdote about men and friendship. During field-
work, Frank introduced his topic very carefully to all of those involved,
explaining that he was studying men’s friendships and social lives. In a
strange twist, Frank overheard a guy ask another man (one who Frank
knew) who Frank was, and the guy responded, “he’s the guy who does
experiments on men’s sexuality.” A strange statement considering Frank
was doing no experiments, nor was his focus sexuality. And yet, very quickly,
friendship which is implicitly homosocial is read as homosexual, or, in a
degaying gesture (a phrase to which we shall return), at least sexual, which
is precisely what Sedgwick and Kimmel would anticipate would happen.
Men’s friendships—whether lived or studied—are deeply suspicious, espe-
cially when they are so deeply attached to love, ascesis, and pleasure.
Instead of opting for a mode of denial and repression (Allan 2016,
2017), or at the very least the accusation of doing just that, we want to
think about men’s friendships alongside and through Foucault’s “some-

thing else.” How then do we imagine men’s friendship without this assump-
tion of homosexuality, and what does it mean to do that? Do we, as scholars
of men and masculinity, run the risk of being accused of “homophobia”
when we deny that men’s friendships are homosexual? And how do we
think about this kind of negation or denial when confronted by words and
phrases like “no homo,” or “bromance,” words that explicitly call atten-
tion to the queerness of the thing being described while simultaneously
rejecting this association? This question has become all the more impor-
tant to ponder and think about when confronted by ideas like “hybrid
masculinity” or “inclusive masculinity” (Anderson 2009), as well as the
apparent, though hardly convincing, “decline of homophobia” in the West
(McCormick 2012).
“Indeed, friendship between men is perhaps the most important site,”
Garlick argues, “where virile heterosexual masculinities are endangered by
the specter of homosexuality” (Garlick 2002, p. 560). It is this specter
that has similarly created the backlash, including the “No Homo” catch-
phrase of dismissing homosexuality when displaying intimacy, pleasure with
other men, or simply complimenting another man. Importantly, saying “no
homo” is about “disqualif[ying] such a misunderstanding for the audience”
(Potts 2015, p. 180), that is, the focus is as much about the speaker as it
is about the audience which may (mis)recognize his sexual affinities. The
introduction of a phrase like “no homo,” we would contend, runs counter
to the theorizations of “inclusive masculinity theory,” which imagines that
homophobia is somehow in decline. The failures of such theoretical pos-
tures are that theorists fail to imagine the possibilities of homophobia that
extend beyond outward violence, for instance, what is the place of inter-
nalized homophobia in inclusive masculinity theory? Simply put, does the
phrase “no homo” not elucidate the fear that some men have of being per-
ceived of as being “homo,” even if they are not outwardly homophobic?
This phrase, “no homo,” is necessitated because homosexuality is cast
not as a given act or series of acts, nor is it just an identity, but as a way
of relating. John Paul Ricco (2002) explains, “Foucault is speaking not
of homosexual content, identity, or perhaps even specific acts, but of a
relational logic that is indeterminate, one that neither begins nor ends with
homosexuality, but through which one might come to relate socially and
spatially otherwise” (p. 5). In many ways, this is the “something else” that
is being called upon when we use phrases like “no homo” or words like
“bromance.” These phrases implicitly call attention to what it is not, but
what it could be, but still “something else.” This “something else” seems
to escape language or at least the possibility of limiting the “something
else” to language itself.
However, there is also a more critical reading of these phrases, not least
because of the homophobia that informs them (and in other cases misogyny,
for instance, manorexia, which, one supposes, is about a manly way of doing
anorexia). If we spend so much time “degaying” our friendships, we deny
the friendships of their intimate potentialities.
Collaborating on Friendship, Pleasure,

and Homosociality
It is critical, in setting up this friendship, that we recognize its relation
to collaboration not as merely practical, but as pleasurable. It is a fiction,
perhaps even a fantasy, to suggest that collaboration eases workloads—in
the same way that it is fictitious to suggest that interdisciplinarity should
save money! What would it mean to suggest that collaborating necessitates
a similar relation as a friendship, endowed with a pleasure that is both
wrought in some antagonism and enveloped in pleasure? In a slightly vexing
version of collaboration, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips (2008) discuss the
way that in the Phaedrus, the two lovers “through reciprocal attentiveness
to the other’s becoming” move “beyond what turns out to have been
only a provisional distinction between the lover and the beloved” (p. 123).
This vision of friendship, however, contradicts what Jacques Derrida says
about the difference between the “lover” and the “one loved.” Drawing on
Aristotle (2009), Derrida makes a separation between “lover” and “friend,”
stating that—as part of the cyclical—a true friend (a friend of “good” rather
than of “use” or “pleasure”) must be someone who is so close as to be
nearly one and the same. Bersani and Phillips instead focus on the necessity
of attentiveness, which is to say, the attention to, the thinking about, rather
than the essence as undetachable. In seeking out the pleasure of the other,
one is able to move beneath the limits of the friend. Derrida explains,
“Beyond all ulterior frontiers between love and friendship, but also between
the passive and active voices, between the loving and the being-loved, what
is at stake is ‘lovence’” (Derrida 2005, p. 7). This “lovence” is what is “on
the near or far side of loving (friendship or love), of activity or passivity,
decision or passion” (ibid., p. 25), and provides an understanding that, for
Aristotle, the lover is the position to aim for. This lovence, though, does
not—nor need not—destabilize the ability of two to love each other—not
necessarily in simple reciprocation, but, as a more abstracted and freeform

form of Marcel Mauss’s (2000) gift, opening up an essence of pleasure that
is already formed from its possible but impossible exactitude of sameness.
Put another way, “The friend is the person who loves before being the
person who is loved: he who loves before being the beloved” (Derrida
2005, p. 9).
It is important to situate this within a context of masculinity and
homosociality, recognizing the particular ways they exist in broader dis-
courses of gender and sexuality. Jean Lipman-Blumen (1976) first pub-
lished on the term, linking it to its opposite, homosexuality. Building on
this distinction, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued, “in any male-dominated
society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including
homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting
patriarchal power” (Sedgwick 1985, p. 25). Further, she notes that “By
the first decade of the present [20th] century, the gaping and unbridgeable
homophobic rift in the male homosocial spectrum already looked like a
permanent feature of the geography” (ibid., p. 201), a claim that would
become the central thesis of Epistemology of the Closet. Sedgwick (1990)
boldly writes, in the first sentence to the book,
Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of

thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole
are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of
homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the
nineteenth century. (p. 1)
It is this “unbridgeable” gap that one confronts head-on through ideas

about friendship and collaboration, especially when we fully and finally,
once and for all admit, that central to masculinity is homophobia, as Michael
Kimmel (1994) has argued. What we mean by this is not that all men
are homophobic, but rather that homophobia lurks in so many of our
ideas around masculinity, especially when two men become friends, they
become deeply suspicious to those witnessing the friendship, which is pre-
cisely Sedgwick’s point.
Foucault reminds us that the homosexual becomes “a species” (Foucault
1990, p. 43) as part of a process of gendering that is linked to necessary
heterosexuality. Sedgwick places homosociality on a spectrum, putting it
“back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic” (Sedgwick 1985,
p. 1). It is this desire, and the attached erotic, that one should complicate
through a questioning of the singularity of eros and by bringing into play

pleasure rather than desire. In putting forward pleasure as a key component,
we mean to suggest a play-with that neither simply omits the possibility of
eros (as homosociality frequently does) nor gives into the eroticization of
the social.
Alan Bray, writing a foundational text for deep discussions of the history
of friendship, says that one of the starting points of the book was saying
“farewell to my friend and colleague Michel Rey, shortly before his death”
(2006, p. 4). He reminds his reader that one of the chapters in the book is
based on multiple conversations with his friend Rey, which appeared earlier
in English Masculinities 1660–1800 (Hitchcock and Cohen 1999); he had
actually published the chapter “The Body of the Friend” as co-authored
with Rey who, though he had written not a single word, was intertwined
with it (Bray and Rey 1999). The same is noted about Richard Sennett’s
book The Hidden Injuries of Class, in which Sennett acknowledges, “so
while Sennett is the writer of the present text, he is not its sole author”
(Sennett and Cobb 1993, p. ix). These collaborations bend what we think
of as the inherent connection between authors, pushing at a relation—both
within and outside of the text—that recognizes these intimate pleasures of
connection with the other.
Pedagogy and collaboration act as a form of being-together, being-with,
that recognizes pleasure without necessitating formations of desire that
position it as sexual. In this way, the pedagogic momentum of learning-
with/together posits these relational elements as “something else,” an
opening that relates without relegating. Collaboration, in this way, is the
merging of pleasure with the loved and lover and a dialectical movement
of these intertwining.
Education, Ascesis, and Friendship

Having established the collaborative and educational process and practice
that is entailed in friendships, it is crucial to understand, at the same time,
the ways that ascesis , which we understand as a disciplining, an educating,
and a practice, is necessitated into and part of men’s friendships and col-
laboration (Roach 2012). Through this, we are able to think through a
pedagogy of ascesis alongside the pleasures of friendship and collaboration,
setting them as linked processes of engagement and togetherness.
In setting friendship up in relation to education (within a measure of

pleasure), one must recognize the conditions upon which friendship’s “rea-
son” comes (Orford 2005). Derrida reminds us,
The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to

do with wisdom … [has attempted] to have us believe that amorous passion
was madness, no doubt, but that friendship was the way of wisdom and
knowledge, no less than political justice. (Derrida 2005, p. 52)
This polarization posits a form of friendship as wisdom, a relation to the

polis and to reason. Pushing back against this explicit connection between
“friend” and “wisdom” or “reason,” one might suggest, with Berlant
and Warner, that what is necessary is, in fact, forms of relations that are
not straight lines but “unsystematized lines of acquaintance” (Berlant and
Warner 2002, p. 198). Further, by pushing at these bounds, one can see
the necessarily homosocial fact, for Aristotle and Montaigne that the “‘holy
bond’ of sovereign friendship, silently dismisses heterosexual friendship,
excluding a holy bond that would unite anyone other than two men … in
the figure and oath of friendship” (Derrida 2005, p. 180). For it is not just
“friend” that is boxed as reason here, but forms of passion—here the use
of “amorous” disjoints itself from Aristotle, situating itself in Latin rather
than the Greek.
Here, though, we are able to see a play at the distinction between forms
of love in Greek that do not abide by amory—one can look, for an inter-
esting linguistic example of these crosses at the word “polyamory” that
is one part Greek and one part Latin. For Aristotle, there were multiple
loves, including philia, which is, as we likely know, a love premised on
virtue and which Aristotle connected directly with friendship. It is, then,
that when we situate friendship—and, thusly, philia—as containing plea-
sure beyond virtue, we veer away from a split between previous divisions of
reason and madness and, as such, open up not simply new relational poten-
tialities, but through this disinter passion—here referring to eros , the love
which is at the root of the word “erotic”—from a position of unreason. In
repositioning “friendship” and its relationship to pleasure—and therefore
to “reason”/“wisdom”—it simultaneously begins the process of breaking
down equations between woman and madness and man and reason.
If pleasure is integral to friendship, it is important to find this pleasure as
part of an educational process and practice. In the twenty-first century, “it
has become the task of educationists to teach children the ‘desire’ for edu-
cation. The aspects of the self most recently made teachable include love,
pleasure, feelings, wishes, fears, and anxieties” (Fendler 1998, pp. 54–55).
This learning is done not singularly but as a process of ascesis in pushing
together, which is predicated on the subject that we are able to locate from
Foucault, who argues, “The educated subject, then, became endowed with
a new sort of power, namely, the power to govern itself” (Fendler 1998,
p. 52). Through collaboration between two autonomous subjects, one sees
already the plaited necessity of pleasure and friendship. In friendship of this
kind, one not only suggests a simultaneousness to the relation of loved and
being-loved, but also sees imbricated a necessary giving up of a degree
of governance. This giving up of governance depends upon mutualized
giving, a collaboration that need not find itself simply taking, or just plea-
surable, but instead as one that is always already a striving for, a challenge.
Rather than seeing, as Aquinas did, that education and learning meant an
imposed ascetic regime to diminish pleasure (Fendler 1998, p. 56), we
propose that we can see the pedagogy of ascesis of men’s friendships not
as diminishing of pleasure, but as, in fact, the necessary form by which
pleasure can emerge.
To do this, it is critical to see the way that this pedagogy and relation
exists outside of the structures of formalized education. Foucault (1990)
states that:
Educational or psychiatric institutions, with their large populations, their

hierarchies, their spatial arrangements, their surveillance systems, constituted,
alongside the family, another way of distributing the interplay of powers and
pleasures … The forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogomous sexuality were
drawn there [places such as the classroom and dormitory] and established.
(p. 46)
Through the explicit linkage of “nonconjugal” and “nonmonogomous”

to education, we can further take these to recognize the ways that these
institutions and spaces, such as a classroom or a dormitory, can be undone
through misuse, reuse, disuse, and unuse. These pleasures formed inside of
educational institutions may be reshaped as outside and brought into the
social world. Through prescriptions of the sexual, the social is thusly con-
stituted as the “not-sexual” in these discourses. It is crucial to challenge the
methodological calling out to certain social relations and the unprescribed
prescriptions against homosocial relations of pleasure.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, we have sought to recognize the importance
of Foucault’s work on friendship, because it “helps to locate friendship
as a key site of challenge to the modern gender regime and its underly-
ing discourse of heterosexuality” (Garlick 2002, p. 559). By focusing on
a pedagogy of ascesis that works through men’s friendships, and utilizing
Foucault’s and other’s work on conceptualizing friendship as well as edu-
cation, one is able to see not simply the productive, affirming elements of
power that Foucault discusses, but also to see the ways that these relations
and forms of collaboration work in disjuncture with the Administrative
University that is spreading. Rather than absorbing difference “as a way
to neutralize any ruptural possibilities,” as the Administrative University
does (Ferguson 2008, p. 162), we have posed and suggested that through
the bringing together of difference with notions of friendship—and the
supposed intimate similarity it is supposed to entail—one is able to see the
value of collaboration as a form of moving outside of boxed bodies and
relations toward positions that elaborate on new relational modes that are
not subsumed entirely under a heteronormative ordering.
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CHAPTER 3
Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture,

Exclusion, and the Politics of Friendship
Hilary Malatino
Abstract This chapter revisits Foucault’s brief, influential interview

“Friendship as a Way of Life” in order to interrogate what his figura-
tion of friendship means for trans, intersex, of color, and otherwise non-
homonormative subjects who are so often relegated to the outskirts of the
circuits of homonormative intimacies—fetishized and spectacularized while
debarred from comprehension as legible sexual partners. It examines the
centrality of cisgender male homoeroticism in Foucault’s theorization of
queer friendship and explores the implications of the presumption of bod-
ily sameness at work in his meditations on the interplay between sex and
friendship. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the ascesis of queer friend-
ship that Foucault found a site of such rich possibility was also predicated
on the exclusion of trans, femme, non-binary, fat, disabled, and non-white
bodies, thus deeply informed by forms of privilege left uninterrogated by
H. Malatino (B)
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
e-mail: hjm30@psu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_3
24 H. MALATINO
Foucault. A contemporary account of queer friendship as a way of life neces-

sitates that we think through the legacy of such exclusions, and the material
traces they’ve left on queer forms of sociality.
Keywords Queer intimacy · Queer community · Friendship ·

Cisnormativity · Trans studies · Intersex studies
I am in Wilton Manors, an historic gayborhood in the center of Fort Laud-

erdale, Florida. The neighborhood is both male dominant and white dominant,
as is the way with most gay ghettoes. I am twenty, too young to be in this bar, but
my casual and considerably older girlfriend is buying my drinks, in between
her flirtations with the butch bartender. I am seated next to a man—older
than me, but not quite middle age, who is (I think) flirting with me, believing
I am a young gay man. He is explaining to me that he has an apartment on the
Intracoastal Waterway, a beautiful apartment with lovely views. He is telling
me how monied he is, not knowing that this doesn’t interest or impress me—that
he doesn’t interest or impress me. After monologuing, tipsy, for several min-
utes, he glances down at my chest. Small breasts —AA, maybe—protrude from
the ill-fitting, thrifted polo shirt I’m wearing. My breasts are small because I
am intersex, partially insensitive to androgens and only minimally produc-
ing the hormones we typically understand as “feminizing.” He mistakes these
breasts —my breasts —for pectoral muscles, still reading me as male. He grabs
them, tells me what workouts I’ll need to do to get rid of them.
I quickly leave the bar. His touch was too reminiscent of other touches, other
times my body did not seem to belong to me.
Is this a story about white male privilege and prerogative, or a story about
gay male touch, intimacy and bodily access?
Homosexuality, Hegemonic Masculinity,

and Queer Publics
In his interview with Le Gai Pied, the French leftist gay monthly pub-
lished by the Revolutionary Communist League, Foucault argues that
male homosociality, as it occurs in the context of totalizing institutions
wherein one’s daily intimacies, primary emotional bonds, and life-worlds
are intensely mono-gendered, has only been tolerated “in certain periods
3 INTIMACY AND ACCESS: CLONE CULTURE, EXCLUSION … 25
and since the nineteenth century” and usually only when “rigorously nec-
essary: very simply, during war” (1997, p. 139). For Foucault, the homoso-
cial intimacies of wartime are fraught, a situation where obvious affective
intensities and emotional bonds are developed between men, but with no
outright verbal acknowledgment or elaboration, and with—of course—a
systematic silence around the possible genitality of these male intimacies.
This lack of discourse around male intimacy bespeaks the need for a way of
rendering intelligible these relationships; however, the only forms available
are directly translated from tropes of heterosexual intimacy, what Foucault
refers to as “the readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the
lovers’ fusion of identities” (ibid., p. 137).
Friendship was the third way for Foucault; it signaled a relation irre-
ducible to the valorization of the anonymous sexual encounter, on the one
hand, and the merged-couple form, on the other. Friendship, as theorized
by him, had the capacity to scramble readymade relational forms—friends
were not strictly lovers, nor family (at least not in the traditional sense), nor
were they mere members of a community of association or interest. Friend-
ships are passionate attachments that disrupt modes of relationship that
are typically thought of as mutually exclusive to one another—one-night
stands contra long-term relationships. For him, the resistant and transfor-
mative potential—or, put differently, the threat—queer intimacies pose to
the dominant social order isn’t on the order of the sexual. He asserts “to
imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what
disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—
there’s the problem” (ibid., pp. 136–137). Sexual contact, while sometimes
the beginning point for these de-institutionalized relationships, is not the
apotheosis of them. Rather, sexual interest serves (at least potentially) as
the basis for a public erotic culture, a culture that signals a distinct mode
of life.
Foucault poses a rhetorical (but nevertheless open-ended and perhaps
still unanswered) set of questions:
How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices? Is it possi-

ble to create a homosexual mode of life? … Will it require the introduction of
a diversification different from the ones due to social class, differences in pro-
fession and culture, a diversification that would also be a form of relationship
and would be a “way of life”? (ibid., pp. 137–138)
26 H. MALATINO
This is a very utopic moment in Foucault’s oeuvre—a moment when the

transformative force of queer loving is thought to have the potential to
create an alternative set of “diversifications,” over and apart from the hier-
archical stratifications that already structure the social. We are very far away
from Lee Edelman’s (2004) antisocial hypothesis here; there is no valoriza-
tion of anonymity, no celebration of sexuality as a form of self-shattering.
We have, instead, a deep investment in the inventiveness of queer intimacy,
a faith—if we can risk speaking of it that way—in the transformative poten-
tial of queer bonds. In this, Foucault prefigures much of the scholarship—
from Jose Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Tim Dean, and others—that
takes issue with queer antisociality. I understand him as invested in mov-
ing beyond the strict identity forms and social mores that coincide with
what Edelman (ibid., p. 3) calls “reproductive futurism”—the heterofamil-
ial form, the emphasis on monogamy, long-term relationships, the couple
form, insulating the figure of the Child from the taint of perversity, and the
readymade life narratives supplied by the telos of marriage and reproduc-
tion. For Foucault—as for most critics of the antisocial thesis—the goal of
this movement is not self-shattering, not a loss of identity, but a means of
relinquishing or refusing to tarry with what Deleuze and Guattari (1987,
p. 195) have called “molar” forms of identity—dominant, hegemonic, sed-
imented, readymade forms of social identification—in order to develop
alternative ways of being. This is why, I think, Foucault’s comments on
queer friendship come historically coincident with the development of his
work on ascesis, his refiguring of ascesis not as self-denial or austere refusal,
but as an active engagement with habit in the process of self-making, in
the process of becoming. It is also an acknowledgment that ascesis—or
call it something else, self-making, becoming, resistant transformation—is
impossible without intimacy, without relationality. It is supported through
collaboration and communality. I think that José Esteban Muñoz (2009)
echoes this understanding of the importance of relationality for the self-
making projects of minoritized—trans, of color, poor—queer folks in his
excoriation of the antisocial thesis that appeared in PMLA just ahead of
the release of Cruising Utopia which was to be, devastatingly, his final
monograph. He writes:
I have long believed that the antirelational turn in queer studies was primarily
a reaction to critical approaches that argued for the relational and contingent
nature of sexuality. Escaping or denouncing relationality first and foremost
distances queerness from what some theorists seem to think of as contamina-

tion by race, gender, or other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality
as a singular trope of difference. In other words, I have been of the opinion
that antirelational approaches to queer theory were wishful thinking, invest-
ments in deferring various dreams of difference. It has been clear to many of
us, for quite a while now, that the antirelational in queer studies was the gay
white man’s last stand. (2006, p. 825)
I want to take a moment to unpack Muñoz’s claim. He argues that the

antisocial thesis is predicated on a reaction to, broadly speaking, inter-
sectional approaches to the study of sexuality: The many theorizations of
sexuality offered by feminist and queer folks of color, which assert that the
experience of sexuality is deeply interwoven with race, gender, and “other
particularities”—class, spirituality, dis/ability, and so on. One of the key
analytical strengths of intersectional feminist approaches to sexuality lies
in its commitment to interrogating, critiquing, and transforming the poli-
tics of sexual access to female/feminized bodies and the bodies of folks of
color—particularly women of color, cis and trans alike.
This critique of the politics of sexual access is necessary to bear in mind
when considering Muñoz’s excoriation of antirelationality as “the gay white
man’s last stand.” Women, genderqueers, and folks of color have not been
heavily invested in sexuality as self-shattering, the rejection of futurity, nor
the supposed tyranny of the Child in reproductive futurism; for many of us,
sexuality has been a site of trauma, but also a space of healing, of building
relations integral to our sense of livability, supporting our ability to project
our lives, bodies, and communities into possible futures. For many of us,
childhood was something radically other than a sanctified, protected, safe
space, and time—rather, it was a time wherein we learned we lacked bodily
autonomy, wherein we learned to utilize our bodies as barter or trade,
wherein we learned that our value as beings was inextricable from our
perceived sexual desirability. Perhaps we also learned that parents, agents of
the state, and medical practitioners had more authority over our bodies than
we did—in their refusal to grant us access to technologies of transition, or
through their consistent pathologization and criminalization of our modes
of comportment, of being-in-the-world. For many of us, this has meant
that we’ve sought a greater degree of control over access to our bodies.
This means we have not necessarily sought easy access to other bodies in
queer publics; it also means we’ve often fought hard to be left the fuck
alone.
28 H. MALATINO
Foucault, though he certainly envisions queer intimacies as fundamen-

tally relational and potentially counter-hegemonic, doesn’t seem to quite
grasp the role of pain, trauma, and lack of bodily autonomy in his medi-
tations on queer friendship and bodily access. He writes, in “Friendship as
a Way of Life,” that men have not historically had access to the bodies of
other men, unlike women, who ostensibly have had relatively unmitigated
access to the bodies of other women throughout western modernity. Cit-
ing Lillian Faderman’s early work Surpassing the Love of Men (1981), he
comments “women do each other’s hair, help each other with make-up,
dress each other. Women have had access to the bodies of other women:
they put their arms around each other, kiss each other. Man’s body has
been forbidden to other men in a much more drastic way” (ibid., p. 139).
Lillian Faderman, in that cited work, explains that female homosocial-
ity—and same-sex intimacies between women, by extension—was uniquely
enabled by the doctrine of separate gendered spheres that structured rela-
tions between upper-class European men and women. She understands
romantic friendship between women in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies as uniquely enabled by this doctrine of separate spheres, writing “by
the eighteenth century, men and women had long been considered differ-
ent species. Upper-class males and females were usually brought up sep-
arately, taught separately, and encouraged to function in entirely separate
spheres” (1981, pp. 85–86). Faderman reads this separation within the con-
text of intense gender stratification as productive of alienation, an alienation
which becomes one of the driving forces behind the formation of intense
female friendships: “the woman of ambition probably had the most reason
to feel alienated from men because she took herself seriously while most
men usually didn’t” (ibid., p. 86). In other words, female homosociality
was a Janus-faced phenomenon, producing same-sex intimacy but driven
by social alienation; moreover, Faderman is very clear to mention that this
form of homosociality was definitively desexualized—these intimacies were
predicated on assumptions of female chastity, passivity, and lack of sexual
drive.
I mention this because it’s an ameliorative to Foucault’s brief gloss of
Faderman’s work, which reads female intimacy as a kind of soft-focus pre-
lude in mainstream vanilla lesbian porn—hair-brushing, hugging, playing
dress-up, and painting each other’s nails. It is an intimacy devoid of social
and political context, one that reimagines the violent reduction of wom-
en’s abilities and capacities that is a hallmark of the doctrine of separate
spheres as provident of a wombish, coddling form of female homosociality
that is, curiously, devoid of erotic tension. Upper-class European women

may very well have had access to each other’s bodies, but that access was
predicated on an assumed lack of sexual desire broadly and lack of genitality
specifically. As Faderman writes, “a sexual act without a male initiator, one
which required autonomous drive, would be unthinkable … the eighteenth
century believed a good woman was sexually dormant, and the nineteenth
century promulgated that idea with a vengeance” (ibid., p. 154). Female
intimacies, in this upper-class milieu, were predicated on the assumption
of chastity. This could, indeed, be a very effective cover for sex between
women, but functioned in a manner which produced great silence around
this sexual contact, as well as censure should such liaisons be made public.
Sexual contact between women was deeply prohibited, although homoso-
cial intimacies were allowed. In this respect, the gendered, classed, and
racialized doctrine of separate spheres produces a certain isomorphism.
Bodily contact is acceptable as long as it is nonsexual: a sort of proto no-
homo, one that applies to both men and women alike. However, because
of the assumption of women’s passive sexuality, these female intimacies
were less subject to external regulation—in the form of criminalization,
particularly.
When Foucault builds his commentary on the importance of friend-
ship as a way of life, as a means of inventing alternative socialities, it’s quite
clear—at least to me—that he’s referring exclusively to cisgender, homosex-
ual men. The historical barricades that have prevented intimate friendships
between men are the locus of his lament, whereas his brief gloss of Fader-
man’s research testifies to his opinion that women have been able, in ways
disproportionate to men, to share their lives with each other, to have access
to each other’s bodies—a reductive understanding of lesbian intimacy, at
best. His account is also troubling insofar as it is deracinated, overlooking
the many ways in which non-white bodies of all genders have been forcibly
rendered accessible in the context of colonialism and neocolonialism. Fou-
cault’s longings are neatly consolidated in the following response to the
Le Gai Pied interviewer’s questions about how he has come to consider
friendship so integral to homosexuality:
As far back as I remember, to want guys was to want relations with guys. That
has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple
but as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live
together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief,
their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be “naked” among men,
30 H. MALATINO
outside of institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory cama-

raderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among
a lot of people. (Foucault 1997, p. 136)
What Foucault doesn’t mention and what is worth thinking through

are the ways that this difficulty men—at least men of a certain class and
race—have had being “naked” among each other hinges on the mainte-
nance of male privilege and an investment in hegemonic masculinity that
unbridled intimacy—being “‘naked’ among men”—would compromise.
Their difficulty in developing and maintaining intimate friendship springs
from an investment in maintaining power over and access to certain other
bodies—particularly feminized bodies and non-white bodies. These bodies,
when present in gay male social spaces, become troubling bodies—visceral
reminders that not everyone shares this history of verboten access; visceral
reminders of the violence of maintaining the very privileged forms of male
sociality that have been posited as that to be overcome in the realization of
gay erotic intimacy.
At what price comes the manifestation of Foucault’s longing? If, for men
of a certain class and race to be naked among each other, beyond the typical
social bonds that have cemented institutionalized forms of homosociality,
what subjects are excluded, both implicitly and explicitly? If the desire man-
ifest in such spaces of male intimacy is already uneasy, which bodies become
killjoys if they come to circulate in such socialities?
Killjoys not Welcome: Tension and Difference

in Queer Publics
I suspect many of us familiar with the limitations and exclusions of
gaystream (mainstream gay) spaces already know the answer to this. Those
of us who are not cis, not male, not white, and not well-off understand
intimately the price at which most gay spaces are realized, the tacit lack of
belonging and alienation felt in spaces where Foucault’s desire—for men to
be “naked” among each other—is however tenuously realized. Sara Ahmed
(2010) writes, in her much-beloved chapter on feminist killjoys, of how
bodies that trouble the unspoken logics of particular spaces produce ten-
sion—unease—in the felt experience of those subjects that smoothly and
seamlessly belong, and how that tension comes to be assigned, thought to
reside, in the body that has produced such tension:
In being felt by some bodies, [tension] is attributed as caused by another

body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the
way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed
as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere
(or we could say that sharing the experience of loss is how the atmosphere is
shared). As a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause
tension. This mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion.
To get along you have to go along with things which might mean for some
not even being able to enter the room. (p. 67)
Ahmed articulates the ways in which minoritized participants in a given

sociality produce tension and, in turn, become branded as the problem,
the source of this tension. This phenomenon—what Ahmed rightly calls
an “affective conversion”—can inform a decision by minoritized folks that
these situations are better avoided—that it isn’t worth it to enter the room,
to claim a seat at the table.
To make Ahmed’s meditation on affective conversion more tangible, I
want to think about the ways in which queer publics are regulated to specif-
ically—in either de jure or de facto ways—discourage the access of bodies
deemed troublesome, productive of tension, and provident of unease. This
phenomenon is another form of response to tension, one taken on behalf
of majoritarian folks who wish to minimize the disruption of belonging
produced by certain bodies. We see this quite clearly in Samuel Delany’s
(2001) brilliant thick description of the transmutation of Time Square from
a site of rich, sexualized interclass communication—replete with porn the-
aters, of course—to the Disneyfied, sanitized, family-friendly tourist zone
it became in the mid- to late 1990s. He writes, theorizing this transition,
that,
in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that pro-
mote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions
functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as, at
best, nostalgia for an outmoded past and, at worst, a pernicious glorification
of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with undesirables
(read “unsafe characters”), promiscuity, an attack on the family and the stable
social structure, and dangerous, noncommitted, “unsafe” relationships—that
is, psychologically “dangerous” relations, though the danger is rarely spec-
ified in any way other than to suggest its failure to conform to the ideal
bourgeois marriage. (p. 122)
32 H. MALATINO
One of the central effects of this restructuring of Times Square—and any

social-spatial restructuring in the name of “safety”—is the erosion of inter-
class contact. Delany makes much of this notion of contact, drawing upon
Jane Jacob’s (1992) classic text on urban development, The Life and Death
of Great American Cities. Delany uses “contact” to index all those daily
interactions—chats in line at the grocery store, stoop-to-stoop discus-
sions with a neighbor, casual conversation at the bar, and—importantly—
instances of sexual contact “in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks,
singles bars, and sex clubs, on street corners with heavy hustling traffic,
and in the adjoining motels or the apartments of one or another partici-
pant, from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for
decades or a lifetime may spring” (ibid., p. 123). He links the erosion of
public sexual contact to the erosion of diverse queer cultures:
Similarly, if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your

house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes anxiety-filled, class-bound,
and choosy. This is precisely why public rest rooms, peep shows, sex movies,
bars with grope rooms, and parks with enough greenery are necessary for
a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis. (ibid.,
p. 127)
Delaney marks, here, the ascendancy of homonormativity (coincident with

the rapid spread of HIV) that resulted in the rapid evaporation of cultures of
public sex as well as the rhetorical recoding of queer sexuality as a private,
domestic issue. What Delany’s (2001) Times Square Red, Times Square
Blue so poignantly documents is how this erosion of cultures of public
sexual contact is also a flashpoint in the mainstreaming of forms of gay
sociality. What’s disappearing are democratic erotic spaces, spaces accessible
across lines of race and class, spaces of contact that aren’t predicated on
sameness—of body, of identity, of desire.
Martin R. Manalansan IV, in Global Divas, highlights the way that down-
town gay enclaves in New York City were proximate to the public sexual
culture of Times Square, as well as queer of color enclaves in Harlem and
Upper Manhattan, but worlds apart in terms of organizational logic and
the politics of access. He documents the construction of queer of color
spaces by Filipino gay men in New York, and in doing so, powerfully illus-
trates the means by which the intelligibility of clubs, bars, businesses, and
neighborhoods intelligible as gay are densely interwoven with racial, class,
and gender privilege. Discussing the clone culture that emerges in the late
1970s and 1980s in downtown Manhattan, he writes that it was comprised

of “predominately Caucasian men” (2003, p. 60) who appropriated and
fetishized symbols of working-class hypermasculinity and combined this
sartorial statement with an embrace of “good taste” (ibid., p. 68) that
sublimates class privilege through the rhetoric of style. When such class
distinctions are cloaked in the garb of “taste,” critiques of style are the
indirect means through which class is discussed. This results in what Man-
alansan calls a “dis-ease” with class, one that makes it very difficult to call
out the ways in which “mainstream gay cultural events and lifestyles are
suffused with class demarcations, which, in turn, hide racial boundaries”
(ibid., p. 69). If “trashy,” “ratchet,” or “hot mess” are utilized as alibis for
poor, trans, and non-white folk, or function as catch-all terms for minori-
tized identities, one need never actually address questions of privilege or
even name axes of subjective difference that produce structural and inter-
personal inequities.
To interrogate this evasion within these spaces would be—once again—
to produce tension and risk becoming, wrongly, someone posited as tense—
a killjoy. I want to remember, here, what Foucault said about men naked
among each other, outside of “institutional relationships, family, occupa-
tion, and obligatory camaraderie.” He said that, in these spaces, there
exists “a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness.” There is a resonance
between Foucault’s reflection on the “desire-in-uneasiness” that subtends
gay male socialities and Manalansan’s note on the “dis-ease” with class—
and with forms of racial, ethnic, and gender difference—that structures
mainstream gay forms of sociality.
As Rod Ferguson (2005) succinctly highlights in “Race-ing Homonor-
mativity: Citizenship, Sociology, and Gay Identity”:
Regulating homosexual difference in order to claim coherence as a public

citizen is part of the homonormative subject’s entrance into racial privilege.
If rights-based action and an affiliation with the illusory and universal com-
munity of the state achieve coherence and emancipation for homosexuality,
then homosexuality achieves coherence and emancipation by regulating gen-
der and sexuality. That regulation is part of the racialized regimes of American
citizenship. In other words, the appeal to gender and sexual normativity by
gays and lesbians in this moment, inevitably, operates as a mode of state
identification that promotes racial exclusion. (p. 61)
34 H. MALATINO
I want to link Ferguson’s work with Manalansan’s and point out the ways
in which the networks of activism and non-profit organizing that have
been deeply invested in rights-based efforts, particularly around marriage
equality, hate crimes legislation, and military inclusion are also overwhelm-
ingly white, middle-class—at the levels of leadership and constituency—and
deeply plugged into the forms of masculine homonormative community—
like clone culture—that are uniquely enabled by forms of gender, racial, and
class privilege. These segments of queer community comprise the field of
primary donors for these organizations. Jane Ward (2008), in Respectably
Queer, parses the disjuncture between instrumentalized diversity rhetoric
and actual communal inclusion: “lesbian and gay activists embrace racial,
gender, socioeconomic and sexual differences when they see them as pre-
dictable, profitable, rational, and respectable, and yet suppress these very
same differences when they are unpredictable, unprofessional, messy, or
defiant” (p. 2).
In other words, killjoys not welcome.
As geosocial networking apps like Grindr have intensified the already-
widespread erosion of queer publics—so much so that a recent article in
The Advocate has referred to them as “the gay bars of our time”—they have
also reified the exclusions that attend these publics. Much has been written
on the “No Fats, No Femmes” phenomenon, wherein men on Grindr spec-
ify their sexual preference as specifically excluding men of size and gender
non-conforming, non-hypermasculine folks. Again utilizing the language
of preference, many men specify their disinclination to hook up with folks
of color. C. Winter Han (2015), in Geisha of Different Kind, calls this the
“‘just a preference’ defense” (p. 93) and points out that, although it “im-
plies that their preferences are not based on racist assumptions or are void
of racist intent,” the defense falls apart when one examines the language
utilized in excluding folks of color. Han, concerned with Asian men in par-
ticular, cites such taglines as “I block more Asians than the Great Wall of
China!” and “Gook-free zone.” There’s also, as well-documented on the
blog Douchebags of Grindr, the ubiquitous “No Blacks or Asians” state-
ment, as well as the “No Queens” “preference”—a too-frequent instance
of femmephobia and transmisogyny that indicates a more widespread cul-
ture of misogyny.
A 2015 article entitled “The Gay Men Who Hate Women,” which
appeared on Vice’s feminist-content site broadly, documents how misog-
yny carries over into gay spaces, manifesting in both the outright exclusion
of women and the sidelining of lesbian and more gender-inclusive queer
parties to separate spaces. Author Seán Faye interviews Victoria Sin—a

London-based female drag queen—who rhetorically asks “why are the les-
bians always put in the fucking basement?” and goes on to unpack this
practice:
Even when there’s a night that is supposed to be lesbian or just “queer,” if

it’s in a gay space marketed at men, there will be men who see it as an inva-
sion of “their space.” A guy in a bar once interrupted conversation between
my friend and me and said, “Ugh. Sorry, there’s too much estrogen in this
conversation.”
To return to Foucault: Too often, men “being naked amongst each oth-
er” is predicated on the deliberate exclusions of women, folks of color,
and folks whose bodies don’t conform to dominant gay male aesthetic ide-
als. With the advent of geosocial hookup apps, the ability to curate such
exclusionary spaces falls less to the owners and employees of bars, clubs,
restaurants, and other sites of queer sociality and is left to the user him-
self. These self-curated encounters take place, overwhelmingly, in private
spaces. As Delany writes, when “every sexual encounter involves bringing
someone back to your house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes
anxiety-filled, class-bound, and choosy.” If Douchebags of Grindr is any
indication, this “choosiness” manifests along racialized and gendered lines
that deliberately exclude—and often malign—bodies that are not those of
white, cis male clones. The most readily identifiable forms of homosexual
sociality are, too frequently, falling far short of Foucault’s hope for a homo-
sexual “way of life [that] can be shared among individuals of different age,
status, and social activity … [and] can yield intense relations not resembling
those that are institutionalized” (1997, p. 138).
As outlined earlier, Foucault envisioned this way of life as male-exclusive;
in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” he is forthrightly critical of the rhetoric
of 1960s era sexual liberation (echoing, of course, his excoriation of the
“repressive hypothesis” in Volume One of The History of Sexuality) and
names clone culture as a specific example of the inventive forms of gay
living he’s interested in:
Many sexual liberation movements project this idea of “liberating yourself

from the hideous constraints that weigh upon you.” Yet the affirmation that
to be a homosexual is for a man to love another man—this search for a way
of life runs counter to the ideology of the sexual liberation movements of the
36 H. MALATINO
sixties. It’s in this sense that the mustached “clones” are significant. (1997,
p. 138)
For Foucault, the project of sexual liberation is focused on a notion of

freedom that isn’t actively engaged with processes of invention; he seems
to believe that the focus on liberation grossly overshadows the projects
of communal self-making that travel, for him, under the banner of asce-
sis. The dialectic of repression and freedom so central to sexual liberation
politics is somehow, thinks Foucault, absented from ascesis. This is why,
perhaps, he finds the embrace of the concept of polymorphous sexuality so
troublesome—it leads, he says, to the “the great myth of saying: There will
no longer be any difference between homo- and heterosexuality” (ibid.,
p. 138). He insists, instead, on the specificity of homosexual desire—not
as a predetermined identity, but as an ensemble of social-sexual practices
capable of inventing new ways of life. He writes
Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational vir-

tualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but
because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he
can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light. (ibid.,
p. 138)
Foucault positions clone culture as an instance of queer ascesis, a virtuality

“come to light,” the invention of a specifically gay male sociality. But in
the intervening years, we’ve come to witness the exclusionary violence of
this form of sociality. This exclusionary violence was perhaps foundational,
as it has been built on an aesthetics and lifestyle available primarily to men
of racial and economic privilege. We’ve come to see how clone culture
has transmogrified, moving from the dominant form of sociality in bars
and clubs to the dominant form of sociality in the hybrid digital-physical
spaces enabled by geosocial technology. Throughout this history, erotics
have been underwritten by a presumption of bodily sameness, one with
deleterious effects for those folks whose bodies—whether trans, of color,
disabled, fat, or femme—disrupt this aesthetico-sexual homogeneity.
As we look back to Foucault’s work to discern what remains of use in
his theorization of queer friendship, it’s imperative to bear in mind the
troubling pedagogy of queer sociality implied by his thought. He asserts,
repeatedly, that homosexuality should be a space of invention, a space of
transformative relationality beyond the couple form, beyond the anony-

mous sexual encounter. But for those of us who have come of age in the
post-gay liberation West, navigating the hegemony of clone culture has
marked our engagements with queer socialities; that is, in learning how to
be queer, in figuring out how to embed ourselves in and transform queer
spaces, we’ve had to—regardless of the complexities of our identities—
grapple with both the dominance of white gay cis masculinity and struggle
to position ourselves in relation to it, by way of assimilation, critique, dis-
tance, proximity, identification, or disidentification. We find ourselves ask-
ing questions similar to those posed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
(2013) in The Undercommons, while they are critiquing the neoliberal uni-
versity, their line of thought is relevant here—particularly given that queer
social spaces have always also been spaces of queer pedagogy, spaces where
we learn how to be and think with each other in order to invent forms of
queer resistance, belonging, and becoming:
It’s fucked up here, how can we think about it in a way to help us organize
ourselves to make it better here? … How come we can’t be together and think
together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good? … Everybody
is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a
conversation where people are going, “why is it that this doesn’t feel good
to us?” There are lots of people who are angry and who don’t feel good, but
it seems hard for people to ask, collectively, “why doesn’t this feel good?”
(p. 117)
The notion of communal ascesis Foucault offers us is a way out of this

circuit of negative affect, as long as we grant that the forms of sociality
he envisioned as a way out—in his historical moment, in his day—have
become the very socialities that produce bad feeling for so many of us.
As he reminds us at the close of “Friendship as a Way of Life”: “we must
think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces” (Foucault 1997,
p. 140).
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Caserio, R. L., Dean, T., Edelman, L., Halberstam, J., & Muñoz, J. E. (2006).
Forum: Conference debates—The antisocial thesis in queer theory. PMLA,
121(3), 819–836.
38 H. MALATINO
Delaney, S. R. (2001). Times square red, times square blue. New York: New York
University Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophre-
nia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the love of men: Romantic friendship and love
between women from the Renaissance to the present. New York: HarperCollins.
Faye, S. (2015). The gay men who hate women. Broadly. https://broadly.vice.
com/en_us/article/the-gay-men-who-hate-women.
Ferguson, R. (2005). Race-ing homonormativity: Citizenship, sociology, and gay
identity. In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A
critical anthology (pp. 52–67). Durham: Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. (1997). Friendship as a way of life. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Michel
Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity and truth (pp. 135–140). New York: The New
Press.
Han, C. W. (2015). Geisha of a different kind: Race and sexuality in gaysian Amer-
ica. New York: New York University Press.
Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black
study. New York: Autonomedia.
Jacobs, J. (1992). The life and death of great American cities. New York: Vintage.
Manalansan IV, M. F. (2003). Global divas: Filipino gay men in the diaspora.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New
York: New York University Press.
Ward, J. (2008). Respectably queer: Diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
CHAPTER 4
Queer Ascesis and the Invention of New

Games
Jonathan Kemp
Abstract The promotion of marriage as the definition or pinnacle of inti-

macy inevitably diminishes the value—both social and epistemological—of
other forms of intimacy, such as friendship. Marriage, as a legal contract,
administers population: a form of what Foucault called biopower and a
discourse deployed to contain and manage society. As such, gay marriage,
as well as a victory of equality, is also a victory of conformity, of biopower.
It consolidates, by extending, the framework of the status quo, assimi-
lating one of the biggest threats to heteronormativity: same-sex love. At
the same time, given that most successful marriages are, on a deep level,
friendships, gay marriage also affirms queer friendship. But it does so within
the rubric of the status quo, and as such is an expression of the mind-set
that marriage is the most significant relationship into which two people—
regardless of gender and sexual orientation—can enter. Is gay marriage a
foreclosing of homosexuality’s radical potential to alter the relational map
of contemporary society? Has our equality come through a conformity that
J. Kemp (B)
Middlesex University, London, UK
e-mail: J.Kemp@mdx.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_4
40 J. KEMP
shuts down alternative modes of being and relating as queers? This chapter
engages with Foucault’s thoughts on friendship and askesis in relation to
these questions, before turning to the notion of queer pedagogy. Foucault
takes as his primary example of queer askesis the relationship between two
men of radically different ages and asks what code would allow them to
communicate? Perhaps queer pedagogy holds the answer.
Keywords Friendship · Gay marriage · Queer
Foucault called his books a “tool-box”1 providing tools for us to deploy in

furthering “the undefined work of freedom.”2 With this metaphor or strat-
egy in mind, I use various statements from his interview with the French gay
magazine, Le Gai Pied,3 and other interviews to argue that gay marriage
is an act of biopower and has been achieved at the expense of defending
and working toward a more richly diverse sexual and relational world. As
Tom Roach (2012) writes, “A radical queer politics would fight against
the institutional impoverishment of the social fabric” that gay marriage
represents, “and for the creation of unconventional forms of union and
community” (p. 14, emphasis in original). In Foucault’s view:
Homosexuality is an historic occasion to re-open affective and relational vir-

tualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but
due to the biases against the position he occupies; in a certain sense diagonal
lines that he can trace in the social fabric permit him to make these virtualities
visible. (FL 1996, p. 311)
Due to what Jana Sawiki calls “their eccentric position in relation to con-
fining norms and practices associated with compulsory heterosexuality and
the reproductive family unit,” homosexuals
might be in a position to create new pleasures, forge new relationships, exper-

iment with new ways of living. He urged gays and lesbians not to be, but
rather to become homosexual—to realize its potential for altering our sense
of the range of amorous relations and pleasurable experiences that might be
possible. (Sawiki 2005, pp. 393–394)
Foucault sketches out a method for achieving this becoming: “a homosex-

ual askesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent, I do not say
4 QUEER ASCESIS AND THE INVENTION OF NEW GAMES 41
discover, a manner of being that is still improbable” (FL 1996, p. 310). He

insists “it’s up to us to advance into” this askesis; it is a challenge, perhaps
the challenge facing homosexuals. We need “to make a truly unavoidable
challenge of the question: what can we make work, what new game can we
invent?”
This notion of becoming homosexual is understood here in tandem with
Roach’s claim that “Friendship is always a becoming” (Roach 2012, p. 15),
as we investigate Foucault’s “relations with boys,” specifically his comments
regarding the friendship between men of noticeably different ages. Finally,
I will conclude with some remarks on placing this friendship/relationship
within a pedagogical framework.
In 1981, marriage equality wasn’t the primary focus of gay politics,
which hadn’t yet had its radicalism shredded by consumer capitalism’s
exploitation of the pink pound and the assimilationist agenda of gay conser-
vatives. Foucault’s comments are very much in line with early gay liberation
thinking from the 1970s,4 and the leather and BDSM communities in San
Francisco and New York with which he was familiar offered him examples
of alternative lifestyles focused on collective experiences rather than the
individual unit of the couple (see Halperin 1995, pp. 81–91).
Today’s world is very different from the one about which Foucault was
thinking,5 although the dominant fiction in our late capitalist neoliberal
culture still unquestionably presents marriage as the definitive pinnacle of
intimacy, the ultimate goal of our emotional lives. For gay rights, it has
become the benchmark for “equality.” Yet this inevitably diminishes the
value—both social and epistemological—of other forms of intimacy, such as
friendship. For Foucault, marriage is a form of biopower, a law administered
to control populations, and a discourse deployed to contain and manage the
masses. “There were,” he writes, “two great systems conceived by the West
for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires” (Foucault
1990 [1978], pp. 39–40).
As such, gay marriage, for all it represents a victory of equality, is also
in a very real sense a victory for biopower. Gay men and lesbians have
simply shifted categories in Foucault’s famous terms: from perverse adults
to Malthusian couples.6
Foucault told Gilles Barbedette:
We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished.

Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of rela-
tionships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage.
42 J. KEMP
In effect, we live in a legal, social and institutional world where the only rela-
tions possible are extremely few, extremely simplified, and extremely poor.
There is, of course, the fundamental relation of marriage, and the relations
of the family, but how many other relations should exist! (cited in Halperin
1995, pp. 81–82)
Because “a rich relational world would be very complex to manage,”

extending the right to marry to same-sex couples is an extension of the
administrative powers of governmentality to include those individuals once
perceived as one of society’s greatest threats. Marriage equality consoli-
dates, by extending, the administrative biopower of the status quo to incor-
porate and tame one of its arch enemies: same-sex love. It offers the badge
of social intelligibility to those bodies once seen as unintelligible, while
leaving in the wastelands of unintelligibility other forms of managing one’s
emotional, affectional, and sexual life. What about “the millions who are
weary of being told that to be queer requires them to become perfect
neoliberal citizens as well?” (Conrad 2010, p. 7). Or put another way, how
do we destroy straightness? (Papantonopoulou 2012, pp. 221–229).
For Foucault, what disturbs people most about homosexuality—what he
calls “the common fear”—is that “gays will develop relationships that are
intense and satisfying even though they do not at all conform to the ideas
of relationship held by others. It is the prospect that gays will create as yet
unforeseen kinds of relationships that many people cannot tolerate” (Fou-
cault 1997b, p. 153, emphasis added). Marriage equality is an ideological
investment in a pre-existing model (and one that isn’t even particularly
“equal”). Rather than protecting what’s queer about same-sex love, we’ve
strived to prove we are “Good As You” with entirely the wrong meaning
of “good” (“goodness” over “value”). Equality doesn’t mean sameness or
homogeneity. It means different but equally valid.
Marriage equality brings with it the quaintly outmoded bourgeois expec-
tation that one will marry, for now we can, what are you waiting for? It sets
a standard by which other, differently lived queer lives will be measured and
judged. That one might not want to marry, and instead forge other kinds
of relationships—as yet unseen, and all of it risky, as the best adventures
should be—is unthinkable within our dominant cultural mind-set, despite
all the evidence suggesting that new ways of relating are sorely needed (see
Cooper 2017). Leo Bersani writes:
I think that when [Foucault] told gays not to be proud of being gay, but rather
to learn to become gay, he meant that we should work to invent relations that
no longer imitate the dominant heterosexual model of a gender-based and
fundamentally hierarchical relationality. (2011, p. 99)
For Bersani, “our insistence on having the right to marry has helped to
make us more acceptable to straight people by allowing them to think that
we have the same conjugal dreams as they do” (ibid., p. 92). Undoubtedly,
some of us—for all sorts of reasons—share those conjugal dreams, but
what if you don’t? The trouble with propaganda is that it makes enemies
of dissenters. It works by ostracizing those who don’t agree with the big
single message propaganda reduces complex issues down to: such as love
or equality.7
At the same time—given that most successful marriages are, on a deep
level, friendships—gay marriage could also be viewed as affirming queer
friendship. But if it does, it does so within the rubric of the status quo,
and as such is an expression of the dominant fiction that marriage is the
most significant relationship into which two people—regardless of gender
and sexual orientation—can enter. “The couple imposed itself as model,
enforced the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to speak
while retaining the principle of secrecy” (Foucault 1990 [1978], p. 3).
The married couple constitutes the most effective relational unit in
neoliberal late capitalism, and as such might be more accurately seen as
two people conjoined legally into a single unit, or as we say, an “item.”
For all it’s a triumph in the face of the haters, marriage equality is also at
the same time an act of assimilationism—however radical, subversive, or
nonconformist any individual marriage may be in reality. As Roach asserts,
“the progress made by reproducing the marriage bond is slight” (Roach
2012, p. 14). In administrative terms—in terms, that is, of biopower—all
marriages are conservative, for they conserve by duplicating and thereby
perpetuating things as they already are. It’s not called an institution for
nothing.
I wish to propose (pun intended) that the single, unmarried individual be
seen not as a discrete singularity but as part of a network, a queer diaspora of
friendships, a “we,” a commonality that is always already more than simply
an unmarried body. As Roach (2012) writes:
The friend is neither possessive nor possessed, neither owner nor owned.
If, for Foucault, the becoming of homosexuality is friendship, it is because
44 J. KEMP
friendship is always a becoming; if homosexuality is a “problem,” it is precisely

because it arrests the becoming of being-in-common. The friend is the fleet-
ing placeholder of an asubjective affectivity moving through ontologically
variegated singularities; it is the figure that intuits and enacts the common,
that which seethes beneath and is excessive of relations and communities
founded on identitarian difference. (p. 15)
One only needs to look at the origins and purpose of marriage to know
that, as a foundation stone of patriarchy, it is not something to which a
radical politics should aspire, for it simply repeats the norm that governs
us. Moreover, it rests upon, and therefore duplicates, the understanding
of the self in terms that see the couple (ideally, married couple) as the
completion of an incomplete project of subjectivation: Why else do partners
in relationships refer to each other as their “other/better half”? As such,
gay marriage is also the foreclosing of homosexuality’s radical potential
to alter the relational map of contemporary society. Our “equality” is no
more than a conformity that effectively shuts down—by devaluing or not
recognizing—alternative modes of being: ways of living and relating as
queers, such as polyamory, open relationships, communal living, or being
single, promiscuous, or otherwise?
While the battle for marriage equality was fought on ideological ter-
rain—what defined the very concept of marriage (a “man” and a “woman,”
etc.), and what constitutes universal human rights—its victory can also be
seen as economic because ultimately biopower and capitalism go hand in
hand.8 Capitalism and marriage go together like—well, like a horse and
carriage—and gay marriage is very good for the economy.9 Given that the
divorce rate is around 40–50% (with the rate for subsequent marriages even
higher), a cynic could be forgiven for thinking gays are only being allowed
“in” now that the institution of marriage is in disrepair: crumbling and
covered in cobwebs.
The ultimate question is this: How liberating is gay liberation if the
freedom it offers is for us to participate in the very system that oppresses
us? If a level playing field is what you’re after, wouldn’t it make more sense
to fight to scrap marriage altogether, rather than extend its remit?10 As John
D’Emilio argues, what we should be doing is “pushing to further de-center
and de-institutionalize marriage” (cited in Conrad 2010, p. 41).11
It’s not my intention to rehearse here the various critiques of gay mar-
riage (see Warner 1999, pp. 81–147; Conrad 2010); it mostly plays a sym-
bolic role in the fight for equality, but there are major flaws to this way of
thinking (with some members of the LGBTQI community “more equal”

than others). In the USA, one of the major issues is access to health care,
whereas in the UK (for the time being, at least) this is not such an issue.
Clearly, what Foucault hoped for back in the early 1980s—“that changes
in established routines will occur on a much broader scale as gays learn to
express their feelings for one another in more various ways and develop
new life-styles not resembling those that have been institutionalized”12 —
has not materialized; instead of experimenting with new lifestyles, we’ve put
our energies into winning a place at the table when we should be burning
the table down and making a better one.13 In short, marriage equality
is not equality. That the institution of marriage—against which feminists
have been railing for centuries—could become the goal of progressive gay
activism bespeaks how far its ideals have been co-opted by neoliberalism.
For Foucault, “It’s not only a matter of integrating this strange little
practice of making love with someone of the same sex into pre-existing
cultures; it’s a matter of constructing cultural forms” (as cited in Halperin
1995, p. 80). Halperin writes, “Foucault protested against the paucity of
choices” (1995, p. 81), turning to “classical antiquity and its social methods
of institutionalizing friendships between men,” but rather than calling for
a return to the Greco-Roman model, he encourages us to see in it “the
possibility of multiplying the forms of association beyond the small number
that presently exist” (ibid., p. 82).
Foucault employs the concept of askesis in his work on the Ancient
worlds of Greece and Rome for the final two volumes of his History of Sex-
uality: The Use of Pleasure (1990 [1985]) and The Care of the Self (1988
[1986]). But whereas for the Ancients askesis was a mode of self-mastery
based on abnegation, denial, or austerity, for Foucault, in a modern queer
context, this work on the self could involve a radical jouissance that seems
the very antithesis of the Hellenic and Roman ascetic practices. For Fou-
cault, Bersani writes, “jouissance [is] a mode of ascesis” (cited in Halperin
1995, p. 97)—a self-(in)-transformation, a becoming that never settles into
being but rather interrogates certainties in an ongoing engagement with
alterity, or as Arnold I. Davidson (2003) puts it (perhaps somewhat appo-
sitely if one considers that for Foucault the act of fisting could constitute
such an ascetic practice) “dilating the self beyond itself” (p. 137). Lynne
Huffer (2009) argues:
Foucault’s eros… is driven by an attention to a relationality that goes far

beyond the relationship between the individual and the state. It redefines
46 J. KEMP
freedom and governmentality as a nexus of relations that animates and con-

figures every fiber of our lives. (pp. 276–277)
Crucial to an understanding of Foucault’s askesis is his approach to the

question of the self, because for Foucault, importantly, in the words of Paul
Veyne, “the self is the new strategic possibility” (cited in Halperin 1995,
p. 73).14 If askesis is “an exercise of the self in the activity of thought” (Fou-
cault as cited in Halperin 1995, p. 77), “a transformative queer practice of
the self” (Halperin 1995, p. 78), the self exercised is not a self-evident, dis-
creet essence, not something to be discovered, but a potentiality, an experi-
ment in what William Haver calls existential comportment, an opportunity
to be other than who one is or thinks one is. For Foucault, “To be gay is
to be in a state of becoming…. the point is not to be homosexual but to
keep working persistently at being gay” (as cited in Halperin 1995, p. 77).
Garth Greenwell’s words accord with my own thinking on this point,
when he said in an interview recently:
I think the marriage equality battle was important and it’s important that
we won it. I also think that it came at a really great cost. And that cost was
a marketing campaign that took queer lives and translated them into values
that could be appreciated by people who are disgusted by queer people. And
that meant presenting one model of queer life, which is a model that looks
very much like straight life, which is a monogamous relationship centered on
the raising of a child. That’s a beautiful model of human life, and it should
be available to queer people. It is not the only model of queer life, and I
think it forecloses much of the kind of radical potential in queer life. And
if we accept the narrative of queer life that cleanses it—and those are the
terms, “dirty” and “clean”—of those spaces and of relationships whose value
is not immediately recognizable by mainstream culture, I think we sacrifice
too much.15
Foucault’s queer askesis, while being well exemplified by gay male sex-
ual practices such as S&M and fisting, is certainly not confined to those
practices. Most importantly, it is a care of the self that is “a true social prac-
tice… an intensification of social relations” (Foucault 1986, pp. 51, 53).16
As such, I propose friendship as a practice of queer askesis.
Friendship as Queer Ascesis

If “the development towards which the problem of homosexuality tends is
the one of friendship” (FL 1996, p. 308), what is the nature of this prob-
lem and how might it be addressed? If the sexual/relational discourse of
Western societies tends toward the dichotomy of matrimonial monogamy
and “the order of desires” or “pure sexual act,” where is friendship to be
placed, particularly a friendship that might also involve desire and the sex-
ual act? And how far might we overcome that problem by practicing a kind
of queer askesis that would involve inventing new forms of relationships?
Foucault says:
As far back as I remember, to want boys was to want relations with boys. That
has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple, but
as a matter of existence: How is it possible for men to be together? To live
together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief,
their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be “naked” among men, out-
side of institutional relations, family, profession and obligatory camaraderie?
It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of
people. (FL 1996, pp. 308–309, emphasis added)
He suggests that desire is inseparable from the other, from the relationality
that binds one to the other in this desire-in-uneasiness that comes from
not having a guide or rule book, only the unknown experiment of having
relations with boys, naked among men, outside of institutional relations,
finding it all out as you go along because there is no script. What does
it mean to make relations with boys a matter of existence? Not in the
form of the couple, but as a being-together of men; a desire in and of
the relational, the homosocial, the same-sex collective, or community, co-
habiting in uneasy desire? “How can a relational system be reached through
sexual practices? Is it possible to create a homosexual mode of life?” (FL
1996, p. 312).
He states, “I think that’s what makes homosexuality ‘disturbing’: the
homosexual mode of life much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine
a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs
people… that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the
problem” (FL 1996, p. 309), and he offers the army as an example of this
becoming/being-together of men, a relationality without institutionalized
script:
48 J. KEMP
Look at the army, where love between men is ceaselessly provoked and
shamed. Institutional codes can’t validate these relations with multiple inten-
sities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing forms. These
relations short-circuit it and introduce love where there’s supposed to be
only law, rule or habit. (FL 1996, p. 309)
Viewed through such a lens, homosexual love can be seen as a history of

friendship. Indeed, such a view expands the concept of “friend,” taking
in the long-standing, though now quite outdated colloquial reference to
“lover” as “friend.”
Friendship was important to Foucault, and his comments on the subject
must be seen in light of his own experience. Some of his significant friend-
ships with other gay men, such as Hervé Guibert, Roland Barthes, Jean
Barraqué, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Defert, and Edmund White, have been
documented. Roach devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between
Foucault and Guibert—a friendship which is arguably the inspiration for the
entire book. Huffer’s (2009) Mad for Foucault begins with an exploration
of the romantic friendship between Foucault and Jean Barraqué. She cites
as Foucault’s first culture shock his discovery of dodecaphonic music via his
friendship with the composers Boulez and Barraqué, dramatizing, I would
argue, the pedagogical dimension of friendship. One learns from one’s
friends, pedagogy being much more than what occurs in the classroom.
Foucault met his life partner, Daniel Defert, eleven years his junior, while
Defert was a philosophy student at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in
France, and their relationship lasted from the early 1960s until Foucault’s
death in 1984. They described their relationship as a “state of passion.” In
a letter written in 1983, twenty years after they first met, Foucault signs off
with the single word, “passion.” Foucault consulted a lawyer to investigate
the possibility of legally adopting Defert, but abandoned the idea. What’s
clear is Foucault’s commitment to trying to forge new forms of relation-
ships between men, to enrich the “relational mosaic” (Roach 2012, p. 5).
As Halperin (1995) writes, “Adoption might also provide a mechanism
for formalizing differences of wealth or age or education between lovers,
acknowledging informal inequality while providing a framework of mutual
support in which such inequality, accompanied by clearly marked rights
and duties, might not devolve into exploitation or domination” (p. 82).
When Foucault says, “We must escape and help others escape the two
ready-made formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion
of identities” (FL 1996, p. 312), what exactly does he mean? How is such
escape possible if not through the creation of new forms of relationality,

through the practice of a queer askesis that shuns traditional, unworkable
models in favor of new explorations into becoming-together? Between sex
and love lies—what? Between the intensity of the anonymous encounter
and the institutionalization of the marriage bed lies a field of possibility, a
rich potentiality of as yet unseen forms of relating that do not rely on this
dichotomy. “We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible
spaces” (FL 1996, p. 312).
Remolded, reconceptualized, and rethought along these lines, friend-
ship is an example of one such form of “the subversive, revolutionary social
rearrangements that gays may be trying out,” thus representing “a threat
to the way people are expected to relate to one another, which is not too
different from saying the way power is positioned and exercised in our
society” (Bersani 1995, p. 78).
Friend is understood here in various ways: as partner or lover (in the old-
fashioned sense); as non-sexual significant other; as fuck-buddy or friend-
with-benefits; and even as a brief, one-off anonymous encounter. But always
as an intimacy, or familiarity, even if, and perhaps especially when, that
intimacy is the short-lived intensity of sex with a “stranger.” In Bersani’s
words, “Tireless sexual promiscuity makes for a connectedness based on
unlimited bodily intimacies” (Bersani 2011, p. 95). The zipless fuck or
NSA hook-up is a form of intimacy, not to mention the gay sex party, and
in many gay male social networks, sex becomes no more than a form of
handshake, a social exchange or introduction outlived by the non-sexual
friendship to follow.
According to Roach, “an active practice of friendship… requires atten-
tion and care, a mutual trust, and, bizarre as it sounds, betrayals” (Roach
2012, p. 6). Perhaps one of those betrayals is the refusal to marry or, in
the Foucauldian sense, to refuse who we are in order to explore who we
might be:
Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosex-

uality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?”
Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “What relations, through homosex-
uality, can be established, invented, multiplied and modulated?” The problem
is not to discover in oneself the truth of sex but rather to use sexuality hence-
forth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And no doubt that’s the real
reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable.
50 J. KEMP
Therefore we have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate

in recognizing that we are. (FL 1996, p. 308, emphasis added)
What might it mean to use sexuality to arrive at a multiplicity of relation-

ships? And how might we open up the dynamics of friendship to new erotic
possibilities in a way that enables that multiplicity to function as an alterna-
tive to the couple-oriented discourse? To repeat: “What relations, through
homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied and modulated?”
“Foucault designates friendship the becoming of queer relationality”
(Roach 2012, p. 6), and this queer relationality is a form of askesis that
provides new ways of thinking about how we relate as queer people. He
conceives homosexuality as an opportunity to be creative and inventive in
our emotional and sexual lives, rather than simply using the template of
heterosexual marriage as the blueprint from which to build.
“If thinking accepts the ‘practical’ constraints of its institution and insti-
tutions,” William Haver warns us, “then thought is nothing more than
the administration, or policing, of its disciplines” (Haver 1996, p. 180).
Thinking differently is also, and importantly, tied up with feeling differ-
ently, acting differently, of experimenting with the self, forging new types
of relationships not governed by biopower. This practice is queer askesis.
We can hardly say what this new relational world might look like for it’s
as yet unformed, and the potentialities are rich beyond imagination. One
thing is certain, it will be unmanageable, for that, in a sense, is its ulti-
mate goal, a kind of anarchic meeting point of madness and sexuality,17 a
true heteroclite sociality (Haver 1997, pp. 277–292), “the radically anar-
chic ground of all sociality, the groundlessness that is the ground of the
political as such” (Haver 1996, p. 178). Friendship as queer askesis might
represent such an example of the unthinkable, particularly in the form it
takes in one example Foucault gives to which this chapter now turns.
Daddy Issues
Although marriage equality wasn’t part of the agenda for gay liberation
at the time of the interview, Foucault nevertheless offers marriage as an
example of the paucity of the relational field:
Between a man and a younger woman the marriage institution makes it easier;
she accepts it and makes it work. But two men of noticeably different ages—
what code would allow them to communicate? They face each other without
terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure them about the meaning
of the movement that carries them towards each other. They have to invent,
from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship: that is to
say, the sum of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.
(FL 1996, p. 309)
Rather than making a plea for those two men of different ages to be able to
marry, Foucault offers something like his definition of friendship: “the sum
of everything through which they can give each other pleasure.” Whereas
marriage provides a script, assigns roles, and allots power, here there is
no script but an invention of “the meaning of the movement that carries
them towards each other.” A new code must be invented by which they
can communicate, not discovered, but created as the unknown territory
of their mutual pleasure gets mapped, outside of the protocols that would
disavow such friendship, especially if it cuts across not only generational
lines, but also across lines of class, or race.
Once a stalwart of the 1970s leather and S/M scenes, the Daddy has
recently become a greater phenomenon in mainstream gay culture, the
increased cultural presence and fetishization of the older man, or Daddy
(aka DILF, or Daddy I’d Like to Fuck). Often seen as the Daddy of
Queer Theory,18 Foucault is an apposite theorist for thinking through these
“daddy issues.”19 The age difference, Foucault suggests, requires that they
“invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless.” They must prac-
tice a kind of queer askesis to enable them to create the ways in which they
might relate because “They face each other without terms or convenient
words” recalling Wilde’s famous courtroom speech in defense of the love
that dare not speak its name:
“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great
affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and
Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as
you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep,
spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great
works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two
letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much
misunderstood that it may be described as the “Love that dare not speak its
name,” and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it
is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about
it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger
man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy,
52 J. KEMP
hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does
not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory
for it.
Could such a friendship be pilloried because it “bespeaks the anarchical

contingency of all relationality” (Roach 2012, p. 13)? For Roach, the value
of friendship is that it is “anti-institutional, indeed it cannot congeal into
an epistemological object known as ‘society.’ It is excessive of self-identity,
and hence contrary to Aristotle’s claim, structurally incapable of grounding
social forms” (ibid.), while at the same time providing the ground for all true
heteroclite or queer sociality. The intergenerational dynamics of daddies
and sons is one of these as yet unseen forms of relationships Foucault
mentions. They represent one such virtuality among many. I imagine these
two men—between whom all pleasures and relations wait to be invented,
their erotic A to Z drawn up—not as the discreet unit of a couple (married
or not), nor as the Hellenic model of adult male and adolescent youth,
where the younger partner is seen as a non-citizen or citizen in the making,
but as part of a relational network that would include other partners, other
daddies and sons, sharings, couplings, and groupings—a vast constellation
of relations unknowable until created.20
And it’s in this creation, in this active practice of a queer askesis, that ped-
agogy comes into play. All friendships are in essence pedagogical, a mutual
exchange of knowledge rather than the power imbalance of teacher/pupil.
The erotic vectors of pedagogy are often overlooked, but they are there, in
a sense, in the simplest exchange of knowledge between friends, or peers,
as much as between an elder and a younger man, where very different
knowledges may be at work. There’s pleasure to be had in learning, as
there is in teaching. To listen to other narratives, other lives, is to learn a
lesson of compassion, empathy, and greater intimacy. But for men of very
different ages, the play of knowledge is a code to be cracked, with often
disparate frames of reference or vectors of experience between them to be
navigated. For this type of friendship—grounded in such “shared estrange-
ment” (Roach 2012)—to become a way of life, what would that mean?
Certainly for Roach, “Friendship, as a formless relation without telos, pro-
vides a counterpoint to a GLBT political agenda seeking social legitimacy
in the right to marry” (ibid.). For Haver:
The pedagogical imperative here is to precipitate, with no guarantee of any

ultimate transcendence or salvation, interruption: all those hiatuses, caesuras,
and faux pas which mark the limit of the thinkable, the tolerable. What is at
stake in all these interruptions is not merely a lapse in intellectual competence
but an ontological stammering, the essential inability to conceptualize what is
being thought when thought tries to think its thinking. (Haver 1997, p. 290)
The daddy–son configuration is such a form of queer pedagogy, an inter-

ruption within and of our understanding of relationality, a dangerous new
game. As Haver states (citing Britzman 1995), there can be no safety
because when it is a matter of queer pedagogy we are always already at
risk.
To make such friendships, a way of life will “require the introduction of
a diversification different from the ones due to social class, differences in
profession and culture” (FL 1996, p. 310). “It can yield intense relations
not resembling those that are institutionalized,” even “yield a culture and
an ethics” (FL 1996, p. 310).
Friendship as queer ascesis requires the invention of new games, an
approach to the question of same-sex desire involving creativity and imag-
ination, not limiting ourselves to the heterosexual model of monogamous
marriage. Domestic relationships need not be sexual, nor sexual relation-
ships domestic. Not households, but socio-sexual networks, not couples
but multiplicities, libidinal economies of friendship as a radical act of coun-
terproductivity against the dominant fiction of soul mates, or the one, the
happy-ever-after with wedding bells and confetti. Is this, Foucault might
say if he were alive today, what we fought for? What some of us died for?
Same-gender wedding cake decorations?
Notes
1. “I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage
through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own
area… I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary
systems to be useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscien-
tious objector. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers”
(Foucault 1994 [1974], pp. 523–524).
2. See Foucault (1997a).
3. See Foucault (1996). Subsequent references to this text will be indicated by
the abbreviation FL.
4. See Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto, http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/
pwh/glf-london.asp.
54 J. KEMP
5. Michael Warner (1999, p. 84) claims that, “Before the election of Bill Clin-
ton in 1992, marriage was scarcely a visible blip on the horizon of queer
politics.”
6. “Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex,” Foucault writes
in The History of Sexuality, “four privileged objects of knowledge, which
were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the
hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the
perverse adult” (Foucault 1990 [1978], p. 105).
7. See Yasmin Nair’s (2010) “Who’s Illegal Now? Immigration, Marriage, and
the Violence of Inclusion” for an excellent reading of how the slogan “Le-
galize Gay” was used in the fight for gay marriage.
8. “This biopower was without question an indispensable element in the devel-
opment of capitalism” (Foucault 1990 [1978], pp. 140–141).
9. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/26/wedding-industry-same-
sex_n_7672618.html.
10. For an example of a community without marriage, see the Mosuo, Tibetan
Buddhists living in south-west China. They practice what they call “walking
marriages,” involving women and men choosing who to be sexually involved
with (it would seem to be a strictly hetero affair, aimed at reproduction). No
couples live together or get married, and children are brought up collectively.
11. See John D’Emilio’s “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (in Abelove et al. 1993,
pp. 467–476) for an account of how advances in capitalism in the twentieth
century contributed to the emergence of lesbian and gay subcultures and
identities.
12. Ibid.
13. Aqdas Aftab links the marriage equality battle with a shift in the LGBT
movement away from progressive politics and towards what Jasbir Puar has
called “homonationalism”: “It is no surprise, then, that a movement that has
dwindled into celebrations of anti-feminist and racist institutions like mar-
riage (rather than sustaining a resistance against the interconnected struc-
tures of heteropatriarchy, racism, Islamophobia, capitalism and xenophobia)
can get so easily co-opted by racists like Trump.” (“Queering Islamophobia:
The Homonationalism of the Muslim Ban”) (Bitch Media 2017).
14. See also the chapter entitled “Refusing the Self” in O’Leary (2002,
pp. 107–120).
15. From an interview with Garth Greenwell, found at http://gawker.com/
this-is-just-a-great-sermon-on-the-desperate-urgency-of-1762965937.
16. Halperin cites the Italian feminist collective, the Milan Women’s Bookstore,
as a further example of “the queer practices of self-fashioning” (Halperin
1995, pp. 82–85). Tom Roach offers the Buddy System of the AIDS
era as an example of these new, collective modes of being (see Roach
2012, pp. 97–122), while Bersani cites the barebacking subculture that has
emerged (mainly in America) in the past decade or so. While this is not
necessarily a form of community one would want to promote, it neverthe-

less represents, Bersani argues, “a profound shift in registers of intimacy:
from our heterosexual culture’s prioritizing of the couple to a communal
model of impersonal intimacy” (Bersani 2011, p. 98). See also Tim Dean’s
(2009) Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking,
upon which Bersani’s own observations are based. One could also add the
communities described by Gayle Rubin (1991) in her “The Catacombs: A
Temple of the Butthole.”
17. On this, see Huffer, Mad for Foucault, pp. 242–278.
18. Leo Bersani’s (1995) chapter on Foucault in Homos is entitled “The Gay
Daddy.”
19. So popular is the concept of the daddy in East London (where I live) that a
monthly night where daddies and sons can meet has been running for several
years, called daddy issues.
20. As Guillaume Dustan declares in his autobiographical novel, or “autofic-
tion,” Dans ma chambre, which charts the lives of a group of young gay
men in Paris who maintain such a sexual network: “I live in a wonderful
world where everyone has slept with everyone” (Dustan 1996, p. 70).
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Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
CHAPTER 5
Transcendent Friendship: The Potential

of Foucault’s Ascesis to Subvert School
Gender Regimes and Facilitate Learning
James R. Gilligan
Abstract Foucault’s theories regarding friendship (or philia), homosex-

ual ascesis, and queer culture may be useful in reforming the institutional
gender regimes that permeate academic environments, especially those of
secondary schools, where hegemonic masculinity often establishes a hier-
archy that affects power relationships, academic disciplines, and extracur-
ricular activities. The epistemic value of friendship has the potential to
counter these potent and oppressive school gender regimes that operate
as an element of the hidden curriculum and dictate behavior ranging from
the expression (and suppression) of emotion to pedagogical methods. A
review of selected empirical research demonstrates the effects of implement-
ing pedagogical and extracurricular strategies that promote friendship as a
crucial component of culturally responsive curricula. Considered through
a queer theoretical lens, Foucault’s complex theory of homosexual ascesis
may be seen as a counternarrative to restrictive school gender regimes. It
J. R. Gilligan (B)
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA
e-mail: jimrgill@sfsu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_5
58 J. R. GILLIGAN
can provide a conceptual foundation for practical strategies that will for-
tify students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Consequently, promot-
ing friendship as both a pedagogical and social scaffold has the potential to
deconstruct oppressive gender regimes, create more equitable and socially
just academic environments, and cultivate enjoyable teaching and learning
experiences that occur within collaborative, communal contexts.
Keywords School gender regimes · Hegemonic masculinity · Philia ·

Friendship · Pedagogy · Curriculum · Extracurricular · Happiness
In at least three of Foucault’s works (1985, 1986, 1997), he discusses the

notion of friendship and its role in queer culture. Foucault characterizes
“the homosexual mode of life” as a social context within which “individ-
uals are beginning to love one another” with “affective intensities” that
violate “institutional codes” intended to regulate interpersonal relation-
ships (1997, pp. 136–137). These friendships (or philia) grow from “the
fervor of love” to ensure “mutual benevolence” in a relationship (1985,
p. 201); Foucault describes friendship as an evolved state that transcends
sexual desire between men to achieve “a bond in which the equality is …
perfect” (1986, p. 225).
School gender regimes are among the most powerful “institutional
codes” that govern gendered behavior (both personal and professional)
and interpersonal relationships within educational institutions (Mac an
Ghaill 1994; Connell 2000; Berrill and Martino 2002; Pinar 2007; Mar-
tino 2008). Predicated upon the cultural construct of hegemonic mas-
culinity (Seidman 1993; Carrigan et al. 2004; Kimmel 2004), these gen-
der regimes affect everyone—regardless of gender identity or sexual ori-
entation—within school environments. This chapter examines the ways in
which Foucault’s ideas regarding homosexual ascesis as “a historic occa-
sion to reopen affective and relational virtualities” and the possibility of
“a homosexual culture” (1997, pp. 138–139) may fuel resistance against
institutionalized gender norms, challenge heteronormativity and the hege-
monic masculinity endemic to many educational institutions, and facilitate:
(1) the deconstruction of school gender regimes that limit and inhibit learn-
ing and development and (2) the pedagogical promotion of friendship as
a social and instructional scaffold.
5 TRANSCENDENT FRIENDSHIP: THE POTENTIAL OF FOUCAULT’S … 59
School Gender Regimes

As Mac an Ghaill (1994) notes, schools are especially “complex gendered
and heterosexual arenas” (p. 4). Both Mac an Ghaill (1994) and Con-
nell (2000) discuss the impact of a school’s gender regime on relationships
of power and privilege within the institutions; Connell (2000) defines the
term as “The totality of gender arrangements within a school” (p. 152), and
Mac an Ghaill (1994) explains, “the school microcultures of management,
teachers and students are key infrastructural mechanisms through which
masculinities and femininities are mediated and lived out.” He considers
schools “as deeply gendered and heterosexual regimes, [which] construct
relations of domination and subordination within and across these micro-
cultures” (p. 4).
As Foucault (1990) has noted, the ambivalent relationship between
schools and sexuality has affected teachers and students since as far back as
the eighteenth century. The topic of sex was diligently avoided, but it was
simultaneously an obsession:
On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at all
in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural layout,
the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question
of sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it explicitly.
The organizers took it permanently into account. All who held a measure
of authority were placed in a state of perpetual alert, which the fixtures, the
precautions taken, the interplay of punishments and responsibilities, never
ceased to reiterate. (pp. 27–28)
The gendering of education has an equally lengthy history. As Martino

(2008) points out, “The gender politics surrounding elementary teach-
ing as women’s work—with its emasculating associations for male teach-
ers and boys—has a history that can be traced back to the mid-1800s”
(p. 195). Hegemonic masculinity combines both of these forces—the regu-
lation of teacher and student sexuality along with the gendering of teaching
and learning—to control privilege and power in education; Vavrus (2009)
argues that, in the contexts of the social dynamics of education, privilege
has been historically (and currently) “acquired by displays of masculinity”
(p. 386).
Within the context of schools and other educational institutions, hege-
monic masculinity supersedes all other kinds of masculinities and confers
power and privilege upon those who control it. Haywood and Mac an
60 J. R. GILLIGAN
Ghaill (1996) explain the ways in which masculinities are constructed with
respect to various other factors—such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic
status—within schools to create power differentials:
Masculinities do not have a one-dimensional identity, rather they embody

multiple dimensions … An important development in the theorization of
masculinities and schooling is to see that … social locations create the condi-
tions for relations of power. There are different masculinities with differential
access to power, practices of power and differential effects of power. (p. 51)
Although some progress has been made in recent years, heterosexual men
who have demonstrated the culturally sanctioned traits of hegemonic mas-
culinity seem to enjoy the greatest positions of power and privilege within
educational institutions. Connell (2000) describes the “familiar … pattern”
of power relations in school systems: “the association of masculinity with
authority, and the concentration of men in supervisory positions” (p. 153).
As Mac an Ghaill (1994) explains, schools are “deeply gendered and hetero-
sexual regimes” (p. 4) that prescribe, in overt and subtle ways, acceptable
forms of behavior for both men and women.
This masculine hegemony regulates relationships among all men
within educational institutions: student-student, student-teacher, teacher-
teacher, teacher-administrator, administrator-administrator, etc. Paradoxi-
cally, male-male friendships that develop within schools—which often seek
to foster mutually respectful, collaborative relationships that effect con-
structive learning in a social environment—conflict with the hegemonic
gender regimes that permeate these very same institutions. As bell hooks
has argued, critical pedagogy “must rely on the presence of the erotic in
the classroom to aid the learning process”; she characterizes eros as a “force
that … can provide an epistemological grounding … in a classroom set-
ting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite the critical imagination”
(1994, pp. 194–195). hooks’ description of the power of eros in the class-
room resembles Foucault’s example of “affective intensities” among men
in the army. He argues that “individuals … beginning to love one anoth-
er” within these hegemonically structured institutions causes a “problem”;
consequently, “The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective inten-
sities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake
it up.” Much like affectionate relationships among men in schools, “these
relations … introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or
habit” (1997, p. 137).
Further complicating this struggle between productive philia and the

rigid restraints of hegemonic gender norms, the privileging of heteronor-
mative masculinity is often negotiated and enforced at the state level; it
“closely involves the division of labor, the social definitions of tasks as either
‘men’s work’ or ‘women’s work,’ and the definition of some kinds of work
as more masculine than others” (Carrigan et al. 2004, p. 156). Philaretou
and Allen (2001) explain that “The essentializing of the social construc-
tion of masculinity and femininity, as culturally based ideologies necessary
for the scripting of gender relations, attitudes, and beliefs, constitutes a
powerful force entrenched in the pillars of social institutions” (p. 311).
Schools are, of course, among the most common of these social institu-
tions that serve as sites for the propagation and perpetuation of heteronor-
mativity and hegemonic masculinity, which constitute part of the hidden
curriculum taught “unintentionally, through values promoted by teachers,
administration, boards and parents, [including] a taken-for-granted norma-
tive sexuality and concomitant expectations of gender behaviour” (Khayatt
2006, p. 135).
As Olson and Gillman (2013) explain, however, friendship—especially
friendship that features a power differential—possesses “an epistemic value”
and can work to subvert hegemony by creating more equitable distributions
of knowledge:
… friendship among persons inhabiting asymmetrical relationships of power

… make possible the disruption and rehabitution of those practices in ways
that move toward more inclusive, more reliable, and more responsible knowl-
edge. Moreover, by resisting arrogant perception, the affective, loving fea-
tures of friendship may intensify friends’ motivation to pursue knowledge,
both out of love for the epistemic goods themselves and out of love for one
another. (p. 78)
Since power relations constitute a primary component of school gender

regimes, friendship’s potential to counterbalance disparities in power, as
Olson and Gillman argue, provides a formidable tool with which to begin
the deconstruction of those regimes.
In addition to power relations, the primary components of school gen-
der regimes are symbolism, patterns of emotion, and a division of labor
(Connell 2000, pp. 153–154). As noted earlier, most of the power within
schools resides with heterosexual men; in most schools, “masculinities tend
to operate through mechanisms of official power and authority” (Haywood
62 J. R. GILLIGAN
and Mac an Ghaill 2003, p. 64). As Connell (2000) explains, symbolism

serves a school’s heteronormative gender regime by combining icons and
signs from the broader culture with symbols indigenous to school culture:
Schools import much of the symbolization of gender from the wider culture,
but they have their own symbol systems too: uniforms and dress codes, formal
and informal language codes, etc. A particularly important symbolic structure
in education is the gendering of knowledge, the defining of certain areas of
the curriculum as masculine and others feminine. Activities such as sports
may also be of great importance in the symbolism of gender. (p. 154)
Here Connell (2000) identifies both the curriculum and extracurricular

activities such as sports as significant symbolic structures in the gender
regime. He continues:
Academic subjects may … have strong gender meanings. It has long been
recognized that physical sciences are culturally defined as masculine and have
a concentration of men teachers …. English, by contrast, is feminized. In
the eyes of many … boys, English classes are distanced by their focus on the
expression of emotions, their apparent irrelevance to men’s work, the lack
of set rules and unique answers, and the contrast with activities defined as
properly masculine, such as sport. (p. 158)
Gard (2002) describes school and university physical education programs

as significant sites “for the construction of gendered identities”; the social
interactions that occur in physical education programs—which blend the
curricular and the extracurricular—contribute to “the construction of
knowledge about gender, sexuality, race, and class” (p. 47) that transpires
under school gender regimes.
The patterns of emotion that are deemed acceptable according to the
gender regimes of schools closely correspond to the structure of symbolism
and the division of labor between men and women. As Mac an Ghaill (1994)
explains:
Teaching, which is often seen as a “soft” job, is not … unambiguously mas-

culine, because it involves emotional engagement and caring for children,
which are traditionally defined as women’s work. Classroom life is not pre-
disposed to accommodate such emotional ambiguity, which challenges the
gender-ascribed “masculine function” of discipline and the “feminine func-

tion” of caring/nurturing, with their attendant juxtaposed connotations of
physical strength and emotional vulnerability. (p. 37)
According to Klein (2012), “Men especially are seduced into living an

isolating, unhappy life or risk being tormented and teased for expressing
emotion or depending too much on others—a mark against their masculin-
ity even though it might nourish their psyches” (p. 176). Connell (2000)
describes the “feeling rules” that are often associated with specific occu-
pations and roles in education, such as “the tough duty principal” or “the
drama teacher”: “Among the most important feeling rules in schools are
those concerned with sexuality, and the prohibition on homosexuality may
be particularly important in definitions of masculinity” (p. 153). In addi-
tion, “certain nurturing behaviors, like being affectionate or touching, are
unacceptable for men because they are associated with femininity” (Berrill
and Martino 2002, p. 62).
Klein (2012) argues, however, that this dichotomy of “feeling rules”
between men and women in education might be in the process of breaking
down—for the worse. Noting the “masculinization” of almost every aspect
of school culture, she asserts:
Girls and boys alike are encouraged toward conventionally masculine ways of
being—casual and noncommittal, disconnected and unemotional, and cut-
throat competitive and power driven, backed by violence and serious threats.
Boys and girls both find that their more “feminine” desires for connection,
intimacy, emotional self-expression, and cooperative and compassionate ways
of being are discouraged at many turns. (pp. 108–109)
She identifies “the new Internet addiction phenomenon,” which can result
in “depression and addiction,” as one of the primary culprits in the reduc-
tion of “social connections and difficulty developing intimacy. Such symp-
toms are likely to develop when men and women alike are counseled to
strive to be hyperindependent, self-reliant, unemotional, tough, and cav-
alier about their relationships” (ibid., p. 124). In short, convenient and
technologically assisted online relationships inhibit the ability of both men
and women to develop and sustain intimate personal relationships.
Foucault’s assessment of the gendered contrast between the “accept-
able” forms of both embodied and emotional connections among women
and among men offers some redress to the alarming phenomenon that
64 J. R. GILLIGAN
Klein describes. He implies that female same-sex interactions have led to

healthier, more supportive and emotionally nourishing relationships. Not-
ing “the importance of physical contact between women: women do each
other’s hair, help each other with make up, dress each other,” Foucault con-
cludes that, historically, “Women have had access to the bodies of other
women: they put their arms around each other, kiss each other.” Men’s
bodies, however, have “been forbidden to other men in a much more dras-
tic way,” with access granted only “during war” and “in prison camps”
(1997, p. 139). As a substitute for the physical and emotional intimacy
afforded by war or imprisonment, men in schools are permitted access to
other men’s bodies through physical education and sports.
As mentioned earlier, the gendering of knowledge that occurs in schools
behaves in much the same way, as women are assigned to the more “emo-
tional” subjects such as English and men are relegated to “harder” sub-
jects such as science. Smagorinsky (2008) identifies the epistemological
dimensions of this contrast between genders but eschews any binary divi-
sion between men’s and women’s ways of knowing; he prefers to “use
the terms authoritative and connected in place of men’s and women’s psy-
chological makeups” [italics in the original]. Smagorinsky considers these
“ways of knowing” as “points on a continuum rather than absolute cate-
gories” (p. 15). Reconceptualizing these alleged epistemological opposites
within a spectrum of learning styles suggests that presumably gendered
knowledge—which constitutes an important component of school gender
regimes—may be queered in much the same way that Foucault’s description
of physical contact between same-sex bodies implies. “Connected” ways
of knowing—and ways of being—resonate more clearly with Foucault’s
homosexual ascesis than “authoritative” ways of knowing. Consequently,
pedagogy that promotes connected ways of knowing will more effectively
deconstruct school gender regimes.
Everyone—regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity—who
spends a significant amount of time in school buildings must cope with
the “fear and denial of all sexuality” that, according to McNinch (2007),
“define the educational environment” (p. 208). Pinar (2007) describes the
effects of school gender regimes on straight men:
In a profession gendered female, straight men are double punk’d. Like boys
who play with girls during childhood, men who teach are not “real” men.
Forced to submit to the political will of (mostly straight male) legislators,
straight men suffer gendered positions of “gracious submission,” the term
Southern Baptists employed to depict the “biblical” relation of wives to their

husbands. (pp. 155–156)
Perhaps this phenomenon of straight men subjugating other straight men

through school gender regimes exemplifies Kimmel’s (2004) statement
regarding “the great secret of American manhood: We are afraid of other
men” (p. 188). Martino (2008) believes that “Within … a gender hierar-
chical context of labour relations within the education system, those men
who remained in schools ‘doing women’s work’ increasingly risked being
stigmatized as sissies or effeminate men” (p. 202). The English classroom,
for example, is often identified as a “feminized pedagogical site,” which
counters “dominant constructions of masculinity and leads men to regu-
late their behaviors in very specific ways” (Berrill and Martino 2002, p. 61).
Ironically enough, most men who work in education are complicit in
their own oppression. As Vavrus (2009) found in his study of preservice
teachers, “With the exception of a memorable teacher or two, all of the
teacher candidates reported that teachers in their schools participated in
the enforcement of traditional gender roles and heteronormativity through
overt actions or by their silences” (pp. 387–388). Other recent research
substantiates the idea that male teachers support—rather than challenge—
hegemonic masculinity in schools. Many male teachers, whether intention-
ally or not, tend to reinforce gender-stereotypical behavior among them-
selves and their male students (Martino 2008, p. 214). Rofes (2000), him-
self an openly gay teacher, explains the self-defeating nature of such com-
plicity:
… we are wrong if we pretend that our mere presence in the classroom is

counterhegemonic. Being transgressive because we are openly gay, yet com-
pliant because we affirm traditional masculinities, may do little to alter the
sex/gender system that wreaks havoc in our everyday lives. (p. 143)
These obstacles—men’s mutual subjugation, men’s fear of each other,

men’s overt and covert complicity in perpetuating the strict gender regime
of hegemonic masculinity—might well be rooted, as Foucault argued, in
men’s lack of familiarity with other men’s bodies and emotions. Homoso-
cial friendships offer a means to counteract these obstacles.
66 J. R. GILLIGAN
The Possibilities for “A Homosexual Ascesis”

Near the start of his interview with Le Gai Pied, Foucault poses the ques-
tion, “What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented,
multiplied, and modulated?” (1997, p. 135). He adds, “The development
toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friend-
ship” and offers the clarification that he is speaking of “relations with guys
… not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence: how
is it possible for men to be together?” (1997, p. 136). He then considers
“the homosexual mode of life” as a way to transcend the limitations of the
“institutional codes” discussed earlier (1997, pp. 136–137). Ultimately,
he proposes “a homosexual ascesis” as a strategy “to escape … readymade
formulas” that reduce male-male relationships to pure sex:

improbable. (1997, p. 137)
Clearly, with all his talk of development, tending, escaping, transforming,

advancing, and inventing, Foucault envisions homosexual ascesis as a pro-
cess that will result in the transcendence of hegemonic and corporeal rela-
tions among men to some higher state of equality, partnership, and rever-
ence—improbable though it may seem. According to McPherran (2010),
Socrates and Plato also believed that romantic erôs “resists acquisition by
its very nature” and is “only the prelude to a larger life and kind of love”
(p. 535), namely “that fellow-feeling of brotherly and sisterly affection we
call philia …. From that vantage point, then, we can begin to see that
our love of self translates into love of wisdom which then translates into
love of others” (p. 536). This progression that McPherran describes closely
resembles Foucault’s concept of ascesis.
Within educational institutions, the possibilities for “a homosexual asce-
sis” could very well result in the progress that Foucault envisioned and the
symbiotic development of love and wisdom that Socrates and Plato theo-
rized. Keeping in mind Foucault’s admonition against programmatic pro-
posals and aspiring to the “inventiveness special to a situation like ours,” the
following pedagogical theories and strategies may facilitate “a homosexual
culture … the instruments for polymorphic, varied, and individually mod-

ulated relationships” (1997, p. 139) capable of deconstructing the school
gender regimes that limit and inhibit learning and development.
The Curricular and Extracurricular Promotion

of Friendship
Research demonstrates that, within a range of academic levels—early child-
hood, primary, and secondary—infusing curricula with the ethos of philia
supports and strengthens pedagogy and learning. Olson and Gillman
(2013) assert that:
… the cultivation of friendship can facilitate the pursuit of, or partially consti-
tute the conditions for, more reliable knowledge and deeper understanding
by encouraging the sort of cooperative inquiry in which friends recognize
their interdependence in their common pursuit of epistemic goods. (p. 78)
In their study of literacy instruction, Smith and Wilhelm (2006) identify

“relationships with friends” among the “five sets of social relationships that
were especially important” to students (p. 12). They ultimately conclude
that when “everybody learns from one another—everybody gets smarter
about the topic under study and about reading” (p. 113). They add, “we
learn best when we are addressing an issue or solving a problem in rela-
tionship with others” (p. 115).
Stephenson (2011), in her research on thirty-six children enrolled in
a New Zealand community-based Early Childhood Center, found that
“Developing friendships and building relationships within the community
appeared to be a predominant concern for every child” (p. 140). Further-
more, she indicates that “the challenges children confront as they learn
how to form and sustain peer relationships might … be an underestimated
aspect of curriculum” (p. 141). Among older students, curricula that incor-
porate friendship as a vital component of classroom communities can help
students develop both social and academic skills. Supporting the implemen-
tation of “friendship curriculum” in primary education, Kieff (2005/2006)
asserts that such an approach can address “bullying and gender equity.” She
explains:
68 J. R. GILLIGAN
In terms of social development, it is critical for students to learn social skills

early in life in order to get along well with others and build lasting friend-
ships …. Building a sense of belonging and classroom community is also an
imperative. (p. 98K)
Furthermore, friendship holds great potential to enhance curricula at the

secondary level, despite its rarity as a component of middle school and high
school instruction. James and Mullen (2002) ask, “How often is the impor-
tance of friendship dealt with in the secondary curriculum … ? Infrequently
if at all, yet it is a critical role that … will be central throughout [students’]
adult lives” (p. 206). In their study, James and Mullen (2002) found that
schools pay “little attention … to the skills involved with performing the
Friend role,” and they recommend:
… some instruction and/or curricular activities in a variety of secondary

classes including humanities, social sciences, and even science courses could
provide a setting for helping students develop and improve over time the
skills associated with high performance in the friend role. (p. 201)
Ultimately, they advocate “highlighting certain developmental roles (e.g.

friend) as germane for students” as the “next step in curriculum develop-
ment” (p. 194).
Educators may address the need to integrate friendship as a curricular
component in both their instructional methodology and in the content
they teach. For example, some current pedagogical practices, which often
rely heavily on technology, might seem incompatible with an approach
to teaching and learning that relies on the cultivation of friendships and
connected ways of knowing. Klein (2012) has argued that the advent of
social media—which was purportedly designed to facilitate connections
among people—has resulted in a decrease of intimate relationships. She
asserts:
On Facebook a person may sport thousands of “friends,” but this number has
little resemblance to the intimate connections on decline. Facebook friends
tend to confer popularity status or demerits similar to the more superficial
indicators seen in so many schools. (p. 176)
As a way to counteract this kind of spurious digitally mediated connection,

Turkle (2015) advocates face-to-face collaboration. She observes that stu-
dents will often choose to “collaborate” electronically using shared media
such as Google Docs rather than meet in person to work together and
allow for what she calls “intellectual serendipity” (p. 245). In ascribing
more importance to the product of their work than to the process they
utilize to create it, Turkle argues, students deny themselves opportunities
to acquire important skills of genuine reciprocal collaboration: “the value
of what you produce … is not just the final paper; it’s the process of making
it” (p. 244).
White and Hungerford-Kresser (2014), however, have designed a peda-
gogical approach that uses social networking to “engage students in learn-
ing” (p. 644) and scaffolds constructive collaboration. The combination of
literary analysis with technology that students already use to mediate and
manage their friendships provides “educators with a culturally relevant way
to engage today’s learners” (p. 645). Their strategy of character journaling
through social media “allowed for extensive use of multiple literacies, for
students to incorporate prior knowledge and present interpretations into
their online discussions, and thus for cooperative learning” (p. 648), which
afforded students multiple opportunities to participate in the social dimen-
sion of literacy; consequently, they practiced both their linguistic and social
skills as they collectively constructed meaning from the texts they read and
created together. This project “prompted … students to negotiate how
they came to understand the text and the world it represents” (p. 649).
Sadowski (2016) describes an LGBT literature course taught at Amherst
Regional High School in Massachusetts that—although not explicitly
focused on friendship—actively promotes connected learning within the
context of a more inclusive and welcoming school culture. He argues that
LGBTQ students deserve more than just “having a place” or “having a
voice” within schools if they are to feel truly safe and welcomed as important
parts of a school’s academic and social communities. Sadowski asserts, “cre-
ating school environments where LGBTQ students feel truly connected,
both to the content they are learning and the people with whom they are
learning, is essential—and eminently possible” (p. 36). The LGBT liter-
ature course began as a pilot, which received “overwhelmingly positive
reviews”:
Following a unanimous vote from the English department and enthusiastic

approval by the school board, Amherst added the course to its schedule in
2004. The popularity of the class … has grown ever since. Covering authors
whose work spans a century, including Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and
70 J. R. GILLIGAN
Michael Cunningham, the course now enrolls about 150 students each year
in six sections. (p. 34)
The course focuses on a broad range of topics related to the queer commu-
nity, and “issues affecting transgender people and LGBTQ people of color
make up an important component of the curriculum.” As the course has
grown in popularity, “the demographic of students taking the course has
changed.” Initially, the course appealed primarily to “queer youth, mostly
girls,” but “a lot of boys take it now” (p. 34). Sadowski cites student feed-
back as evidence that the course provides the school community with both
academically and socially developmental value: “student reflections speak
to the empowerment that students felt when they saw LGBTQ identities—
so often silenced in many school communities—represented prominently
in their curriculum. [One] student said that [the] class ‘gave every student
a voice’” (p. 35).
The extracurricular promotion of friendship—which might or might not
occur on its own as a natural consequence of students working together as,
for example, an athletic team or a theatrical cast and crew—may also be an
effective strategy for subverting school gender regimes and fostering ascesis.
As Klein (2012) advises, however, any such extracurricular program must
be clearly focused on establishing connections among students rather than
individual student needs. Citing the recent spate of anti-bullying initiatives
within schools, she writes, “Many of the new school bullying programs that
have sprung up across the country continue to focus only on the individual
…. Few programs work on creating better relationships among students
and others in the school community in the first place” (p. 108).
Marx and Kettrey (2016) found that, “One promising approach to
promoting the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ students is the establishment of
student-directed clubs and organizations for LGBTQ+ youth, commonly
known as Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)” (p. 1270). Some, however, have
challenged the customary labeling of these alliances—claiming that char-
acterizing them as “Gay-Straight” reifies the binary conceptualization of
sexual orientation while simultaneously excluding transgender or gender
non-conforming students. In a nifty bit of semantic adroitness, it has
been suggested that these support groups be called “Gender and Sexu-
ality Alliances,” a name that would preserve the familiar GSA acronym.
Nonetheless, Marx and Kettrey’s “meta-analysis” of these groups “suggest
that GSAs are associated with lower levels of at-school victimization of an
often-marginalized group of youth,” and they express hope that:
… the establishment of GSAs in local schools may have important implica-

tions for the healthy development of LGBTQ+ youth, as previous research
has indicated that homophobic victimization is more strongly associated with
negative mental health outcomes (i.e., depression, suicidality) than other
forms of victimization that are not based on sexual orientation. (p. 1279)
In addition to assisting in the subversion of school gender regimes by forg-

ing connections and supporting friendships among students (and, in some
cases, faculty) with diverse sexual orientations (and, ideally, gender identi-
ties), GSAs seem to create more inclusive school communities with respect
to many dimensions of diversity. Mayo (2013) reports that “schools with
GSAs are more welcoming of many different forms of diversity, including
religious, racial, and ethnic as well as difference centered on gender and
sexual orientation” (p. 267).
As Mayo found, students who actively participate in GSAs learn about
the inequities of school gender regimes and—by extension—the more
wide-ranging effects of hegemonic heteronormativity throughout the
broader culture. Without this kind of awareness, school gender regimes
cannot be understood or challenged. In his case study of a GSA in a Mid-
western high school, Mayo observed its members become:
… consciously aware of the power differential between their heterosexual

peers and those who were LGBTQ or perceived as being so, and they under-
stood this scenario as one that was unjust and that spread far beyond the space
within their school. Allies within the group realized that they could use their
power (identified as straight privilege) to support their queer classmates and
enact changes at school given the lessons learned from the pedagogy prac-
ticed by their advisor. Significantly, these heterosexual students understood
that power/privilege can be used to support fairness and equity rather than
the status quo and their role in maintaining it. (p. 268)
Ultimately, the members of the GSA—the majority of whom “identified as

straight allies”—grew to understand non-heteronormative sexualities and
identities as “simply another way of being, rather than fodder for stigma
and fear” and demonstrated support for “openly gay and lesbian friends
outside of GSA meetings in a larger school context” (p. 271).
72 J. R. GILLIGAN
Theory into Practice: Synthesizing Knowledge,

Skills, and Dispositions
Considered through a queer theoretical lens, Foucault’s complex theory of
homosexual ascesis may be seen as a counternarrative to restrictive school
gender regimes. Furthermore, it can provide a conceptual foundation for
practical strategies that will fortify students’ knowledge, skills, and dispo-
sitions. And although homosexual ascesis might appear to be somewhat
radical and progressive in its effort to harness the power of homosocial
friendship and “to make possible a homosexual culture” (Foucault 1997,
p. 139), its implications for pedagogy hearken back to classic tenets regard-
ing the ideal of intellectual and physical harmony (i.e., “a sound mind in
a sound body”) both within an individual and as a foundation for aca-
demic and social connections in pursuit of eudaimonia: “Socrates, and
other ancient philosophers’ positions can be characterised as ‘eudaimonis-
tic’, meaning that philosophical analyses and understandings, and ethical
decisions and conduct, should be both justified and explained by reference
to human flourishing (or ‘happiness’)” (McPherran 2010, p. 530). Simply
put, pedagogy should be motivated by and result in happiness.
Few, if any, of us can achieve happiness in isolation. Johnston (2012)
argues that schools are obligated to teach knowledge and skills as well
as empathy; social imagination—which is impossible to achieve without
an understanding of philia—“requires simultaneously thinking through
another’s perspective and one’s own. Critical literacy requires imagining
others’ intentions, adopting multiple perspectives, and imagining social
arrangements that don’t yet exist” (p. 73). Without the robust develop-
ment of a sense of empathy, no learning—social or academic—occurs. The
intellectual and the affective are inextricably conjoined. Education must
help students build character as well as knowledge; it must help students
become better learners and better human beings. As Bazelon (2013) urges,
“We … have to instill in kids the paramount value of kindness—to show
them that it’s more important to come together than to finish first, that
other people’s feelings can take precedence over one’s own, that relation-
ships can matter more than tasks” (p. 305). In the current political and
socioeconomic climate of the early twenty-first-century USA, this is a chal-
lenging goal indeed.
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CHAPTER 6
Gender and Sexual Minority Faculty

Negotiating “A Way of Life”: Friendships
and Support Within the Academy
Sean Robinson
Abstract Workplace friendships, and the various networks that develop

out of those relationships, are a key factor in the career and identity devel-
opment for gender and sexual minority (GSM) faculty and in essence help
us to create and navigate a way of life in the academy. Previous research has
underscored the important role of friendships in the lives of gay men and
lesbians as a source of support, intimacy, and acceptance for developing
and sustaining meaningful identities and selves often at odds with cultural
norms that privilege heterosexuality (Nardi in Gay men’s friendships: Invin-
cible communities. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999; Weeks et al.
in Same-sex intimacies: Families of choice and other life experiments. Rout-
ledge, London, 2001; Weinstock in Lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities in
families. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 122–154, 1998). While
a few studies have examined how gay men and lesbians can struggle to
S. Robinson (B)
Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, USA
e-mail: sean.robinson@morgan.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_6
78 S. ROBINSON
negotiate identities within an organization (Lee et al. in Public Administra-

tion 86(1):149–167, 2008; Ozga and Walker in Transforming managers:
Gendering change in the public sector. UCL Press, London, pp. 107–119,
1999), little has been done to explore the role that friendships and rela-
tionships, either at a network or dyadic level, enable the career and identity
development of gender and sexual minority university faculty. Indeed, an
exploration of this issue in contemporary organizational life is relevant given
that heteronormativity is manifest in many organizational settings as the
source of everyday oppression experienced by gender and sexual minori-
ties in the workplace (Lewis in Qualitative Research in Organizations and
Management: An International Journal 4(3):208–230, 2009; Skidmore in
Gender, Work & Organization 11(3):229–253, 2004; Ward and Winstanley
in Human Relations 56(10):1255–1280, 2003). Based on narrative inter-
views with 70 GSM faculty across the USA, this chapter explores workplace
relationships and friendships of GSM faculty within university contexts as
a way to add to our understanding about how, indeed, can we as GSM
faculty create and sustain the multiplicity of relationships that ultimately
support us and allow us to create a particular way of life for ourselves.
Keywords Workplace friendships · LGBTQ · Faculty · University
Sociological perspectives of friendship have traditionally considered how

social structures and contexts influence forms and practices of friendship,
paying particular attention to factors such as class, gender, and geography,
but more recently acknowledging the historical and cultural specificity of
our understandings of friendship (Adams and Allan 1998; Pahl 2006). Cur-
rent Western privileged ideas point toward friendships being of increasing
importance as sites of intimacy or care and qualities such as egalitarian-
ism, reciprocity and subversion being salient (Dreher 2009; Pahl 2006;
Roseneil and Budgeon 2004). Within psychology, understanding the pur-
poses of friendships, how they are formed and maintained is important
given that friendships have been shown to be central to individual well-
being and that they provide a buffer to psychological distress (Heinrich
and Gullone 2006). Furthermore, friendship networks have been identified
as an important framework around which individual identity development
occurs (Poulin and Chan 2010).
6 GENDER AND SEXUAL MINORITY FACULTY NEGOTIATING … 79
Yet psychological research on friendship has been criticized for its het-
eronormative bias (e.g., Rose 2000), and a growing body of research on
gender and sexual minority (GSM) friendships suggests that friendship pat-
terns differ from those of heterosexual people, and among sexual minor-
ity groups. One focus has been on demarcations between friendships and
other intimate relationships, indicating that boundaries between friend-
ships and sexual or family relationships tend to be more fluid and complex
than in heterosexual identified people (Peplau and Fingerhut 2007). A fre-
quently reported notion within gender and sexual minority communities
is the concept of “family of choice,” which has been adapted to describe
strong ties within gender and sexual minority (GSM) friendships extending
beyond families of origin (Weeks et al. 2001). Weinstock (1998) argues that
families of choice often operate as alternative families for those who have
been rejected within traditional family relationships. In their research on
beyond the family and care in the twenty-first century, Roseneil and Bud-
geon (2004) argue that practices of non-normative intimacies and friend-
ships increasingly move beyond familial or sexual relationships, thereby
challenging privileged, heteronormative positions of families and sexual
relationships as key sites of intimacy and care; this is especially the case for
those living at the cutting edge of social change, such as gender and sexual
minorities.
The salience of friendship as a source of support, acceptance, and inti-
macy for helping gender and sexual minorities “come out” to family,
friends, and colleagues is well documented (e.g., Nardi 1999; Weeks et al.
2001; Weinstock 1998). The research in this area, much of it sociolog-
ical, bears out the argument that individuals seek friendship with others
who share similar characteristics. Indeed, friendship is a voluntary relation-
ship, often based on personality factors, that affords individuals consider-
able although not unconstrained flexibility in choosing friends similar in
age, race, ethnicity, class, status, gender, sexuality, and so on (Allan 1989).
Similarity in friendship, especially with regard to gender and sexual iden-
tity, opens up opportunities to affirm shared points of view, attitudes and
aspects of the self that others might seek to discredit, disaffirm, or silence
(Weeks et al. 2001).
It is reasonable then to suggest that generally speaking workplace friend-
ships play a similarly supportive role, as Rumens (2010a) suggests. Con-
sidering a specific context, that of a university or college, I contend that
friendships are necessary and necessary for GSM faculty to access reliable
80 S. ROBINSON
sources of support and advice for constructing and sustaining meaning-

ful faculty identities and careers specifically as GSM identified individuals.
According to Gee (2001), identity encompasses how individuals under-
stand themselves, how they interpret experiences, how they present them-
selves, wish to be perceived by others, and how they are recognized by
the broader community. In addition to personal and social identities, uni-
versity and college faculty members also have an “academic” professional
identity, which is situated within the context of their discipline as well as
their academic department, and encompass the many educational roles they
occupy. Several researchers (Coldron and Smith 1999; Luehmann 2007)
assert that such academic identity is an ongoing process rather than a fixed
entity; the process of academic identity development constantly involves
interpreting oneself as a certain kind of person, (re)presenting oneself as
that person and being recognized as such in a given context. If identity is in
a constant, dynamic state of development, and if friendships have the abil-
ity to impact such development, then as Foucault (1997) portends, “Gay”
friendships can indeed engender particular ways of life for GSM individuals
in the workplace.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the idea that workplace friend-
ships, and by extension the various networks that occur between workplace
friends, is a key factor in the career and identity development for gender
and sexual minority faculty, and in essence helps them to create (and nav-
igate) a way of life in the academy. Previous research has underscored the
important role of friendships in the lives of gay men and lesbians as a source
of support, intimacy, and acceptance for developing and sustaining mean-
ingful identities and selves often at odds with cultural norms that privi-
lege heterosexuality (Nardi 1999; Weeks et al. 2001; Weinstock 1998).
Although much of this literature focuses on gay and lesbian friendships
in non-work contexts, emerging scholarship on gay men has shed light
on how workplace friendships can help these men to negotiate identities
and ways of relating that challenge heteronormative forms of organizing
(Rumens 2010a, b). Rumens’ work parallels wider developments in the
organizational studies literature showing how workplace friendships can
help employees cope with stress (Parris et al. 2008; Sias and Cahill 1998),
improve job satisfaction (Winstead et al. 1995), provide forms of support
and intimacy (Kakabadse and Kakabadse 2004; McGuire 2007; Sias 2005;
Sias and Bartoo 2007), and contribute to career success (Kram and Isabella
1985; Kanter 1977).
Trau and Hartel (2004) also explored gay men’s career development
issues and found that support from colleagues and family is pivotal in
developing and managing a gay sexual identity at work. Similarly, Burnett
(2010) suggests that the supportive function of some workplace friend-
ships can help to reduce the isolating and marginalizing effects of workplace
homophobia, citing the lesbian workplace friendship of one study partici-
pant to that end. Furthermore, research indicates that employees who are
excluded from friendship networks can struggle to advance their careers
because access to important organizational resources and sources of influ-
ence is limited (Elsesser and Peplau 2006; Hultin and Szulkin 2003; Kanter
1977). This dynamic has certainly played out in my own career as a gay,
queer, white male faculty member, and throughout my own conversations
and research with GSM faculty around the country.
Friendships in the Workplace

While a few studies have examined how gay men and lesbians can strug-
gle to negotiate identities within an organization (Lee et al. 2008; Ozga
and Walker 1999), little has been done to explore the role that friendships
and relationships, either at a network or dyadic level, enable the career
and identity development of gender and sexual minority faculty. Indeed,
an exploration of this issue in contemporary organizational life is relevant
given that heteronormativity, a term used to describe how heterosexuality
is routinely embodied as “natural” and ascribed a normative status (Butler
1990), is manifest in many organizational settings as the source of everyday
oppression experienced by gender and sexual minorities in the workplace
(Lewis 2009; Skidmore 2004; Ward and Winstanley 2003). Understanding
how careers and identities of GSM faculty are developed within heteronor-
mative work contexts can add to our understanding about how such iden-
tities and careers can be supported and granted opportunities for growth
and visibility. In doing so, we as gender and sexual minority faculty can
start to answer another question posed by Foucault (1997): “‘What rela-
tions, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and
modulated?’ The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s
sex, but rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity
of relationships” (p. 135).
In conceptualizing friendships in the workplace, Sias (2005) along with
some of her colleagues (Sias et al. 2003; Sias and Cahill 1998) contend
that workplace friendships are different than other types of relationships in
82 S. ROBINSON
several ways. First, friendships in one’s work setting are voluntary, unlike
other relationships, such as between employee and supervisor, which is for-
malized and structured. This contention makes the assumption that per-
sonal agency comes to bear on workplace friendships in ways not found in
more formal workplace relationships. A second important aspect to Sias’s
(2008) research is that friends relate to one another as individuals, not as
roles occupied within an organization. This becomes important for GSM
faculty friendships in what they do, where they do it, how they do it, and
the exact nature of those friendships; the workplace friends of GSM fac-
ulty in essence might share personal information and challenges that have
little to do with their roles as faculty and that appear to have little bearing
on their work lives. Another way to view workplace relationships here is
that they can be an important source of meaning-making for GSM faculty
around both their personal and professional individual identities within the
academy; in short, they can provide avenues for care and support around
sexual and gendered selves. If we view workplace friendships as dynamic
and open, we can begin to consider them as ways for GSM faculty to orga-
nize within the academic realm, thereby creating what Foucault asserts is
a “way of life” for such faculty.
If one accepts the premise that friendships in the workplace operate as a
way for faculty to organize their work life, one must also accept that such
friendships are shaped by the organizational and social contexts in which
they occur. The argument here then is that faculty workplace friendships
are socially constructed. But more than that, friendships within a university
context are embedded within both hegemonic gender and sexual power
relations. Elsesser and Paplau (2006) found that women are often at a
disadvantage in the workplace when they are unable to break into male-
dominated friendship networks. In general, men are afforded more ben-
efits from supportive friendships and networks comprised of other men
(Ibarra 1993). Given that as of 2013, 52% of faculty were male (Chron-
icle 2016) this clearly puts women at a disadvantage in the academy in
creating cross-gender friendships. In their research, Elsesser and Paplau
(2006) highlighted the ways in which females had difficulty in establish-
ing friendships with men that limited their access to resources, mentoring
opportunities, increasing their own networks, and professional advance-
ment opportunities. Elsesser and Paplau found that for men, homosocial
barriers to cross-gender workplace friendships existed in other ways, includ-
ing the misinterpretation of such friendships as a sexual advancement.
While cross-gender friendships may be challenging to develop in the

workplace, there are still numerous benefits and rewards of workplace
friendships. In one of the earliest studies, Lincoln and Miller (1979)
demonstrated that workplace friendships can result in new collaborations
and increase communication flow within work settings. More recently Song
(2006) found that workplace friendships can have a positive impact on
employee attitudes toward job satisfaction, which in turn decreases the like-
lihood of employee turnover (Feeley et al. 2008). Although Sias (2008)
offers a cautionary note that much of the discourse on workplace friend-
ship is framed around social capital, this is precisely how one can view
the friendships, networks, and relationships of GSM faculty. The degree
of social capital GSM faculty possess, in relation to their friendships, can
potentially act to either advance or stifle one’s career. In order to more fully
understand the power of networks and friendships in the academic life of
GSM faculty, it is important to briefly examine the overall experiences of
GSM within the university context.
The Workplace Environment of GSM Faculty

In recent years, colleges and universities have attempted to create welcom-
ing environments for GSM faculty. From the inclusion of sexual orien-
tation and gender identity in non-discriminatory policies to lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and trans (LGBT) student support services, universities have insti-
tuted policies and structures to build an inclusive community. However,
research within the field shows that the experiences of self-identified GSM
faculty often include issues of heterosexism, homophobia, and hostility
from peers and other members of the academy (e.g., Bilimoria and Stew-
art 2009; Robinson 2016, 2018; Sears 2002). A key attribute to retaining
diverse faculty is providing a welcoming work environment. Yet, hostility
and marginalization from peers and other members of the academy often
become barriers to building an inclusive community for GSM faculty.
The challenge with any study of GSM individuals is the fact that sexual
orientation may be less visible than other differences such as gender and
ethnicity. In order to be identified as gay or lesbian, an individual typi-
cally declares that he or she is “out.” For instance, some gays and lesbians,
as Bilimoria and Stewart (2009) suggest with faculty, are not “out” and
choose not to disclose their sexual orientation in an effort to be deliberately
invisible. The terms “out” and “out of the closet” typically refer to being
84 S. ROBINSON
open about one’s sexual orientation. Furthermore, sexual orientation com-

pounds other areas of diversity (Fukuyama and Ferguson 2000). One of
Bilimoria and Stewart’s main research findings was that “gayness or homo-
sexuality was invisible, and that heterosexuality was routinely assumed”
(2009, p. 89). In addition to the avoidance of homosexuality, many research
participants reported that their colleagues “expressed or revealed their dis-
comfort” for LGBT individuals (2009, p. 90). From fellow faculty feeling
uneasy about sharing a room with a LGBT colleague at a conference to
a department chair encouraging LGBT faculty to not bring their partners
to department activities such as picnics and holiday gatherings, individual
responses articulated an unsupportive environment.
In an earlier study, Sears (2002) gathered data from a national sample
of lesbian, gay, and bisexual education faculty to examine how participants
viewed their institutional climate as defined as gay-affirming, gay-tolerant,
gay-neutral, gay-intolerant, or gay-hostile. More than two-thirds of Sears’
survey participants viewed their institution as gay-affirmative or tolerant,
while less than one-quarter perceived the campus climate as gay-intolerant
or hostile. When accounting for institutional type, such as public versus
private, 30% of public university faculty viewed their campus as intolerant
or hostile compared to only 6% of private university faculty. In addition, les-
bians viewed their institutions as less gay-affirming than homosexual men.
In addition to the overall assessment, Sears’ survey included individual com-
ponents of institutional climate in an effort to determine what correlation
various elements had on creating an affirming environment. Sears found
the highest correlation was between perceived level of “gay-affirmative”
and perceived unit support. In other words, those gay and lesbian faculty
members who rated their campus environment as gay-affirming were more
likely to have strong institutional support within their academic discipline.
My national narrative study of GSM faculty sought to extend prior
research through interviews with 70 GSM identified faculty at 49 insti-
tutions in 33 disciplines (Robinson 2016). It is not surprising that one of
the key themes heard within my participants’ stories is that the academy is
still a place that is unsafe for many GSM identified faculty. Even though
many (but not all) of the faculty in my study were able to negotiate within
and around “the closet” to build successful, productive academic careers,
most acknowledged that it was a very hard thing to do. A few were very suc-
cessful because of their identities, and their service, research, scholarship,
and teaching were all a direct result of their identity as a GSM individual.
Their narratives represent an ideology of the personal as political, and the
political as personal. A number, however, kept their sexual identity at arm’s

length from these activities. And not surprising, those who were most suc-
cessful did in fact have a strong friendship network, most often crossing
institutional boundaries. Although many participants were out and experi-
enced positive benefits and rewards, their experiences were also framed by
a series of challenges and barriers based on their sexual and gender iden-
tities. Given the impact of university culture and climate for GSM faculty,
it becomes important to acknowledge the significant role that friendships
can play in constructing a meaningful and fulfilling way of life for GSM
faculty.
Constructing a Way of Life in the Academy

The negotiation of friendships can serve as a unique space for individuals
to recognize, support, and affirm identities. Within particular friendships,
GSM faculty may indeed find ways to perform sexuality and gender dif-
ferently, in ways that serve to buffer the heteronormative culture of the
academy. This is one reason workplace friendships and support networks
can be a powerful force for GSM faculty, as they seek ways to both embrace
and contest particular constructions of gender and sexuality.
For many GSM, friendships with other GSM identified individuals help
them to identify as “normal” and create a sense of inclusion and belonging
in the workplace. As Seidman (2002) contends, the increased visibility of
GSM individuals in the workplace does have a positive effect, although the
“normalization” of GSM individuals is still far from complete. Therefore,
as Richardson has argued, that in their desire to be seen as “normal,” GSM
must reconceptualize and “(re)create new boundaries in relation to sexual-
ity, one that constitutes Other sexualities that can be figured as problematic
and in need of control” (2005, p. 522). In other words, the construction
of the “normal GSM individual” requires one to be compared with the
Other in order to discern what is “not normal.”
This is important to acknowledge as GSM faculty seek to find a sense of
belonging, and to find meaning in their work life. All faculty must operate
within a set of cultural, and political, rules about what it means to be a
“good,” aka “normal heterosexual,” faculty member. For GSM, such a set
of heteronormative expectations creates not just a politic of normalization,
but a politic of difference. Thus, friendships between GSM faculty allow
individuals to create and sustain both conventional and unconventional sex-
ual and gendered lives and identities. For many GSM faculty, connecting
86 S. ROBINSON
with other GSM faculty adds to the feeling of belonging, and of integration
into the life of the academy, by creating and participating in a discourse of
what is normal for them specifically as GSM faculty. In considering Fou-
cault’s (1979) position, GSM-oriented friendships allow for the self to be
seen as a site of positive discursive power, acknowledging that there are
different ways of being that can be seen in either positive or negative ways
depending on the observer.
It is within the space of select friendships that GSM faculty can challenge
what it means to be a “good” or “normal” faculty member, doing the
“right things in the right ways.” In such private spaces, GSM friends can
exchange ideas about gender and sexuality, while also performing their own
ideas of what that looks like. In such friendships, GSM faculty find allies
and advocates, collaborators and confidants, and can be both subject and
object away from the watchful gaze of those policing such identities. It is
here, that such friends can be themselves, without pretense or dishonesty
(Allan 1989). Thus, workplace friendships can facilitate the development
of a range of possible identities and ways of being. It is then through these
possible selves the work of faculty can take place. GSM friendships can
provide many different forms of support, from acting as an adviser to being
a trusted confidant, from working through issues related to coming out in
the classroom, to issues of bullying and harassment, and from negotiating
through the tenure and promotion political arena.
Final Thoughts
Circling back to Foucault’s (1997) interview, and his idea of creating a way
of life, friendships for GSM faculty can be viewed as circles of safety, those
brave spaces as it were, where GSM individuals can find solace against the
heteronormative rules and politic imbedded within the academy that can
cause psychosocial harm, as well as derail one’s career. GSM friendships
serve to blunt organizational heterosexism and homophobia. As scholars
such as Weeks et al. (2001) and Nardi (1999) have written, friendships
inside the workplace can have the same effect as those outside of the work-
place, namely that they have the power to equip GSM faculty with the skills,
courage, and fortitude to confront and rail against the grain of heterosex-
ism and homophobia. In short, it is through their friendships that GSM
faculty can, and do, create a way life in the academy.
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CHAPTER 7
Gay Ascesis: Ethics of Strategic Disorientation

and the Pedagogies of Friendship
David Lee Carlson
Abstract This chapter examines the relationship between Foucault’s

provocative statements about homosexual ascesis based on friendship and
pedagogy. The chapter situates pedagogy as an affective aspect of friendship
within specific time/spaces. The chapter argues that a homosexual ascesis
as friendship involves a strategic disorientation of the self, in relation to
the self and to others. It is through various affective pedagogical aspects
of pleasure and power which can produce disorientation that allows one to
escape oneself.
Keywords Foucault · Ascesis · Pedagogy · Friendship
In my research for this chapter, I came across an essay written in 1970

that infuriated me. Joseph Epstein wrote what was and is still considered
D. L. Carlson (B)
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
e-mail: David.L.Carlson@asu.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_7
92 D. L. CARLSON
a rather scathing invective of homosexuality in Harper’s Magazine. In his

article, he describes his personal interactions with gay men, and he offers
an assessment of their character and lifestyle. In a rather bizarre twist of
fate (or chance), Epstein seems to run into, get hit on, or approached by
gay men. He offered detailed descriptions of various types of gay men.
There’s the middle-aged predator, the “exotic, a flamboyant thing,” who
is a “female impersonator” and a “freak show for the middle class”; there is
the “great swishy colored queen,” the “very suspicious-looking player” in
the men’s locker room, the “Hollywood queer,” the “byzantine variety at
the University of Chicago,” the “buddy bunk in the Army,” the married,
stocky man who is a “roaring fag,” the duplicitous homosexual, the “tough
fag,” the “closet queen,” the artistic fag, the fashionable fag, the “outlaw,”
the “good ole boy in the great southern tradition,” the defiant homosexual,
the “cultural swinger par excellence,” the public official who is married
and “nicely dressed,” the “old” and “new” homosexual, and the worst
of all the “latent queer,” whose veiled appearances obscure secret hidden,
unconscious desires.
Paranoia, according to Epstein, about these queers is clearly justified.
Epstein with all of his interest in homosexual men doth protest too much
and appeases himself by claiming that a homosexual is someone “… who
commits physical homosexual acts. I believe that only the man who is phys-
ically attracted to other men and acts on his attraction is a homosexual”
(1970, p. 43). Epstein believes that homosexuality yields a life of unbearable
pain, one where the homosexual is in an always/already state of alienation
and marginalization. His longing to “wish homosexuality off the face of
this earth” might occur which would but not for the reasons he suggests.
Notwithstanding the fact that his essay reinforces negative, harmful,
racist, and hurtful views of gay people, an alternative reading of his piece
illustrates that Epstein conveys the notion of sexualities as multiplicities.
So much so that categorical terms such as homo/heterosexual blur. So
many different ways to perform a homosexual life, or to practice one’s
sexuality, and those performances are subject to change, chance, and whim
that trying to categorize and define a person based on traditional categorical
binaries becomes rather useless and violent. His claim, at the end of his
essay, that homosexuals are “different from the rest of us,” and are the
“pain of the earth” needs to be qualified. Epstein’s own essay, despite its
greatest efforts to excoriate homosexuals, offers a rather clear illustration
of the potentialities for sexuality. Not just for LGBTQ individuals but also
for straight ones, too.
7 GAY ASCESIS: ETHICS OF STRATEGIC DISORIENTATION … 93
I find it quite ironic that Epstein’s invective can serve as a clear case
study to support Michel Foucault’s version of the homosexual ascesis based
on friendship. Epstein’s interests were not to advocate for new alternative
relationships or for problematizing traditional ones such as marriage. Not at
all. His intensions were to buttress traditional relationships by demonizing
homosexuals. In an ironic and perhaps poetic twist, I find his work an
excellent example for just the potential for polyhedronic relationships based
on a desire in uneasiness that Foucault discusses in his interview with Le
Gai Pied in 1981.
Thus, my interest in writing this chapter is to think through Michel Fou-
cault’s provocative statements of the homosexual ascesis based on friend-
ship. This virtual thought experiment with Foucault’s ideas remains based
on the interview he gave to Le Gai Pied. This interview was later titled,
“Friendship as a Way of Life.” Foucault offers several new ways to look at
both gay rights, and more germane to this chapter, ways of relating, which
exceed and expand traditional modes. For men, Foucault reasons, tradi-
tional modes of relating remain context-dependent and limited, such as
the intensities of comaraderie in the military. Foucault argues that institu-
tionalized modes of forming intensities between men “… [are] ceaselessly
provoked and shamed” (1997, p. 137). Such relationships belie institu-
tional codes and serve as crevices to expand and build new alternative
modes of relationships between men. A similar argument can be made
for gay men, Foucault asserts. Relationships between gay men can build
“new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force” (Fou-
cault 1997, p. 136). These relationships can be viewed as an ascesis, as a
working on the self to transform oneself, based on friendship. Such an asce-
sis can occur through a strategic disorientation of the self with others. It is
strategic because it involves an understanding of power/knowledge, and
it’s disorienting because it involves escaping oneself beyond institutional
forms of being.
Foucault’s position that friendship can serve as an opportunity for gay
men to explore new relationships and connections seeks to alter our under-
standing of friendship. Rather than thinking of friendship divorced from
or distinct from other intimate relationships, Foucault argues that pleasure
and power can be useful elements of friendship. I wish to explore Fou-
cault’s suggestive approach to friendship and its pedagogical elements. I
want to argue that a homosexual ascesis based on friendship involves a
continual strategic disorientation of the self on the self based on an ethic of
refusal, experimentation, and invention. I wish to show that this strategic
94 D. L. CARLSON
disorientation contains pedagogical practices. To make this point, I rely on

Elizabeth Ellsworth’s work. Her approach to pedagogy centers more on
the relationship between the body and architectural spaces rather than on
the technical aspects of teaching and learning. Ellsworth’s work provides
me with an opportunity to bring the visceral into the pedagogical and relate
it to Foucault’s notion of ascesis. If ascesis is a continual work on the self
through our continual relationships with others, as Foucault’s imagines,
the ways in which we work on our selves has to involve modes of teaching
and learning. It is my position that friendship can be used as a way to teach
and learn how to strategically disorientate ourselves from ourselves as an
ascesis.
Friendship as a Way of Life

Michel Foucault argued that homosexuality offered the social landscape
the potential for new relations to emerge, which are not necessarily dic-
tated by traditional ones (e.g., family), but are “affective and relational
virtualities” that are more “slantwise” (Foucault 1997, p. 138). Moreover,
Foucault argues that should be practiced as an ongoing ascesis, or as “the
work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make
the self appear which, happily, one never attains” (ibid., p. 137). Foucault’s
comments serve as a collection of question marks about how to both indi-
vidually and collectively compose a life that is in-the-making. In short,
how to live a continually homosexual ascesis based on friendships based on
intensities and pleasures.
He tries to establish a new cartography of subjectivities and social rela-
tionships grounded in bodies and pleasures. His optimism is based primarily
on certain principles and practices. Instead of sex as the window into the
secrets of the “soul,” or the means by which we discover the truth of one-
self, or the solidifying agent (glue) that melds our various subjectivities
into an ossified self, or the banner in which we declare our liberation, it
is, instead, a vital aspect of ourselves to be used to build new relations and
alternative subjectivities. Indeed, sex can be used as a means to continu-
ally work at building new rationalities and subjectivities and to continually
reflect on oneself about how one wants to be in the world.
This effort entails taking risks, experimentation, and invention with one-
self in relation to others. It is a “desire-in-uneasiness” as a means to fashion
a way of life. Friendship, then, for Foucault is a desire in uneasiness, where
intensities, bodies, and pleasures of various kinds (not just sexual pleasures)
become continually reimagined and altered in action as a practice. These

alternative positions of relationalities and affinities provide people with a
variety of ways to continually be in the world, and they deconstruct pre-
dominate perceptions about homosexuality. They contest dominant views
and crystallized ways about how people should relate to one another. The
avenues and principles that Foucault offers in this interview are how can a
homosexual way of life as an ascesis disrupt and interrupt codified ways of
relating to oneself and others as an ethical stance? Or, in other words, what
can be “played” in disrupting dominant discourses about how one relates
to oneself with others?
This last point is important because it implies that bodies- and plea-
sures-as-a-gay ascesis based on friendship is a strategic endeavor. Homo-
sexual ascesis, far from playing its role in the homo/hetero binary, is a
continual practice on the self with others to strategically disrupt prevailing
discourses and to continually invent new ways of being with others in and
through bodies and pleasures. What can be “played” via bodies, pleasures,
and intensities, affinities, subjectivities is a thoughtful/bodily endeavor and
not a thought-less one. Foucault argues as much when he asserts that power
relations are strategic. As an “action upon an action” every power relation
is in some form and to lesser or more degrees asymmetrical, entails some
sort of struggle, entails using multiple and different strategies, and thus
includes reversals and resistances, and offers the opportunity for “escape,
or possible flight” (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, p. 225). Bod-
ies and pleasures can foster alternative arrangements to create new ways of
engaging with others in the world. Friendships as a gay ascesis can help us
develop and grow more of an “art of life” rather than a “science or scientific
knowledge (or pseudo-scientific knowledge) of what sexuality is” (Eribon
2004, p. 320). Sexual desire and practices are a part of the individual’s
behavior, but are nonetheless a creative process, and from those desires
“new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation”
emerge (ibid.).
Furthermore, Foucault argues that a gay ascesis based on friendship
permits individuals to not only build new relationships with others, enjoy
and explore new subjectivities, affinities, and pleasures, but to also refuse
certain “life paths” established in advance. Refusing the assumed ways in
which one should be and live in the world. This means that a gay ascesis
allows individuals to use their sexuality to make life changes and not to
“limit the effects of my sexual choice in such a way that my life doesn’t
96 D. L. CARLSON
change in any way” (ibid., p. 321). Thus, one should “not be homosex-
ual, but should work to be gay” (ibid.). Finally, by refusing predetermined
life paths, remaining curious about new subjectivities and intensities, and
innovating new time/spaces, Foucault contends that gay ascesis based on
friendship seeks new escapes, ones that generate “new relational possibili-
ties” (ibid., p. 323). These new relational possibilities involve pedagogical
endeavors.
Pedagogies of Friendship
Pedagogy is an important aspect of the gay ascesis based on friendship.
Friendships involve relations with oneself and in relation to others. Peda-
gogy involves some relation to knowledge, whether that be self knowledge,
knowledge of others, or knowledge of the world. What I want to do in this
section is to show how Foucault’s ideas on friendship have pedagogical
aspects. To do that I want to discuss three aspects of Ellsworth’s (2004)
work. First, I want to examine Ellsworth’s notion of pedagogy as a bodily
endeavor; second, show how pedagogical pivot points link to Foucault’s
perspective of homosexual ascesis based on friendship; and third, to display
a few aspects of the various pedagogical modalities that we can learn from
Ellsworth’s work and how they tie to Foucault’s notions of friendship.
Ellsworth argues that knowledge once established becomes dead, or a
“decomposed by-product of something that has already happened to us”
(2004, p. 1). Pedagogical relationship with knowledge is a corporeal one,
one that involves “the thinking-feeling, the embodied sensation of mak-
ing sense” and is thus always in-the-making. Thus, the self employs and
interacts with the thinking-feeling enterprise to continually and constantly
engage with and reflect on knowledge in relation to oneself with others.
We are, as we are learning, engaged with pedagogical time/spaces, fashion-
ing a self in the process. This fashioning of the self relies on non-linguistic
aspects of learning and privileges the ineffable, the affective, senses, sensu-
alities, pleasures of the learning process. Learning involves living, moving,
affective, sensing, and sensual bodies that interact and maneuver through
various spaces.
Ellsworth focuses on anomalous sites of pedagogy (e.g., museums) to
investigate the ways in which art and architecture fosters living, breathing
pedagogies with active, sensual bodies as sites of knowledge and learn-
ing. Doing so, she emphasizes the dynamic relationship among thinking,
feeling, sensing, and relating with and in various spaces. Language, thus,
becomes secondary to learning as the body becomes the primary site of

knowledge production. The composition of and juxtaposition to various
sensations, textual elements, and images produce pedagogical affects. These
spatial arrangements that privilege affect and sensation permit a continual
learning, or learning in-the-making.
Learning in-the-making occurs, according to Ellsworth, in pedagogical
pivot points. Pedagogical pivot points are transitional spaces through which
time and space place the “self in relation to self, others, and the world,”
in unique, and sometimes, agonistic ways. She argues that these spaces
redefine pedagogy as an “undirected dynamic of inter-relation” (p. 57).
As such, pedagogical pivot places interact and engage with students simi-
larly and not as stable entities and identities, but as “moving subjects on a
continuous passage towards knowings that are always incomplete” (p. 5).
If pedagogical subjects are incomplete in pedagogical pivot places, they
continually remain incomplete and always/already becoming. Pedagogical
pivot places, as transitional spaces, can help educators reimagine pedagogy
as continually flexible and experimentally relational. This view invites edu-
cators to think of learning as an emergence and an ongoing process. Ped-
agogical pivot places also urge educators to think of teaching and learning
as playful and creative activities rather than static and objective. The learn-
ing subject in pedagogical pivot spaces remains open to relating to the
known and unknown of itself and with others, as well as interacting with
the unknowable and knowable of itself and its social environment. To this
last point, Ellsworth contends that pedagogical pivot places are spaces that
negotiate the movement between inner and outer realities and experiences,
or between the knowable and unknowable to itself and others. To elaborate
on her ideas, Ellsworth explicates Anna Deavere Smith’s theatrical perfor-
mances, Shimon Attie’s visual projections projects, Frank Gehry’s architec-
tural design of the Ray and Maria State Center for Computer, Information,
and Intelligence Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the
Art Inside Out exhibit at Manhattan’s Children’s Museum, and Tom Han-
ks’ characters in the film, Cast Away. For the purposes of this chapter, I
don’t want to go into too much detail about each of their potential con-
tribution to pedagogical thinking. Instead, I wish to parcel out a few key
pedagogical aspects that link to my understanding of Foucault’s gay ascesis
of friendship based on an ethic of disorientation. To summarize, briefly,
what we learn about pedagogy from Ellsworth’s explication of these artists
and architects are the various ways that the body interacts with spaces and
experiences to produce knowledge in-the-making.
98 D. L. CARLSON
Anna Deavere Smith was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant in

1996. Her theatrical productions are known for their methodology as well
as for their performances. She explores the “antagonistic selves and oth-
ers into close proximity without closing or presuming to know the spaces
of differences between them” (p. 58). Smith does this by interviewing a
diverse range of people who are involved in certain historical events.
For example, for her project on the Crown Heights and Los Angeles
riots, she interviewed “rabbis, rappers, housewives, teachers, police offi-
cers, activists, mothers, grocers, teenagers, academics, politicians, clergy,
and business owners,” to name a few. After she listens to the tapes of each
interview several times, she creates a performance of the people “… by tak-
ing onto her own body the words, intonations, affects, gestures, rhythms,
and accents of those she listened to” (p. 63). Smith does more than mimic
her participants, she bases her performance on the moments when the par-
ticipant defies language, or when “smooth-sounding words fail us” (Smith
in Ellsworth 2004, p. 63). It is in these moments, when language fails
the participant, that Smith claims, “… we can learn a lot about a person”
(p. 63). It is in this transitional space between enunciation and the collapse
of language where pedagogical pivot place appears. It is here, Ellsworth
proclaims, that the individual deals with, embodies, and senses the unrest
and instability of identity as a relation of oneself to oneself with others so
that “… a reordering of self and other can be set in motion and so that we
might go on relating to each other at all” (p. 64).
In short, it is the pauses, hesitations, that foster, subsidize, and favor
the disorientation of the self and generates spaces for self-innovation and
originality. Furthermore, it is these pedagogical pivot places that clog lan-
guage, stall its meaning-making machine, and tangle the all-too-convenient
distinctions between the self and other.
Shimon Attie’s visual projections of images in urban spaces “juxtapose
images, languages, memories, and streets” (p. 58). His work represents
what Ellsworth calls, “event potentials” (p. 58). These event potentials
inject history into the present in order to elicit “social change and identities
in the making” (p. 58). His projections remind his viewers of “histories
hidden and nearly forgotten in the here and now of contemporary urban
space” (p. 65). Attie’s projections remind his viewers about the relevance
and importance of history in public places and how historical events inform
the activities and languages of the present. Furthermore, he interposes
forces of power relations in social spaces, where the participant confronts
their own sense of place. Power relations, according to Attie, strive to
discipline and rationalize, but are more likely to be prone to chaos, turmoil,
discord, and impetuous ruptures. Attie’s projections force the viewer to
confront the phantoms of the past and absorb their (phantoms) gazes in
flickering moments of disorientation. These projects intend to alter the
time/spaces of the viewer’s world and function as pedagogical pivot places
that disfigure time.
Frank Gehry’s design of the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Com-
puter, Information, and Intelligence Sciences at MIT campus character-
izes what Ellsworth calls transitional space as “potential.” Here, “learning
and teaching about the world are seen as a constant movement of folding,
unfolding, and refolding of inside to outside, outside to inside” (p. 58).
This type of design “attempts to give material form to cognition’s detours
when it becomes inventive” (p. 58). The multidimensional aspect of the
space and the incomplete interior of the building promote the notion that
spaces can be reused, reconfigured, and rearranged. Time and space remain
flexible, fluid, and transitional. The building encourages a learning self
that is in-the-making, one that invites self-fashioning, risk-taking, and self-
experimentation. It also compels the individual to be an active participate
in the learning process, where the space establishes the shifting contours
for learning to occur. It is in this active arrangement that we find the ped-
agogical pivot place in Gehry’s design.
The Art Inside Out exhibit of Manhattan’s Children’s Museum illus-
trates the “difficulties that educators and designers face when they try to
create exhibits, environments, and events, that address ‘moving subjects’”
(p. 58). It invites students to step inside the playful aspects of the creative
process. As such, it’s assumed that the learning process involves collabora-
tion, experimentation, and innovation. The pedagogical pivot place in this
expression is the space between participants as they play, and as they spon-
taneously generate the rules for how to create “slantwise” relationships.
Finally, Tom Hanks’ character, Chuck, becomes deserted on a tropical
island after a plane crash in the show, Cast Away. A volleyball, later named
Wilson, comes ashore as debris from the crash. Chuck uses his imagina-
tion to draw a human face on the volleyball to create Wilson and to adapt
to his harsh and unfamiliar environment. He employs this object to stop
“fighting to control it—to working with the island and being in relation
to it” (p. 78). He transforms himself in order to become an active agent in
his new environment and to revel in the peculiar and bizarre surroundings.
As Ellsworth summarizes, “His imaginative uses of Wilson as a companion
imbue his experience on the island with meaning, and that is how Chuck is
100 D. L. CARLSON
able to eventually transform himself” (p. 78). The imagination and adapta-
tion of the self with one’s environment illustrates the affects of transitional
spaces and the ways in which they interact pedagogically.
Conclusion
Throughout this chapter, I have tried to think about a gay ascesis, as a
continual working on the self, of friendship as a playful and creative activity
interested in changing or altering the types of subjective relationships indi-
viduals can have with themselves, with others, and with the social world.
As such, friendships-as-a-gay ascesis persists between these inner and outer
experiences, so much so that they blur the me from the non-me, or where
the inner and outer selves transform in different time/spaces. It is through
the pedagogical encouragement of the strategic disorientation of bodies
and pleasures that new affective intensities emerge and shifts in community
construction appear.
Smith’s performances remind educators that the pedagogical expe-
riences between teacher and student remain always/already relationally
opaque, fluid, and spongy. As a gay ascesis of friendship, she offers homo-
sexuality as an opportunity to take chances with oneself, assume the stutter
of an other being, and step into the transitional spaces that shuffles the self,
one’s relationship to others and to the social world, in a constant dance of
disorientation. As a gay ascesis of friendship based on an ethic of disorien-
tation, Attie’s work illustrates how discourses haunt the present moment,
how historically “deviant” sexual practices hover over present claims to
codified subjectivities and relating, and ultimately, reveal the thin threads
that tie together the scientificity of the human and social sciences to typolo-
gies of people based on their bodies and pleasures. They, in short, unveil
how power fails when it comes face-to-face with the ineffable, jolted, and
jejune of the bodies and pleasure. Power/knowledge, for its diligent effort
to rationalize and discipline the sensual experiences, proves impotent. As
an example of gay ascesis of friendship based on an ethic of disorientation,
the experience of such a space can be overwhelming in its possibilities and
its potential learning. To encounter a space with so much continual and
constant fluidity and flexibility, which also fosters self-fashioning, can be
disorienting. So much so, that one forgets one’s sense of time, who one
was, and who one is, but one can also determine and change who one wants
to be. Gay friendships, as a continual working on the self, can function in
a similar way, in that they offer the other with a flexible and fluid space to
risk, to discover who one is and who one could be. To try out new spatial
relationships that reconfigure intensities and pleasures in order to construct
new relationships and compose a life as a work of art. Regarding gay ascesis
of friendship, this example shows us that the pedagogical aspect in cre-
ating a self in relation with others involves a playful stance, where selves
are mixed-and-matched with other selves, where virtual cross-dressing and
role-playing cloud our stable sense of self and refocus our view of oth-
ers. Friendships can be useful in this endeavor as long as they are also gay
and good-natured. Again, we see how the pedagogical pivot place can be
altered in order to metamorphose the self in relation to an other. Regarding
gay ascesis of friendship as an ethic of disorientation, Chuck’s disorienta-
tion produced a new self—a strange person in a strange land forced him to
construct new relationships and new intensities that subvert and challenge
prevailing constructs.
Thus, we want to think about a gay ascesis, as a continual working
on the self, of friendship as a playful and creative activity interested in
changing or altering the types of subjective relationships individuals can
have with themselves, with others, and with the social world. It is through
the pedagogical encouragement of the strategic disorientation of bodies
and pleasure that new affective intensities emerge and shifts in community
construction appear. Thus, the homosexual community, despite Epstein’s
invectives and protestations, emerges as a vital one based on polyhedronic
relationships. And, more important, it is also what makes homosexuality,
in all its various guises, varieties, and shifting forms, less about desire and
more desirable.
References
Ellsworth, E. (2004). Places of learning: Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York:
Routledge.
Epstein, J. (1970, September). Homo/hetero: The struggle for sexual identity.
Harper’s Magazine, pp. 37–44, 49–51.
Eribon, D. (2004). Insult and the making of the gay self. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. Dryfus & P. Rabinow
(Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–228).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1997). Friendship as a way of life (J. Johnston, Trans.). In P. Rabinow
(Ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity, and truth (pp. 135–140). New York:
The New Press.
CHAPTER 8
Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life
Adam J. Greteman and Kevin J. Burke
Abstract This chapter utilizes Foucault’s interview, “Friendship as a Way

of Life” to make an argument for the value of schooling as a site for building
fleeting, visiting friendships. The idea is not to lionize friendship, as such,
but to suggest that the malleability present in the learning-of-friendship
that can happen in schooled spaces might be of value in a rethinking of
relationality not only between students and teachers, but also how stu-
dents access or are taught implicitly and explicitly about relationships. Can
homosexuality as it tends toward friendship offer models of relationality
that extend beyond the normalized models of relationality, notably mar-
riage or celibacy, taught in schools? And if we can, what exactly might that
mean for the educational project as it creates opportunities for becoming
a subject? It is Foucault’s curious interest in friendship that helps us think
through this changing twenty-first-century school landscape, a landscape
and institutional space that still grapples with the problems experienced by
A. J. Greteman (B)
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: agreteman@saic.edu
K. J. Burke
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
e-mail: burkekq@uga.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_8
104 A. J. GRETEMAN AND K. J. BURKE
LGBTQ youth and the problems LGBTQ youth raise for schools. If we’re
to reconsider the ways in which schools might become sites of resistance,
persistence, and reinvention in becoming a sexual subject, then we’d do
well to reconsider the possibility of friendship as a concept open among
students and teachers to malleably become a self amid others.
Keywords Friendship · Schooling · Educational policy · Ascesis · Queer
The Interview
This chapter is primarily situated in our reading of Foucault’s (1997a) brief
interview entitled “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Tom Roach (2012) notes
that this interview has been critiqued for lacking “concrete solutions and
specific sites of resistance” (p. 44). Yet, “Foucault is quite insistent,” Roach
argues, “on the value of friendship for the gay community’s political future”
(p. 44). Friendship is, historically, a concept that has been utilized by various
social movements; however, Roach, via Foucault, contends “gay and lesbian
communities—in part because they have been historically denied access
to legal forms of relation—have a unique claim on friendship” (p. 45).
Roach continues “if marital bliss was never an option, friendship in all its
messy malleability was” (p. 45). As we, all of a sudden, find ourselves in a
moment where marital bliss (and misery) is an option for gay couples in the
United States and other countries, we find the role of friendship—about
which more will be said in the chapter—ever more important as a way to
complicate and question the normalizing trends of gay matrimony.1
The interview, of course, is short, shorter than this chapter. And Fou-
cault’s engagement with friendship really emerged only in his late work—
particularly his lectures from 1981 to 1984—as he investigated the emer-
gence of the subject in “practices of the self.” Roach (2012) in his aptly
titled book Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of
Shared Estrangement offers one of the first serious extended engagements
with Foucault’s ideas of friendship’s political and ethical importance. In
Roach’s argument, Foucault’s friendship “points to a sexual politics quite
different from what we know” (p. 1); yet, friendship is, for Roach, merely a
“fleeting placeholder” (p. 15) that “bespeaks the anarchical contingency of
all relationality” (p. 13). For him, Foucault’s friendship becomes the place-
holder for that which works against the “social.” This politics, grounded
in friendship, becomes “a radical queer politics” that “would fight against
8 BEFRIENDING FOUCAULT AS A WAY OF LIFE 105
the institutional impoverishment of the social fabric, and for the creation
of unconventional forms of union and community” (p. 14).
Roach’s analysis—drawing upon Foucault’s own friendship with Guibert
and the emergence of the buddy network during the AIDS epidemic—
offers a compelling articulation for Foucault’s friendship-as-theory. And we
work from Roach’s articulation, to further think through how friendship
helps produce new models of relating and community grounding ourselves
in education. As such, drawing upon Foucault’s ideas in the interview and
his writings within the temporal space of the 1980s we want to turn, like
Foucault, to friendship. We take seriously Foucault’s belief that friendship
has value in the ever-changing ideas of what constitutes gay communities
and how friendship offers a relational model for becoming outside state-
sanctioned and institutionalized ideas of relationality. We say this because
we also take seriously his request in the interview to not establish a new truth
about homosexuality. “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of
one’s sex,” Foucault argued, but “to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive
at a multiplicity of relationships” (Foucault 1997a, p. 135). Friendship
asks us—or provokes us—to think through ways homosexuality might be
used to create beautiful consequences for queer relations in the midst of
ever-changing discourses, institutional demands, and material practices on
sexuality, particularly as such changes enter the classroom. How do we
become friends—to and with whom any number of benefits outside of
the tax code accrue—amid, among, as and with homosexuals, particularly
as homosexuals are “coming out” themselves younger and younger and
often in schooled situations? And given the influence of the institution of
education on the experience of these very youth coming in the doors and
perhaps, now, coming out, how might we think about schooling as a space
for friendship in the ways Foucault has already articulated?
Significant work has already been done within education to think
about the state of things for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and
queer (LGBTQ) youth. The Gay and Lesbian Straight Education Net-
work (GLSEN) publishes research on school climate that has been cited
and recited, as well as critiqued (Greteman and Thorpe 2018). Scholars
across the field of education have made critical interventions thinking about
curriculum (Cruz 2013; Pinar 1998), pedagogy (Britzman 1995), educa-
tional policy (Mayo 2014; Meyer 2009), the intersection of race and sexu-
ality (Kumashiro 2001; McCready 2004a, b), and textbook representation
(Jennings and MacGillivray 2011). The physical presence, representation
of, and language used around gay youth has been established and con-
tested. We continue in this line of work—building upon previous uses of
Foucault while seeking to propose a different way to orient the educational
gaze on homosexuality. Can homosexuality as it tends toward friendship
offer models of relationality that extend beyond the normalized models
of relationality, notably marriage or celibacy, taught in schools? And if we
can, what exactly might that mean for the educational project as it creates
opportunities for becoming a subject?
Education has not had an easy relationship with homosexuality or homo-
sexuals. The history of homosexuality is tied not only to sexology and psy-
chiatry but also to the social institution that is the school and the ways in
which it has disciplined bodies and normalized particular types of relations
over other types of relations (Foucault 1977). Work in this area is manifold,
useful and most illustrative of its progress, now anthologized widely (e.g.,
Meiners and Quinn 2012; Meyer and Carlson 2014). Still, the possibilities
through, and for friendship in education, as regards new relationalities for
gay students, teachers, administrators and other othered others, remains
largely untouched. We have long asked how to make classrooms safe for
LGBTQ kids, altering the relationships in spaces to be more inclusive of
individuals. Lost in that argument, however, are the “slantwise” position-
alities (Foucault 1997a, p. 138) that resist easy categorization and thus
facile incorporation into more inclusive pictures of alternative families in
textbooks, for example. This, we fear, is a failure of imagination and theory.
“Perhaps” Foucault pondered, “it would be better to ask oneself, ‘What
relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied,
and modulated?’” (p. 135).
There are many ways of life, of course. Marriage is, for some, a way of life.
Celibacy is, for others, a way of life. Still, for others, promiscuity is a way of
life as well. Each of these ways of life is open to “homosexuals.” Homosex-
uals can get married in a growing number of countries. For gay Catholics,
celibacy is the way of life that leads to heaven. And, well promiscuity is a
way of life most associated with homosexuals. Yet, for Foucault none of
these ways of life are what the problem of homosexuality tends toward;
they may be elements of friendship, but they are not the sum of the thing;
they are not processes one uses friends to mature through. Rather, the care
that is to be taken, the tendency itself is friendship. And it is Foucault’s curi-
ous interest in friendship that helps us think through twenty-first-century
education, an apparatus and concept that still grapples with the problems
experienced by LGBTQ youth and the problems LGBTQ youth raise for
schools.
Tending Toward Friendship

Homosexuality via Foucault should be less concerned with or tied to ques-
tions of identity—such as “Who am I?”—in attempts to find the truths of
one’s sex. “Rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a mul-
tiplicity of relationships” is the task for homosexuality (Foucault 1997a,
p. 135). Some schools have become safe spaces for students to come out
as gay, although how safe schools are is, of course, debatable as is the idea
of safe space itself (Hanhardt 2013; Sadowski 2016). Students—younger
and younger—reveal the truth of their character through the proud utter-
ance “I am lesbian…gay…bisexual…transgender…queer…etc.” This is, on
its own, not a bad thing, though we ought to pay close attention to the
ever-present exculpatory nature of the coerced confession here; to come
out, in other words, might be viewed as “liberatory, redeeming, and puri-
fying” but limiting an analysis to this individualized experience often fails
to account for the various “systems of regulation and surveillance” (Roach
2012, p. 21) that make coming out necessary and indeed increasingly com-
pulsory, particularly for the sake of certain legal protections. While the pro-
cesses of coming out within the current realities of the twenty-first century
are nothing to dismiss, such an utterance must now, as it becomes more
possible to utter, be engaged for what it allows students to do in the world.
To utter one’s identity might be an important step (although not the only
possible first step) but what consequences emerge after such an utterance?
Or, what does it mean to be “becoming homosexual” after one announces
one’s gayness?
The ability to announce oneself as “gay” is, of course, a part of a his-
torical process. In Foucault’s engagement with reverse discourse, we see
the inversion of medical discourse of the nineteenth century during the
early-to-mid twentieth century. In this moment, homosexuals inverted the
medical discourse that positioned “homosexuals” as objects, often patholo-
gized and asserted themselves as subjects—thus inventing themselves. Yet,
as Tom Roach (2012) argues “Gay liberation, while an important and nec-
essary stage in what Foucault calls ‘becoming homosexual,’ was never for
him an end in itself” (p. 43). The reversal of terms whereby the homosexual
becomes a subject position “only paves the way for future becomings—a
beyond sexuality, a postliberationist politics, which may preeminently take

the form of friendship as a way of life” (p. 43).
Homosexuality, we see, is a problem. It’s a problem that has taken many
forms. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It makes homosexuality inter-
esting, newsworthy even. It becomes a bad thing when those who are
homosexuals are seen as a problem people instead of simply as people who
have problems—one of those problems being how one “makes” oneself a
homosexual. So, homosexuals have problems like all people. But, homo-
sexuals have, of course, not always been a people. As Foucault wrote in The
History of Sexuality:
Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was trans-

posed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a
hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberra-
tion; the homosexual was now a species. (1990, p. 43)
But what of this species known as homosexual? What is the problem toward
which it tends? We might look across the ever-growing body of research
that makes an object of homosexuals. Doing so we might see how some
research proposes homosexuality as a problem that needs to be fixed (e.g.,
reparative therapy) or as a people who are made problems because of a
homophobic society (e.g., critical research) or as a problem of embryonic
development (e.g., biological research). We are little interested in seeing
homosexuality in such ways. Rather, we follow Foucault who thought, “the
development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one
of friendship” (1997a, p. 136). And the problem of homosexuality develops
toward friendship. “Friendship,” for Foucault, “is a way of life” and it is
homosexuality that is central to this way of life.
We should take a moment and think about the ways in which the verb
“tend” is vital to our analysis here. The OED has the verb form as meaning
a “disposition to move towards …” and “to direct one’s, make one’s way …
towards something” which fits well with a first reading of Foucault’s inten-
tions regarding the general disposition of homosexuality as a possible “sum
of everything through which [men] can give each other pleasure” (Foucault
1997a, p. 136). This echoes Warner’s (2005) notion that the “direction of
our glance can constitute our social world” (p. 89) which Ahmed affirms as
the ability to, by directing attention to “a shared object … create the public,
which then exists by virtue of being addressed” (2006, p. 120). Here, the
shared object toward which we make our way is friendship, which might
allow an arrival “at a multiplicity of relationships” (Foucault 1997a, p. 135).

Tend, however, is used in the verb form in other ways as well. It can mean
to “apply oneself to the care and service of …” as well as “to turn one’s
attention [to], apply oneself to do something” and finally, for our purposes,
“to turn one’s ear … listen, hearken” (OED). So in some sense, we are,
in writing this (and you, dear reader, are in reading this) tending to this
notion of homosexuality and its tendencies toward friendship, just in our
written conversation here. This is well and good, but we want to note that
Roach’s (2012) analysis of friendship-as-shared-estrangement, which takes
up Foucault’s work in different ways than ours here, sees homosexuality-as-
friendship very distinctly as “care[ing] for those in whom one finds nothing
of oneself” (p. 130). That is: If we are to listen, carefully, to the imperative
of relationality which Foucault insists upon, then in education in particular,
we will have to begin caring for our students, and our LGBTQ students
in particular, not because they are like us, but particularly because they are
not. LGBTQ students are not born into familial culture, but tend toward
one as they themselves invent their way of life. This application in the care
and service of students, as friends, has been long absent from the literature
on and in education, and it often comes down to a paucity of consideration
around what a way of life in school, differently imagined, might be, once
it is tended toward.
Homosexuality as Relationality Through

Friendship
We see immediately that Foucault seeks to move our thinking about homo-
sexuality away from a problem of “knowledge”—an epistemological ques-
tion philosophically speaking and toward a problem of “being” (an issue of
ontology) and “relationality” (an issue of ethics). Less interested in sticking
with the dogmatic proposition that homosexuality speaks a “truth” about
our identity—something akin to Lady Gaga’s pop-anthem that argued we
are “born this way” and should be proud—Foucault challenged us to push
beyond this historical moment of sexuality (sexuality as truth) to move to
an issue of relationality. Of course, homosexuality as a problem of truth
(e.g., I am gay) is about relating, but it is an impoverished view of relating
that rests on the homo-hetero binary that is, itself, a very modern idea
seemingly rooted in “the closet” (Foucault 1978, 1984a, 1984b; Sedg-
wick, 1990). And we can see how this binary makes relations between
men rather complicated.2 Straight men who appear effeminate are viewed
as “gay”; gay men who do not don a stereotypical performance are ques-
tioned as to whether they are really gay at all; effeminate gay men are beaten
up for their transgressions and straight men are boxed in too tightly by the
gender norms that police masculinity. And yet, in many ways, all of these
“gay” men are now extended the official protections of the law in ways
never previously seen. Still, homosexuality and heterosexuality as “truths”
of our identity simply are too limiting for the radical diversity that could
(and arguably does) exist between men.
Foucault notes his concern about male relationality in the interview:
As far back as I remember, to want guys was to want relations with guys. That
has always been important for me. Not necessarily in the form of a couple but
as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? (1997a,
p. 136)
How indeed is it possible for men to be together in the midst of homo-

phobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, homonormativity, racism, sexism,
and ableism? In what ways has homosexuality as an identity outlived its use-
fulness? Homosexuality—particularly as homosexuals fought back against
the psychiatric, medical, legal, and educational institutions that created and
pathologized them—was about an ability to relate to men and the battles
won to claim the identity “homosexual” (to utter “we’re here, we’re queer,
get used to it”) are incredibly important. Such political battles fought for
(gay) men to relate to (gay) men sexually and to be recognized as legiti-
mate subjects whose desires deserve protection and visibility. When Fou-
cault articulates his “quasi-manifesto” on friendship, visibility and protec-
tion were well on their way—as homosexuality was no longer pathologized
by the American Psychiatric Association in their Diagnostic and Statisti-
cal Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ) and gay characters were emerging
on television and in films. Perhaps prescient or perhaps merely imagining
a future unknown but grounded in his passion for history, Foucault pro-
voked in his interview a potential next step in human relationality, beyond
mere recognition-cum-assimilation.
Friendship is, of course, a messy topic, malleable really. It lacks institu-
tional forms. This is not to suggest that it is, in the end, formless. It has no
state-mandated policies dictating rights and responsibilities. It is a choice,
much less an obligation, that though it has a rich history (particularly in
song, but also institutionally in, say, the existence of fraternal societies for
instance) carries less historical state-regulated freight than familial and mar-
ital love. Yet, it is a relational form that deeply impacts how people come
into existence as subjects, and for Foucault, it was a relational form to pon-
der. The “subject” is, of course, of great interest to Foucault. While he
is often cited for his theorizations of power, he declared in “The Subject
and Power,” “it is not power but the subject, that is the general theme of
my research” (2001, p. 327). Frédéric Gros, one of the editors for Fou-
cault’s lectures, argued that Foucault’s oeuvre addressed the emergence of
the subject in three ways. The subject emerged, as seen in The History of
Madness and Discipline and Punish from practices of division via the emer-
gence of modern institutions (e.g., asylums and prisons). In The Order of
Things, Foucault illustrates how the subject emerged through practices of
knowledge and “theoretical projections” in scientific discourses (p. 512).
And finally, in the late work of Foucault, the subject emerges in “practices
of the self” which is central to our work in this current chapter (p. 512).
How do we work through the problems of homosexuality that have not
been subsumed or normalized by advancements in legal recognition under
the rubric of expanded access to what Sycamore (2008) describes as the
“trinity”—marriage, the military, or adoption? This is largely the continued
project of queer theory as its practitioners ponder ideas of homonationalism
(Puar 2007), homonormativity (Duggan 2003), metronormativity (Hal-
berstam 2005), rural queerness (Gray 2009; Herring 2010), transgender
politics (Spade 2011) among many other issues that are connected to the
“problem” of homosexuality. Homosexuality is, we argue, still a problem
that raises issues for, quite simply, human relationality. How are those who
engage in same-sex encounters, not to say “sexual” encounters, received
and treated in the ever-changing landscapes of life, particularly when they
refuse to engage in the practices that are now seen as “respectable” or
part of the “new normal”? Are these encounters connected to a “mode of
life” (Foucault 1997a, p. 136) and approaches to being in the world that
resist the temptations of connecting sexuality to truth? The central worry is
one of reduction precisely because, though “we live in a relational world”
the very institutions (the law, in particular) that grant “recognition” and
thus normalcy and sanction are the same ones that impoverish the range of
experiences possible for individuals. After all, “Society and the institutions
which frame it” Foucault argued, “have limited the possibility of relation-
ships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage”
(1997b, p. 158). It is precisely this complexity that “friendship” seeks to
ponder whereby “friendship” as a relational model assists in the emergence

of our becoming “subjects” in a messy world.
An Escape Hatch of Friendship

What then are queers to do in the midst of the twenty-first century’s march
toward normalization? “We must escape and help others to escape” Fou-
cault (1997a) argued “the two ready-made formulas of the pure sexual
encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities” (p. 137). This escape is
still necessary three decades after Foucault argued for it. Gays and lesbians
have gained access to the ready-made formula of marriage—“the lovers’
fusion of identities”—and promiscuity is relatively less pathologized (or
perhaps it has been monetized and thus cleansed of its moral residue). Still
we had promiscuity in an epidemic and continue to have it in the age of
Grindr, Scruff, Tinder, and other facilitative hookup sites. Both options
are still the ready-made formulas. Gay men still often note that “every-
one is a whore at some point” while gay mainstream political groups (now
possible!) continue to advocate and spend millions on mainstream causes
tied most closely to the concerns of the white gay and lesbian middle class
(Duberman 2018). And while there may be overlap (Open marriages! Tri-
ads!), there is an overwhelming sense that progress is being made in both
directions: It’s easier to hook up with technology and it’s easier to find a
soul mate now that the state will sanctify a same-sex marriage.
To escape such formulas continues to be the challenge that faces homo-
sexuality. How do we escape the homonormative demands for marriage
and both the homophobic imaginary of promiscuous homosexuals and
stereotypical idea of promiscuity as a way of life? Much ink has been spilled
over such escape plans. And we will here spill more ink, focusing on the
role education might play in hatching such escape plans. Can education
through Foucault cultivate ways of life that are inhabitable for homosexu-
ality beyond the ready-made formulas? Cris Mayo (2014) in LGBTQ Youth
and Education argued as much, noting:
Schools, too, need to encourage forms of association that make diverse life
choices possible for students. Marriage is not the only form of intimate rela-
tionship in which one finds the best expressions of one’s autonomy. There is
also friendship, association, and other forms of intimate relation that do not
entail a particular sort of ceremony. (p. 66)
Schools are therefore a ripe and contested space and time where relations
are imagined and practiced. So, how do we write through Foucault, and
particularly this brief interview, without creating a “program” which “be-
comes a law” such that there emerges “a prohibition against inventing”
(p. 159), all over again. We have to tread lightly (taking advantage of our
lightness in our loafers, perhaps) queering all the while.
To Be Normal
In the second decade of the twenty-first century—in the midst of homosex-
uals in the United States, at least, becoming normalized under the banner
of gay marriage, finding themselves included in the military, able to adopt
children, and stipulated as populations to be protected by policies aimed
to limit (and define) hate-crimes and discrimination—there emerges a new
need to theorize homosexuality. One might argue that the need for the-
ory, in the face of normalization, is perhaps more imminent than before
because the effects of normative policies are less overtly/visibly damaging
than, say, gay-plague baiting and the public assassination of political fig-
ures. The trouble with normal, of course, comes in the tacit agreement that
“what most people are … is what people should be” (Warner 1999, p. 57).
For often, as Butler and Athanasiou (2013) argue:
The norms that are supposed to “set us free” end up operating as constraints
on the very freedom they are meant to protect. At such moments, we have to
wonder what forms of cultural narrowness keep us from asking how norms
that sometimes function in the name of freedom can also become vehicles of
cultural imperialism and unfreedom. (p. 48)
The need to theorize relates to the reality that homosexuality is still prac-
ticed (or, rather, still is ) amid these ongoing changes in how homosexuals
are treated (indeed constituted and limited) by public policy, represented
in the media, and allowed to be a part of what once were and perhaps
still are homophobic institutions. This move toward re-theorizing is a new
assertion that “‘we are here’ … re-read as ‘We are still here,’ … ‘we have
not yet been disposed of’” (p. 196), though perhaps that collective “we”
runs the risk of being normalized out of existence, failing to enact the kind
of rupture in the order of things that Ranciere (2010) views as necessary
for emancipation and that Biesta (2014) deems vital for subjectification. In
the process, we (that word again) risk—through a failure of theory in rela-

tion to homosexuality—missing the opportunity for the “removal” of the
very defining of the “homosexual” “from … naturalness” (Ranciere 1995,
p. 36). To be included or represented relatively more positively, in other
words, might be taken as steps in the right direction (they are certainly steps
in some direction3 ), but amid such inclusive practices we need to investi-
gate other practices that have contributed to “homonormativity” (Duggan
2003, p. 51). How is the solidarity of a normalized “we,” in other words,
a threat even as it carries certain very real benefits? Or: What can theory
offer as an abutment—or rebuttal—to the notion that the protections of
being made normal are worth the effort, full stop?
Many of the practices that are part of becoming included have already
been critiqued for how they exclude or include homosexuals in problematic
institutions (Polikoff 2008; Spade 2011; Stanley and Smith 2011; Warner
1999). And these practices ground themselves in the idea that homosex-
uality is a matter of identity. One identifies as a homosexual—often by
coming out through uttering “I am gay”—and as such becomes recogniz-
able as both belonging to and representing a category that is protected by
(in some places, at least) laws against discrimination in housing, violence,
and employment.4 One becomes, in that moment of interpellation (which
really isn’t a single moment of course, as the coming out is always demanded
and remanded in new and different ways) a being deserving of access to
institutions previously denied one’s peers of the same recognizable cate-
gory. The problems once faced by individuals who identify as gay have now
become recognized as in need of fixing so that such problems are, well, no
longer problems—at least in the law’s eyes. Gays, mostly in adult form,
have become a part of the protected classes of people that have recourse to
the law. This does not mean that violence against gay individuals has been
stopped (as our friends in the NRA would remind us: lawbreakers will, of
course, break the law anyways) but it does mean that a kind of institu-
tionalized violence: The violence of institutionalization itself has replaced
the violence of marginalization, at least for what Connell (1995) has called
people who denote the right kind of “very straight gay.” Implicit, then, in
our discussion of Foucault’s turn toward friendship, is a sense that though
“we are here” and people may indeed even have gotten used to it, the new
risk is that a normalized “gay” we, risks assimilation into unbeing. Lost in
the process of assimilation in other words is the potential for solidarity in
still being here, in new, different, creative and productive ways.
Learning Homosexuality in School: Befriending

Foucault
We exist in a world. It is a world filled with people. It is also a world filled
with institutions that create—through research, policies, and practices—the
people that fill the world. Schools are the institution that we are interested
in as it is in school that students encounter the competing purposes of such
a peculiar institution. In school, students are pushed and pulled amid the
surprisingly elusive and manifold purposes of education. Whether we follow
Labaree’s (2010) assessment on the competing and incomplete purposes of
education: social efficiency, social mobility, and democratic citizenship or
Gert Biesta’s (2006): qualification, socialization, subjectification—we can
see that schools are charged with a great many ends most of which tend
not to align particularly well.
Foucault, we know, had interesting things to say about schools and
learning. In “Talk Show”—an interview greatly concerned with learning
and revolts in learning—he argued:
The first thing one should learn—that is, if it makes any sense to learn such
a thing—is that learning is profoundly bound up with pleasure. Certainly,
learning can be made an erotic, highly pleasurable activity. Now, that a teacher
should be incapable of revealing this, that his job should virtually consist of
showing how unpleasant, sad, dull, and unerotic learning is—to me, this is
an incredible achievement. (1996, p. 136)
He continued:
But it is an achievement that certainly has its raison d’etre. We need to know
why our society considers it so important to show that learning is something
sad; maybe it’s because of the number of people who are excluded from it.
(p. 136)
In his assessment, schools exist for social efficiency and qualification and to
maintain that existence, schools are disagreeable “to keep the number of
people with access to learning at a minimum” (p. 136).
Yet, to focus on the school in such a way—as an institution which subjects
students to subjects would be to focus on only one way in which the subject
emerges—through domination and knowledge. Instead, with friendship we
are tasked to think through how the subject emerges through “practices of
the self,” practices which are by definition relational, within the classrooms,
hallways, and beyond in schools. “In the practice of the self, someone else,
the other,” Foucault argued, “is an indispensable practice to effectively
attain and be filled by its object, that is to say, by the self” (2005, p. 127).
This other is not defined. In schools, the other may very well be the teacher
or a peer. The issue at hand is to think through the practices, the techniques
utilized to allow the subject to emerge and this requires work.
Work, Visiting, and Ascesis

Foucault’s concern is the relations between men that lack a “code” (e.g.,
marriage) to communicate. “They [two men of noticeably different ages]
face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure
them about the meaning of the movement that carries them toward one
another” (1997a, p. 136). And without such terms or words, well, Foucault
argued “they have to invent from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless,
which is friendship: that is to say, the sum of everything through which
they can give each other pleasure” (p. 136). When Foucault talks about
invention, it is not an ahistorical invention out of context. Rather, it is a
serious challenge to intervene in the contexts of our lives. So it is not, in
our case, that individual teachers or students choose to tend to things other
than friendship in school of their own accord, but that the institutions that
filter the possibilities of their imagined worlds have long constrained their
vision of what is possible in terms of relationality among the desks, texts,
dances, and other detritus that make up the schooled context. We find it
useful to consider—as we render the possibility of imagination, of tending
toward a new thing—the value of visiting, of perhaps considering teachers
and students as mutual visitors to the space of school.
Roach (2012) lauds the role of the AIDS buddy system “developed by
New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the early 1980s” which “became
de rigueur in international AIDS caregiving soon thereafter” (p. 110) in
reshaping the discourse around people with AIDS and the gay community
in general. The buddy system functioned particularly on the basis of an
“absence of a shared history” and “with a freedom from a common past
and a foundational acknowledgment of finitude” (p. 112). The buddy was
a caregiver, but essentially a visitor in the life of someone in need.
This notion of the visitor as temporary fellow-traveler might serve to
desacralize the link between teacher and student that, so often tied to
Christian notes of salvation through “change” has long produced damag-
ing situations for gay students (and really all students) in schooled contexts.
It might, as well, de-link the ongoing push to (mis)use standardized test

scores to punitively “measure” teacher and student performance; beyond
this, it might be used to argue that labels long used to categorize students
(disabled, but also: troubled, slow, gifted, etc.) be made temporary and
de-emphasized. If I am a visitor with my student, in other words, I know
only as much of her history as emerges in our interactions. We tend toward
friendship if I’m not charged with keeping her tracked in the right way,
if I don’t have her test-score growth to consider first and foremost; we
become, perhaps more able to reconstitute “a way of life … shared among
individuals of different age, status, and social activity” (Foucault 1997a,
p. 138). Indeed “as Disch explains, visiting involves ‘constructing stories
of an event from each of the plurality of perspectives that might have an
interest in telling it and … imagining how I would respond as a character
in a story very different from my own” (as cited in Biesta 2014, p. 115).
The school as a site of visitation, with teachers and students visiting, and
responding to stories very different from their own, might allow for rela-
tionalities, for friendships to be that toward which school tends. Yet, the
school as an institution cannot tend toward such malleable relations for,
as Foucault argued, “institutional codes can’t validate these relations with
multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and chang-
ing forms” (1997a, p. 137). These relations—“friendship” as we call it—are
not merely bound by rules, laws, or habits.
However, these relations might, as Foucault argued, return to asceticism.
For him, ascesis can be understood simply as “the work that one performs
on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which,
happily, one never attains” (1997a, p. 137). Such work requires guidance,
and as he noted, following Philodemus, “individual guidance could not
take place without an intense affective relationship of friendship between
the two partners” (Foucault 2005, p. 137). Friendship, we see, is in fact a
way of life that “we” commit to and work on and tend toward.
On Ending Too Soon

Foucault ends his interview, as we end this chapter, stating “I would like to
say, finally, that something well-considered and voluntary like a magazine
ought to make possible a homosexual culture, that is to say, the instru-
ments for polymorphic, varied, and individually modulated relationships”
(p. 139). Perhaps a book chapter situated within a book engaging Fou-
cault might also be such an instrument, to make possible a “homosexual
culture,” or a “homosexual mode of life” within schools. Yet, this should

not be taken as a call for a program to do so, as Foucault cautioned:
The idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program

is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing.
There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to
these feelings … The program must be wide open. We have to dig deeply
to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such
reason intelligible but not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear
against a background of emptiness and deny its necessity. We must think that
what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable
challenge of the question: What can be played? (1997a, pp. 139–140)
Friendship it seems might be played, as a placeholder that eschews the

language of promiscuity (the trick) and the language of matrimony (the
spouse) to offer an anarchical placeholder that allows relationships to flour-
ish, flounder, succeed, and fail in the ever-changing process of cultivating a
self instead of sanctimoniously holding on to the idea of a truth, a true self,
rooted in our psyches that corresponds to our sexuality. Given the ubiquity
of schools (we may be autodidacts in some ways, but we are trained in insti-
tutions, shaped by them, under the auspices of education for a genuinely
long time) in everyday life, it seems appropriate that we start thinking about
the ways friendship might become the purpose toward which schools tend.
And this, our friends, this takes work.
Notes
1. This isn’t to simplistically assert that friendship is impossible within marriage
(gay or straight) but is to suggest that the kinds of rhetoric that underline the
move toward state-approved weddings and indeed matrimony in general tend
to focus mostly on the kairotic, rather than, say, the filial. Not to mention the
monogamous. It’s not that these versions of love can’t coexist, but that when
weddings become an ideal, the general sense tends to be one of progression
from eros/filia to something more transcendent and important. We choose
to argue the intrinsic value of friendship beyond the normalizing impulse of
wedded bliss, even as we see it present at times within that very frame. There is
much, as well, to be mined in the move to procure legal rights as the ultimate
recourse of a movement. We address this further in the chapter.
2. We write here of men, much like Foucault who in the interview spoke about
men and relations between men while noting the importance and historical
significance of friendship between women. Foucault cites Lillian Faderman’s
Surpassing the Love of Men. Thirty years later, we can add Faderman’s more
recent Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, and
de Lauretis’s The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire as
other important texts that engage relations between women.
3. Probably, this “progress,” by nature accommodationist, falls short of the kind
of careful orientation to directions that Ahmed (2006) points to when speak-
ing of a queer furnishing that would foreground new things, making available
different ways of doing and presumably “being.”
4. One becomes and represents, but also disappears into, is consumed by, this
very category of course.
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CHAPTER 9
Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party:

A Foucauldian Reading of Friendship,
Fractured Masculinities and Their Potential
for School Practices
Joseph D. Sweet
Abstract In his interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault notes

that “The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends
is the one of friendship” (Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. The New Press, New
York, p. 136, 1997). This statement questions suppositions that link homo-
sexual intimacy with the act of sex, for Foucault advocates for the impor-
tance of friendship and emotional intimacy between homosexual men. He
says, “To want guys [garcons ] was to want relations with guys” (p. 136).
Although sexual desire may be implied as an integral feature of “relations,”
Foucault stresses intimacy between men that is “much more than the sexual
act itself” (p. 136). This chapter puts Foucault’s thoughts about friendship
between homosexual men into conversation with recent scholarship in mas-
J. D. Sweet (B)
The University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC, USA
e-mail: joseph.sweet@uncp.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_9
124 J. D. SWEET
culinities theory to see what can be learned about homosocial male love
and intimacy. Much recent scholarly literature in masculinities highlights a
need for emotional intimacy among men yet instances of this intimacy are
continually policed by heterosexism and homophobia (Buitenbos in Cana-
dian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy/Revue canadienne de coun-
seling et de psychothérapie 46(4): 335–343, 2012; Connell in Masculinities.
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005; Kimmel in Guyland: The
perilous world where boys become men. Harper, New York, 2008). Moreover,
Foucault speaks to the close emotional attachment that soldiers require to
endure war, but as he says, the army is a space “where love between men
is ceaselessly provoked [appele] and shamed” (1997, p. 137). This chapter
borrows Foucault’s assertion that institutions provoke and shame homoso-
cial male love to examine the ways that schools regulate intimacy between
boys in spite of contemporary theories of masculinities that correlate a
healthy gender identity with same-sex emotional intimacy.
Keywords Friendship · Masculinities · Intimacy · Homophobia ·

Fractured masculinity · Hegemonic masculinity · Gender ·
Heteronormativity
“It’s a nice view of the marina. Do you wanna sit next to me so you can see
it, too?”
“No. I’ll stay here. People might think we’re gay.”
“Oh … okay.”
This dialogue took place between me and a close male friend, while sitting
at an outdoor cafe abroad. He was facing me and the blank wall directly
behind me, and I had a view of a marina behind him. When the conversation
occurred, I shrugged it off as a generational difference as this friend is
25 years older than me. Yet, I continued to think about why he would
prefer to look at me and the beige stucco behind me, rather than the people
and boats passing behind him. After returning home, I reiterated this story
to a different male friend who responded, “You’re never going to see any of
those people again. What does it matter?” Though one could argue that my
second friend is more enlightened than the first, his response indicates that
the security available when two men sit next to each other stems not from
being comfortable in their own sexuality, gender identity, and expression,
9 DEEP FRIENDSHIP AT A SAUSAGE PARTY: A FOUCAULDIAN READING … 125
but rather from anonymity. Had the incident taken place in a small town
where we lived, one could imagine that the second friend’s response might
be different as anonymity is unlikely if not impossible.
My friends’ reactions are likely products of decades of socialization in
the United States which continues to produce men and boys who generally
avoid physical or emotional intimacy with one another. Correspondingly,
recent scholarship in the field of masculinities suggests that despite the
inroads toward equality and acceptance that gay communities have right-
fully made in Western cultures, many straight men continue to play out
intense anxieties regarding male intimacy (Edwards and Jones 2009; Har-
ris et al. 2011; Kimmel 2008; O’Neil 1981). This may be partially owing
to the assertion that men and boys attempt to hold fast to heteropatriarchy
by distancing themselves, as far as possible, from being perceived as homo-
sexual (Connell 2005; Davis 2002; Harris 2008, 2010; Harris et al. 2011;
Kimmel 2008, 2012). As will be discussed below, anxieties regarding male
intimacy are more complicated than the word homophobia conveys. Yet,
“homophobia” endures as the descriptor for men and boys who fear male
intimacy. Missing from this literature, however, is a nuanced discussion
that problematizes acceptable and inacceptable levels of male intimacy in
K-12 educational settings. As school practices continue to police and reg-
ulate gender normativity, often sanctioning those who refuse to conform
(Blackburn 2006; Blackburn and Smith 2010; Connell 2005; Miller 2015;
Rasmussen 2009; Sweet and Carlson 2018), school-aged boys are being
socialized to perform traditional expectations of masculinity that align with
physical prowess, material gain, competitiveness, sport, and stoicism (Kim-
mel 2008; Kimmel and Messner 2007; Messner and Sabo 1990; Whitson
1990). This reality presents a major challenge as we struggle through a
Trump Administration that appears to exploit and solidify the oppressive
power that traditional masculinity holds in daily practices.
Against this background, this theoretical chapter investigates the place
of homosocial male intimacy in the lives of straight, cis, Western men and
boys in the hopes of illuminating potential contradictions regarding male
intimacy and rupturing long-held practices that forbid emotional and phys-
ical affection among men and boys. Implications from findings will suggest
a productive lens for rethinking school practices regarding accepted and
exalted masculinities in schooling. To accomplish this, I employ a Fou-
cauldian reading of male friendship using “Friendship as a Way of Life”
(Foucault 1997). Framing my analytic through this Foucauldian framework
that takes up the role of friendship among gay men and current scholarly
126 J. D. SWEET
literature in masculinities, I make a case for the importance of male intimacy

in homosocial male friendship as one means to allow for alternate masculine
expressions that work to unseat the powerful position traditional masculin-
ity occupies in the socialization of school-aged boys (Edwards and Jones
2009; Harris 2010; Whitson 1990). In keeping with Foucault’s concep-
tion of intimacy in his interview, this chapter defines intimacy as physical or
emotional closeness, which includes sharing of personal feelings, sharing
near proximity, and platonic touching. In order to combat traditional mas-
culinity, embrace intimacy, and achieve my study’s aim, I offer “fractured
masculinities” (Sweet 2017). In building from other scholars who allege
that masculinity exists across a spectrum, is context specific and sometimes
shifts as boys and men mature (Connell 2005; Edwards and Jones 2009;
Harris 2008; Kimmel 2008; Swain 2006), fractured masculinities leans
on poststructural feminisms to posit masculinity as a continual process of
becoming that is flexible, malleable, situated, and always incomplete. As
such, fractured masculinities counters traditional masculinity by allowing a
multiplicity of accepted masculine expressions. In order to explore fractured
masculinities, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” and fractured masculinities’
implications for classroom practices, I employ the following research ques-
tions: (1) How does a Foucauldian reading of homosexual friendship create
new meanings for homosocial friendship among boys and men, and how
might these new meanings influence K-12 school practices? (2) What can
prosocial pedagogies do to combat homophobia implicit in socialization
and to affirm emotionally intimate relationships among men and boys? (3)
How do social expectations of masculinities engender multiplicities and
flexibility?
Foucault and Hegemonic Masculinity

In “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault advocates for the importance of
friendship and emotional intimacy among gay men and questions presump-
tions that link homosexual intimacy strictly with the physical act of sex. He
writes that what makes homosexuality “disturbing” is not the sexual act,
but the “homosexual mode of life” (1997, p. 136). At its core, this way
of life comprises men who love each other. To combat a common stereo-
type of gay men, he stresses that one does not begin a relationship simply
to consummate it, for consummation happens relatively easily. Friendship
and forms of relation, then, become the defining ideal for his homosexual
mode of life. This way of life is founded in a friendship and love to be
shared among many individuals of various ages and statuses, which Fou-
cault hopes may yield intense relations, a culture, and an ethics defined by
the homosexual way of life.
Though he excludes straight men from his description of this mode
of life, he does discuss various ways in which cultural norms regulate the
behaviors of men in general. As he puts it, contrary to the access that
women have to each other, men’s bodies have been forbidden to other men.
However, Foucault emphasizes that during the wars of recent centuries,
military organizations both tolerated and required physical intimacy among
men, and he maintains that the army simultaneously provokes and shames
love among men. As will be detailed below, men sometimes have access to
other men in highly masculine environments.
Although Foucault does not address intimacy among straight, cismen,
much can be learned from putting his ideas regarding the homosexual way
of life into dialogue with recent scholarly literature in masculinities. Sim-
ilar to the anecdote that began this chapter, the dominant scholarship in
the field of masculinities acknowledges that difficulties in male intimacy
may spring from deep-seated feelings of homophobia and heterosexisms
(Connell 2005; Davis 2002; Edwards and Jones 2009; Harris et al. 2011;
Kimmel 2012; Sweet 2017). Though this is certainly true, to label this
behavior as simply “homophobia” runs the risk of reducing a much more
complicated phenomenon. Homophobia, simply defined, is the “irrational
fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosex-
uals” (merriam-webster.com 2018). To explore the underlying structures
restricting male intimacy, this chapter takes a deeper look into cultural
phenomena beyond the simple definition of homophobia above. Seen this
way, the reasons for straight, cismen’s anxieties regarding homosocial inti-
macy may result from a confluence of factors existing beyond homophobia,
including anxiety about compulsory heterosexuality, feminization, feared
inadequacy, and apprehension about their status within heteropatriarchy.
Factors that create an environment in which cis, straight men have an aver-
sion to physical and emotional intimacy may exist within nondiscriminatory
contexts where homosexuality is not feared or averred.
Acknowledging the complexity regarding homophobia and gender,
recent scholarship reveals fear of feminization as the primary cause of homo-
phobia among men (Connell 2005; Davis 2002; Harris et al. 2011; Kimmel
2008, 2012; Kimmel and Messner 2007; Edwards and Jones 2009). Schol-
ars also affirm that people often conflate sexuality and gender in their daily
128 J. D. SWEET
interactions (Connell 2005; Teich 2012); by conflating gender and sex-

uality, the straight male subject assumes gay men are less masculine and
thus fears being perceived less masculine when someone may suspect him
of being gay. The subject’s perceived heteromasculinity also implies that he
positions this masculinity as an indicator of privilege and power. Their fear
of feminization likewise precludes men from emotional intimacy with one
another particularly among groups of men. Moreover, recent scholarship
reveals that straight men tend to be more emotionally available with women
(platonic or otherwise) than with their male peers (Davis 2002). This phe-
nomenon is in keeping with the notion that men define their manhood
in the eyes of other men (Davis 2002; Edwards and Jones 2009; Harris
2010; Kimmel 2008; Messner 1992; Sweet 2017) and corresponds with
Connell’s (2005) scholarship on hegemonic masculinity.
According to Connell, hegemonic masculinity is “the masculinity that
occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations”
(2005, p. 76); it is the masculinity in the position of power. Impor-
tantly, Connell posits that hegemonic masculinity is contestable, historically
mobile and culturally situated. Hegemonic masculinity is also “culturally
exalted” (Tarrant et al. 2015, p. 72). Given the powerful position that hege-
monic masculinity occupies within masculinities discourse, men attempt
“the hegemonic ideal” (Limmer 2014, p. 185). This “idealized” masculin-
ity works, then, to lionize certain socially ascribed masculine behaviors and
forms of personhood. In fact, some scholars suggest that other masculini-
ties are assessed by their proximity to it (Lingard 2003; Swain 2006), and
still others argue that hegemonic masculinity exists in the “natural state
of masculinity” (Canetto and Cleary 2012, p. 462). In a revision of their
earlier scholarship on hegemonic masculinity, Connell and Messerschmidt
(2005) state that “the concept of hegemonic masculinities presumes the
subordination of nonhegemonic masculinities” (p. 846). In other words,
also implied is an unspoken requisite to treat the marginalized, less mas-
culine (or aberrant) gender identities with disdain. As men’s and boys’
masculinities are continually measured against hegemonic ideals, anxieties
endure regarding men’s perceived gender identities and expressions.
Many men fear emasculation and assert their masculinity through homo-
phobic acts in order to assuage the fear of being excluded or rejected from
hegemonic masculinity. To these men, engaging in homophobic behaviors
improves their statuses in the eyes of other men and asserts their hege-
monic masculinity (Edwards and Jones 2009; Harris et al. 2011; Kim-
mel 2008). Participating in these behaviors is a way to distance themselves
from what they and others may consider homosexual conduct, including
homosocial physical or emotional intimacy; within this context, homosexu-
ality correlates with femininity. And being perceived as feminine emerges as
a considerable threat to conceptions of idealized masculinity rooted within
heteropatriarchal power.
The section above provides a brief overview of the dominant literature in
masculinities and outlines some of the issues regarding male intimacy. The
following section examines some male-only spaces to uncover particular
performances men deploy to create emotional intimacy that is sometimes
predicated on homophobia, heteropatriarchal power, and hegemonic mas-
culinity.
Sausage Parties
Paradoxically, some literature indicates that closeness among men is an
important aspect of a healthy gender identity (Bly 2004; Harris 2010) and
may be one reason for the existence of male-only spaces. Though same-
gender closeness is generally recognized as significant, the culture of con-
duct within male-only spaces continues to produce and perpetuate hetero-
sexisms and homophobia (Davis 2002; Harris et al. 2011; Kimmel 2008,
2012). Given the loss of status that can occur through homosocial intimacy
and corresponding emasculation, homophobia, and heterosexism, some
male-only spaces may preempt homosocial closeness among men. How-
ever, despite the pervasive homophobia within these spaces, the activities
and decorum enacted in them still produce close and lasting relationships
among men (Harris 2010; Totten and Berbary 2015). Examples of such
male-only spaces include some men’s fraternal orders, locker rooms, gyms,
sports teams, and military organizations. Though troops are now gender-
integrated, the military and troops at war were historically male-only spaces
that encouraged a special closeness among men and required an intimacy
that celebrated trust, violence, and bravery, values pursuant to heteropatri-
archal power and current iterations of hegemonic masculinity.
Fraternity
According to Kimmel (2012), the number of fraternal orders increased sig-
nificantly at the turn of the twentieth century. He writes that this increase
is a response to men’s perceptions of an increasing feminization in US cul-
ture, which included economic realities and educational structures. More
130 J. D. SWEET
specifically, there was a fear that boys would become more feminine, as
they were entirely socialized by women. Not only were boys raised solely
by their mothers at home, as men began to be increasingly employed away
from home, but also women comprised the vast majority of elementary
school teachers (Rotundo 1990). Those who occupied powerful positions
within the patriarchy possessed a genuine fear that women were socializing
generations of boys to grow into effeminate and emasculated men (Kim-
mel 2012). As a result, men established fraternal orders that allowed them
to exist in a space which explicitly excluded women and afforded men the
opportunity to shun femininity and socialize their boys to be “real men.”
At the same time, fraternal orders offered men genuine opportunities to
foster deep emotional ties with other men. Fraternal orders became less
popular after the victory in World War I, which assuaged the “crisis in mas-
culinity” that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century (Kimmel 2012,
p. 139). However, fraternities on college campuses continue to dominate
social life at many universities.
The abundant negative stereotypes affiliated with college fraternities
suggest a correlation between the types of masculinities associated with fra-
ternities and misogynistic, homophobic behaviors indicative of heteropatri-
archy. Kimmel (2008) argues that a culture of silence among college-aged
men underpins a guy code that enables and condones violence against
women. Though the stereotypes implicating fraternities prove true in cer-
tain contexts, it may be reductive to presume that fraternity masculinities
are based solely in misogyny, homophobia, and hegemony. On the con-
trary, fraternities and fraternal orders in general also empower men to forge
meaningful and emotionally intimate relationships with other men (Harris
2010; Kimmel 2008, 2012; McGuire et al. 2018, 2019), but these rela-
tionships are predicated in compulsory heterosexuality and a heteronor-
mative paradigm, where these men run the risk of feminization and the
corresponding loss of status within the fraternity culture if they perform
a gender expression that can be construed as homosexual (Davis 2002;
Edwards and Jones 2009; Harris 2008; Harris et al. 2011; Kimmel 2008).
Hence, fraternal orders toe a fine line between promoting intimate emo-
tional relationships among assumed heterosexual cismen while sanctioning
behaviors that can be read as too feminine or homosexual. While fraternal
orders simultaneously engender and discourage certain forms of masculin-
ities, for many boys and men, sport persists as a means for the creation of
specific types of masculinity.
Sport
Much of the existing scholarship in masculinities reveals that sport con-
tinues to be the most important vehicle in the creation and reification of
masculinity, and men use sport as a constant test of masculinity (Connell
2005; Harper 2004; Harris 2010; Kimmel 2012; Messner 1992; Mess-
ner and Sabo 1990). According to Messner and Sabo (1990), sports afford
boys opportunities to learn and practice masculine values such as toughness
and aggressiveness. Moreover, the literature emphasizes that sport tends to
align itself with behaviors that are often affiliated with the performance of
traditional masculinity. That is, many sports involve physically overpower-
ing one’s opponent or executing a physical skill that renders the opponent
helpless. Because the literature reveals that across contexts, men prove their
manhood in the eyes of other men (Harper 2004; Harris 2010; Kimmel
2008; Martin and Harris 2007; Messner 1992; Messner and Sabo 1990;
Sweet 2017), male-only spaces, such as male sport competitions, create a
distinct opportunity for men to establish status among their peers. Sport
provides a space where men execute traditional masculinity to prove their
manhood, yet they also put it in danger, for failure at sport may cause a loss
of status. Sport, then, positions masculinity in a precarious space because it
forces the constant evaluation of men engaged in behaviors associated with
traditional masculinity (Connell 2005; Estler and Nelson 2005; Messner
and Sabo 1990; Morrison and Eardley 1985). It follows that during ath-
letic competition, an athlete’s manhood is constantly at risk and that the
best athletes firmly establish their hegemonic masculinity atop their peers.
Organized sports, especially youth sports, attempt to establish a cul-
ture of good sportsmanship, emphasizing qualities such as empathy and
emotional intelligence, attributes that are often associated with femininity.
Thus, sportsmanship may carry potential for a more egalitarian masculin-
ity that engenders emotionally savvy young men. However, sportsmanship
is often subordinate to winning, which endures as the primary goal at all
levels of sport. In order to win, men and boys continue to navigate the
world of sport with acts of violence, skill, or intelligence—all which affirm
domination and establish one’s masculinity by embodying hegemonic ide-
als. Men who assert their masculinity through sport push sportsmanship
aside in an effort to establish hegemonic prowess and gain status within the
heteropatriarchy (Connell 2005; Estler and Nelson 2005; Messner 1992;
132 J. D. SWEET
Messner and Sabo 1990). By foreclosing sportsmanship, men and boys ren-
der more “feminine” attributes such as empathy and emotional intelligence
as immaterial in their quest to preserve and grow their statuses.
Though acts associated with traditional masculinities continue to char-
acterize the world of sport, sports teams and competition paradoxically
offer some opportunities for men to engage in emotionally vulnerable and
supportive behaviors. Sport is among the few public arenas where men are
lauded when they weep openly, for it shows their commitment to their
desire to win, to their sport, and to their team. Additionally, athletes are
often called on to support one another in times of emotional distress. When
a player performs badly or is beaten, he will often lean on his teammates
to help him grieve his poor performance, for his teammates and coaches
are the ones who defend him, espouse his performance, and bolster his
confidence for the next competition. These emotional supports appear to
run counter to highly masculinized behavior that governs sports culture. In
many ways, however, teammates supporting a beaten athlete are attempt-
ing to reestablish the athlete’s masculinity so that he can continue to exert
physical domination over his opponents to help his team win. In this case,
the emotional intimacy and support that competition makes possible are
principally intended to reestablish performances of hegemonic masculinity.
Locker Room
In addition to the emotional intimacy that sport sometimes affords, physi-
cal intimacy is also a product of sports culture. During celebration or when
lamenting a loss, men continually engage in physical contact. Whether
exchanging a high five, patting each other on the butt, lying on top of one
another, or anything in between, sport encourages physical intimacy with
other men even though it is predicated within notions of traditional mas-
culinity. Moreover, the locker room demarcates a male-only space in which
men disrobe and shower together. The level of physical intimacy among
men in locker rooms is unparalleled. It could be argued that no other male-
only, physical space exists that is both remarkably intimate and exceedingly
prevalent, yet locker room conventions dictate that men uphold hetero-
sexist and homophobic codes. Though the locker room requires physical
intimacy in very fundamental ways, one of the reasons locker room deco-
rum allows for physical intimacy may result from the performance of highly
masculinized behaviors immediately preceding or following locker room
visits. Men, then, are validated in their masculinity by engaging in sport
or exercise which assuages fear of feminization that might persist in other

immediate contexts of physical intimacy. However, the conventions within
locker rooms demand that one does not speak to strangers nor is one per-
mitted to glance at other men’s bodies. At the same time, the locker room
discourse that is enacted often perpetuates misogyny, homophobia, and
heterosexism, for who can forget Donald Trump’s bragging about com-
mitting sexual assault and later dismissing it as “locker room talk.” In spite
of the physical intimacy present, the locker room appears to perpetuate het-
eronormative principles that uphold traditionally masculine ways of being
that maintain hegemonic masculinity and heteropatriarchy.
Thus, the world of sport straddles two seemingly conflicting concepts
where intimacy is encouraged and simultaneously shamed, which is remi-
niscent of Foucault’s thoughts about men in the military. Foucault points
out this paradox, “Look at the army, where love between men is cease-
lessly provoked [appele] and shamed” (1997, p. 137). Male athletes are
required to excel in performances of traditional masculinity that involve
physical prowess, intelligence and skill, yet they are also expected to be
intimate and available with their teammates. Top athletes are able to nego-
tiate these two conflicting worlds because of hypermasculine performances
engrained in sport. That is, athletes perform traditional masculinity to such
an extreme that it assuages fear of feminization that could result from emo-
tional or physical intimacy that they display on the field and in the locker
room. So, these athletes remain comfortable in their gender expression
even when publicly displaying deep intimacy with other men.
Hegemony and Homosexuality

According to many, the ubiquitous presence of hegemonic masculinity
remains among the driving factors dictating men’s behavior. Its presence is
so overwhelming, so clear and forceful, that it goes unquestioned. Hege-
monic masculinity is what allows men in some cultures to hold hands with-
out threat, allows closeness among players, and emotional outpouring of
athletes. Hegemonic masculinity is, in fact, so powerful that men who
embody it become capable of publicly displaying physical closeness and
heartfelt emotional ties with other men. However, hegemonic masculin-
ity simultaneously carries the potentials for highly destructive behaviors
(Connell 2005), as indicated by Donald Trump’s expressions of violence,
militarization, intimidation, racism, xenophobia, ableism, and misogyny
134 J. D. SWEET
during his rise to power and continuing into his first term. From the cur-
rent cultural context, where destructive acts of competition, violence, and
fear appear to dominate public expressions of masculinities, comes the call
for alternatives to hegemonic masculinity. Currently, school practices con-
tinue to discipline alternative expressions, and students must endure social-
ization processes that exalt hegemony and heteropatriarchy. Because of
these highly problematic practices, it remains vital for school communi-
ties to affirm fractured masculinities as a viable and esteemed way for all
men and boys to do manhood and transform the current discourse regard-
ing accepted and applauded masculinities. This is particularly important
in school settings as boys are currently being socialized to do their gen-
ders within the destructive confines of hegemonic masculinity (Edwards
and Jones 2009; Whitson 1990). Moreover, the dangers of hegemonic
masculinity endure as it is closely associated with alcohol consumption,
stoicism, violence, misogyny, promiscuity and homophobia. On the other
hand, fractured masculinities may allow for meaningful homosocial male
intimacy that can work to destabilize the destructive and monolithic power
of hegemonic masculinity.
As men struggle to conform to expectations of heteropatriarchy, current
conceptions of masculinity uphold static notions of gender that reinscribe
binary and default masculinity. Interestingly, the masculinities indicated
in the opening anecdote and those presented throughout this chapter are
predicated against gay sexuality, for these men define their masculinity in
opposition to homosexuality. Straight men continually attribute homosex-
uality as a constant threat to their masculinity, for they understand their
gender by contrasting it with gay men. This also indicates the fragility with
which straight men understand their gender identities and expressions; the
constant threat of homosexuality underscores the instability from which
some cis-straight men understand their genders. The ubiquitous specter of
homosexuality in the interactions among these men further suggests that
homosexuality plays a defining role in determining the gendered relations
among cis-straight masculinities in general. Hence, by being marginalized,
homosexuality prescribes the dominant discourse in masculinity, thereby
undergirding concurrent iterations of hegemonic masculinity. There exists
a requisite to treat the less masculine (or aberrant) with fear and disgust
even though its existence is required to establish a foothold in hegemonic
masculinity and is crucial to the social order at large.
Discussion
The aim of this chapter was to problematize acceptable and unacceptable
levels of male intimacy as perceived and enacted in the lives of straight, cis,
Western men and boys to explore its implications on current school prac-
tices. The nuances and inconsistencies within the displays of masculinities
this chapter reveals help to bridge new understandings for male intimacy,
bring a multiplicity of meanings to masculinities, and yield homosocial
pedagogical practices to be enacted in schools. The dangers of hegemonic
masculinity and its profound role in boys’ socialization indicate that school
practices must communicate and support more flexible expectations for
students’ masculinities that keep in step with the complexities of our fluid
and ever-shifting culture.
As this chapter shows, fear and competition oversee current expressions
of doing man/boyhood though hypermasculine contexts appear to allow
for intimacy among men and boys. Employing Foucault’s treatise on homo-
sexual friendship to explore intimacy among straight men reveals a veritable
dearth of contexts where decorum permits straight men and boys to engage
in emotional or physical intimacy. This reality bodes poorly for the ways
that school practices currently socialize boys and young men in the con-
text of a ubiquitous hegemonic ideal. In fact, hegemonic masculinity is so
unspoken and taken-for-granted, people fail to notice the contradictions
they are enacting. However, these contradictions indicate inconsistencies
in a monolithic male gender and the consequences of these inconsistencies
could help to bridge new possibilities for reimagining gender expectations
to allow for fractured masculinities.
Implications
In spite of the insinuation that hegemonic masculinity is immobile and
fixed, there are indications that many men have begun to inch forward
toward an egalitarian and more affectionate manhood (Harris 2010; Kim-
mel 2012). Similar to instances of racism a generation ago, acts of overt
homophobia and misogyny have become taboo among many groups of
men, and within these groups straight, cismen police and regulate these
phobic acts among themselves. Also, in recent years, hugs have replaced
handshakes among many groups of men as the common greeting shared
between close male friends. The prominence that hugging gained in recent
years among straight men indicates a major shift of acceptable expressions
136 J. D. SWEET
of male intimacy and may anticipate a trend where instances of male inti-
macy become more and more commonplace and aligned with esteemed
expressions of masculinity. While this trend has continued to grow in recent
decades, it has been threatened by recent political events including the cul-
tural backlash that elected Donald Trump.
Scholars have already pointed out the dangers of default hegemonic mas-
culinity, for when men attempt to live up to the current masculine ideal
they become narcissistic and self-destructive, and become threats to those
around them (Connell 2005; Kimmel 2008, 2012). The election of Donald
Trump reminds us that these dangers are increasingly threatening to affect
the behaviors of young and older men alike. It has become increasingly
clear that a struggle must be sustained in order to topple the destructive
masculinities currently being endorsed by political leaders. There presently
exists a cultural force deploying a volatile social capital which threatens to
undo much of the progress that has been made regarding alternative dis-
courses of gender identities and expressions. I offer fractured masculinities
as a way of validating a multiplicity of masculine expressions that reflects
contemporary cultures and the varieties of gender present in school.
Schools must work to combat the destructive masculinities currently
being enacted by affirming the various masculine expressions that boys
exhibit. As such, schools are encouraged to embrace a fractured masculin-
ity that allows for multiple expressions of manhood. Fractured masculinity
interrogates notions of an essentialized male gender and appreciates the
value of a person rather than attempt to pin down a specific, concrete,
or legible gender. We must move beyond heterosexist and homophobic
discourses as integral to default masculinity and recognize a fractured mas-
culinity that welcomes plurality, flexibility, and intimacy.
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CHAPTER 10
Michel Foucault and Queer Ascesis: Toward

a Pedagogy and Politics of Subversive
Friendships
Nelson M. Rodriguez
Abstract Stemming from a pedagogical interest in exploring ways of the-

oretically framing in classroom discussions the topic of gay-for-pay, this
chapter is organized into two sections. In the first section, I engage with a
close reading of Foucault’s (Michel Foucault: Ethics, subjectivity, and truth.
The Free Press, New York, pp. 135–140, 1997a) interview “Friendship as
a Way of Life,” considering passages that might be useful in helping to
explicate and reflect on the concepts of ascesis and friendship, as well as
other related ideas in the interview. In this first section, I especially explore
the queer dimensions of Foucault’s ideas regarding homosexual ascesis and
their entanglement with his reflections on gay politics. Drawing from the
analyses and insights gleaned from this first section, and as a way to pro-
vide a contemporary example of what Foucault might have had in mind by
“friendship as a way of life,” in the second section I examine an episode
from a talk show that takes up the topic of gay-for-pay. By way of my
N. M. Rodriguez (B)
The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA
e-mail: nrodrigu@tcnj.edu

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9_10
140 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
analysis of this episode, I explore gay-for-pay as a strategy/technology of

self-transformation, a queer ascesis (Halperin in Saint Foucault: Towards
a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995) that can be
read as contributing to the cultivation of a “homosexual mode of life”
(Foucault 1997a, p. 136), an art of living “at becoming homosexuals”
that is eminently “desirable.” As a queer ascesis, gay-for-pay is necessarily
relational—i.e., an ongoing ethical and transformative relation to oneself
in relation to others that can engender new and creative and experimen-
tal forms of relationships and modes of being that are not beholden to
the codes of institutionalized norms governing any number of relation-
ships, including those between men (Kingston in Foucault Studies 7:7–17,
2009). In this way, given their potential to rupture “the normalisation of
relationships” (Kingston 2009), these non-institutionalized relations based
on a queer ascesis can be understood as “subversive friendships” (Kingston
2009).
Keywords Gay-for-pay · Queer ascesis · Relationality · Subversive

friendships · Pedagogy
“Introduction to Sexuality Studies” is a course I regularly teach. In this

undergraduate survey of the sociocultural and political dimensions of sex-
uality, my students and I explore a broad range of themes and topics, includ-
ing, recently, the “phenomenon” within the gay porn industry known as
“gay-for-pay.”1 One way that I have theoretically framed our discussions
of this topic is by introducing students to the concepts of sexual and iden-
tity fluidity, flexibility (Anderson and Robinson 2016), and to the notion
of, what Jane Ward (2015) refers to as, “not-gay.”2 These concepts have
been highly useful in provoking discussions about the problem—analyti-
cally and at the level of lived experience—with collapsing sexual practices
with sexual identities. Indeed, they have provided a conceptual vocabu-
lary for exploring the complexities and productive contradictions that arise
when considering sexual practices that seem at odds with the claiming of
particular sexual identities, as might be evidenced among straight-identified
adult entertainers, especially straight-identified men, who do gay-for-pay.
Complicating notions of coherent sexual identity and, more gener-
ally, identitarian frameworks of analysis (Escoffier 2003)—as the above-
mentioned pedagogical approach to gay-for-pay attempts to do—can be
10 MICHEL FOUCAULT AND QUEER ASCESIS: TOWARD A PEDAGOGY … 141
complemented by Michel Foucault’s reflections on the interrelated con-

cepts of homosexuality, homosexual ascesis, and friendship. For example,
in his 1981 interview, titled “Friendship as a Way of Life,” with the French
magazine Le Gai Pied, an interview that serves as the theoretical and polit-
ical basis for this chapter and the collection as a whole, Foucault is highly
suspicious about, and therefore, critical of, essentialized and static under-
standings of homosexuality and identity. As he notes:
Another thing to distrust is the tendency to relate the question of homosex-

uality to the problem of “Who am I?” and “What is the secret of my desire?”
Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself, “What relations, through homosex-
uality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” The prob-
lem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use
one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. And, no
doubt, that’s the real reason why homosexuality is not a form of desire but
something desirable. Therefore, we have to work at becoming homosexuals
and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are. The development toward
which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship. (Foucault
1997a, p. 135)
For Foucault, homosexuality is conceptualized not as something you dis-

cover that you “are” but rather as a “strategically situated marginal posi-
tion” (Halperin 1995, p. 68), as dynamic, as something that “can be
played” (Foucault 1997a, p. 140): Hence, why he frames the question in
the above-quoted passage in the way that he does: “What relations, through
homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?”
In this formulation, homosexuality is a technology of self-transformation,
a modern version of ascesis (Halperin 1995), where ascesis is defined by
Foucault as: “‘an exercise of self upon self by which one tries to work out,
to transform one’s self and to attain a certain mode of being’” (as cited in
Halperin 1995, pp. 76–77). Homosexual/queer ascesis, thus, constitutes
an ongoing set of relations and practices with oneself in relation to oth-
ers that subvert, or move beyond, institutionalized relations and modes
of being. According to Kingston (2009), this is essentially what Foucault
“means by ‘friendship’—working together with others to build new subjec-
tivities and relationships rather than falling back on social norms” (p. 10)—
and this is why Foucault emphasizes, in the above-quoted passage, that
“The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is
the one of friendship” (1997a, p. 135). By framing homosexuality as asce-
sis, as a creative and transformative relational enterprise of experimental
142 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
friendships (Kingston 2009), as a challenge to the normalization of rela-

tionships, Foucault presents us with a conceptualization of homosexuality
that is indeed “not a form of desire”—i.e., what is my sexuality?—“but
something desirable”—in that, again, as ascesis, homosexuality, given its
“slantwise” position in the social fabric (Foucault 1997a, p. 138), can serve
as a conduit of sorts for arriving at “a multiplicity of relationships” (ibid.,
p. 135)—and, hence, pleasures—that are not reduced to or defined by
institutionalized codes for relating.3 On this last point, Foucault (1997b)
remarks, decries really: “We live in a relational world that institutions have
considerably impoverished” (p. 158).
As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, I have a pedagogical inter-
est in exploring Foucault’s ideas on homosexual ascesis and friendship in
order to consider additional ways of theoretically framing the topic of gay-
for-pay in discussions with my students that might build on and extend the
concepts I already use. With this aim in mind, I organize the chapter into
two general sections: In the first, I continue to engage with a close reading
of Foucault’s (1997a) interview “Friendship as a Way of Life,” considering
passages that might be useful in helping to further explicate and reflect
on the concepts of ascesis and friendship, as well as other related ideas in
the interview. In this first section, I am especially interested in exploring
the queer dimensions of Foucault’s ideas and their entanglement with his
reflections on gay politics. As Halperin (1995) notes in reference to the
1981 interview: “Foucault himself would seem to have anticipated and
embraced a queer conception of both homosexual identity and gay poli-
tics” (p. 67). Drawing from the analyses and insights gleaned from this first
section, and as a way to provide a contemporary example of what Foucault
might have had in mind by “friendship as a way of life,” in the second
section I examine an episode from a talk show that takes up the topic of
gay-for-pay. By way of my analysis of this episode, I explore gay-for-pay
as a strategy/technology of self-transformation, a queer ascesis (Halperin
1995) that could be read as contributing to the cultivation of a “homosex-
ual mode of life” (Foucault 1997a, p. 136), an art of living “at becoming
homosexuals” that is eminently “desirable.” As a queer ascesis, gay-for-pay
is necessarily relational—i.e., an ongoing ethical and transformative rela-
tion to oneself in relation to others that can engender new and creative and
experimental forms of relationships, pleasures, and modes of being that
are not beholden to the codes of institutionalized norms governing any
number of relationships, including those between men (Kingston 2009).
In this way, given their potential to rupture the normalization of relation-

ships, these non-institutionalized relations based on a queer ascesis can be
understood as “subversive friendships” (Kingston 2009).
Foucault’s Queer Ascesis and Politics

As with homosexuality, Foucault conceptualized philosophy itself as a tech-
nology of self-transformation, a modern version of ascesis (Halperin 1995).
In volume 2 of The History of Sexuality Foucault states: “[W]hat is philos-
ophy today … In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how
and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legit-
imating what is already known?” (1985, p. 9). As this conception suggests,
Foucault came to understand philosophy, as Halperin (1995) explains, as
“a transformative experiment or test that one performs on oneself by play-
ing games of truth” (p. 77). And, in this way, Foucault (1985) viewed
philosophy as “an ‘ascesis,’ askēsis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of
thought” (p. 9). This understanding of philosophy for Foucault as a trans-
formative practice of thinking otherwise helps to explain, in part, his shift
in focus from “politics to ethics, from an analytics of power to an interest
in the relation of the self to itself” (Halperin 1995, p. 68) in his explo-
ration of the topic of sexual ethics in ancient Greece and Rome and that
emerges in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality: The Use of Plea-
sure (1985) and The Care of the Self (1986), respectively. Indeed, Foucault
worried that, in writing five more volumes, albeit across different topics,
but nonetheless, “making the same argument—that sexualities are socially
constructed” (Taylor 2017, p. 208)—he would not be “offering his read-
ers [and himself] any alternative to the picture of modern sexuality that he
was describing” (Taylor 2017, p. 208). By contrast, in studying the sexual
ethics of ancient Greece, Foucault was struck by a form of relationality,
practiced of course by privileged men, in which the self was something that
could be fashioned by sexual pleasure, an understanding, that is, “of sexual
pleasure as one of many practices through which we can fashion the self—
and of the self as something to be fashioned” (Taylor 2017, p. 214)—in
other words, a form of ascesis. And while Foucault found much to criticize
regarding Greek ethics and made it clear he was not proposing that such
an ethics be “reactivated” for our modern era (Foucault 1983, p. 236), he
nevertheless found a sexual ethics based on ethical self-fashioning, based
on the cultivation of an “aesthetics of existence” (ibid., p. 236), to be use-
ful in the present for thinking about ourselves beyond “having sexualities,”
144 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
beyond being constituted as subjects of desire. In this way, Foucault’s work

in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality provides the modern reader
with, as Taylor (2017) notes, a potential “antidote to the psychologizing
and biopoliticization of our sexual lives today” (p. 240) and a way to think
otherwise about “sexual ethics without extending the normalizing logics
of both disciplinary power and biopower” (ibid., p. 241).
The ethical self-fashioning (ascesis) Foucault describes among the
ancient Greeks could be considered, in contemporary terms of course, as
a queer practice in that it gives “us a glimpse of a society that experienced
sex without sexuality [i.e. sexual identity]” (Taylor 2017, p. 238):
[T]he Greeks did not see the aphrodisia as an experience that would reveal
the “truth” of a sexual self, and they did not develop a moral or legal code
around the aphrodisia as Christianity did around “the flesh” and moderns
have done around “sexuality”; rather, the aphrodisia were a set of practices
that could be used to fashion an ethical self and a beautiful life, if and to
the extent that a free (male) subject chose to do so. An innate self with a
“sexuality” deciphered through an analysis of desire was not presupposed
in ancient Greece; rather, the self was something that an individual actively
created through his practices, including his practices of sexual pleasure. (ibid.,
pp. 238–239)
The notion of the self in ancient Greece as “something that an individ-

ual actively created through his practices” is how Foucault similarly frames
homosexuality as ascesis in the 1981 interview “Friendship as a Way of
Life.” In this way, Foucault’s elaboration of a homosexual ascesis can be
construed as a queer ascesis in that, rather than something to be deci-
phered, homosexuality entails an ongoing formation, “the work at becom-
ing homosexuals” (Foucault 1997a, p. 135). As Foucault notes in the inter-
view:

improbable. (ibid., p. 137)
Foucault’s qualification about inventing rather than discovering “a manner

of being that is still improbable” provides a counter arguably to sexual
essentialism, that is, provides a more mobile and fluid understanding of
homosexuality; thus, his notion of homosexual ascesis can be read as queer.
Likewise, in other sections of the interview, Foucault positions homosex-
uality as not static, as something that is “not a psychological condition that
we discover” (Halperin 1995, p. 78), as not an intrinsic quality, but rather
as a queer ascesis that has the capacity to yield a homosexual culture and an
ethics that includes “new forms of relationship, new modes of knowledge,
new means of creativity, and new possibilities of love” (Halperin 1995,
p. 79). For example, Foucault states:
To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and

visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of
life. (1997a, p. 138)
And further along in the interview, he continues with:
Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational vir-

tualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but
because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines
he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.
(1997a, p. 138)
As these passages from the 1981 interview suggest, Foucault is trying to

situate homosexuality as a task, as an opportunity, as a queer potential for
self-transformation. As Halperin (1995) poignantly states: Homosexuality
as “‘queer’ marks the very site of gay becoming … a horizon of possibil-
ity” (p. 79) rather than “an occasion to articulate the secret truth of our
own desires” (ibid., p. 78). From this perspective, Foucault’s work, that is,
his critically creative transformative reflections about homosexuality in the
interview, can be seen as an “‘attempt to empty homosexuality of its pos-
itive content, of its material and psychic determinations, in order to make
it available to us as a site for the continuing construction and renewal of
continually changing identities’” (Morar 2014, pp. 210–211)—in short,
homosexuality understood as a queer ascesis.
It’s important to reiterate that Foucault’s notion of advancing into a
homosexual ascesis also constitutes an ethical practice in that he envisions
146 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
“gay becoming” as a collaborative endeavor, a relation to oneself in rela-

tion to others. Thus, his conception of ascesis is “not simply a matter of
self-transformation. Rather, it also involves the transformation of others
through a negotiable and collaborative process of relationship construction
… a move from a solitary aesthetics of existence toward a more collabora-
tive aesthetics of existence” (Kingston 2009, pp. 16–17). As such, reading
Foucault’s homosexual ascesis as a “queer ethic” (Halperin 1995) can help
in making sense of his vision of gay politics/activism. In another inter-
view given at around the same time and originally published in Christopher
Street in 1982, titled “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” Foucault
(1997b) offers his perspective on the limitations of “gay rights” and out-
lines an expanded political agenda moving forward for the gay and lesbian
movements.
In this 1982 interview, the interviewer notes:
Today we no longer speak of sexual liberation in vague terms; we speak of

women’s rights, homosexual rights, gay rights, but we don’t know exactly
what is meant by “rights” and “gay.” In countries where homosexuality as
such is outlawed, everything is simpler since everything is yet to be done,
but in northern European countries where homosexuality is no longer offi-
cially prohibited, the future of gay rights is posed in different terms. (1997b,
p. 157)
And Foucault responds with:
I think we should consider the battle for gay rights as an episode that cannot
be the final stage. For two reasons: first because a right, in its real effects,
is much more linked to attitudes and patterns of behavior than to legal for-
mulations. There can be discrimination against homosexuals even if such
discriminations are prohibited by law. It is therefore necessary to struggle
to establish homosexual lifestyles, existential choices [des choix d’existence]
in which sexual relations with people of the same sex will be important. It’s
not enough as part of a more general way of life, or in addition to it, to be
permitted to make love with someone of the same sex. The fact of making
love with someone of the same sex can very naturally involve a whole series of
choices, a whole series of other values and choices for which there are not yet
real possibilities. It’s not only a matter of integrating this strange little prac-
tice of making love with someone of the same sex into preexisting cultures;
it’s a matter of constructing [créer] cultural forms. (1997b, p. 157)
Foucault’s insistence on establishing “homosexual lifestyles, existential

choices”—that is, on “constructing cultural forms” with a “whole series
of other values and choices”—is what Foucault (1997a) advocates in the
1981 interview when he calls for creating a “mode of life” (p. 137). It’s not
that Foucault didn’t support the struggle for juridical rights; he did.4 How-
ever, by exhorting gays and lesbians to engage in a “positive and creative
construction of different ways of life” (Halperin 1995, p. 80), Foucault
offered a broadened way to organize a queer praxis that might circumvent
the normalizing effects of power, and it was this concern with the nor-
malization of relationships that informed his political thinking in his later
ethical texts. At the conclusion of the 1981 interview, Foucault (1997a)
echoes this concern, one that also highlights his commitment to genealog-
ical analysis:
There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these

feelings, this need that Americans call “coming out,” that is, showing oneself.
The program must be wide open. We have to dig deeply to show how things
have been historically contingent, for such and such reason intelligible but
not necessary. We must make the intelligible appear against a background
of emptiness and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far
from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the
question: What can be played? (pp. 139–140)
Foucault’s challenge of creating a “culture and an ethics,” a “way of

life,” by engendering new relational forms and opportunities for ethical
self-fashioning “not resembling those that are institutionalized” (Foucault
1997a, p. 138), constitutes his queer politics and flows from, I would argue,
his notion of homosexual—i.e., queer—ascesis. As such, Foucault’s “queer
activism” can be framed, as Kingston (2009) argues, as entailing both “lo-
calised resistance to social normalization” (p. 11) and, by extension, a more
general challenge to “the excessive normalisation of relationships across
society as a whole” (p. 12). In this way, Foucault’s queer ascesis and poli-
tics provide a useful way to consider gay-for-pay as a strategy or technology
of ethical self-fashioning and transformation operating at a localized level
and, arguably, marginal space, but that can contribute to a more general
challenge to the normalization of relationships writ large.
148 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
Gay-for-Pay as a Technology of Ethical

Self-Transformation
Returning to the 1981 interview, Foucault (1997a) raises the question:
“how is it possible for men to be together?” (p. 136). On this point, he
goes on to say:
As far back as I remember, to want guys [garçons] was to want relations

with guys. That has always been important to me. No necessarily in the form
of a couple but as a matter of existence … To live together, to share their
time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their
confidences? What is it to be “naked” among men, outside of institutional
relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an
uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people. (ibid.)
Foucault’s questions about how men might “be together” in ways that
reach beyond “readymade formulas” (Foucault 1997a, p. 137) raise
another, yet related, question that is germane to the topic of gay-for-pay.
“How can a relational system be reached through sexual practices?” (ibid.).
When teaching about gay-for-pay, I’ve utilized two cultural texts to explore
the topic in discussions with my students. These texts are: (1) segments of
an episode from The Tyra Banks Show (which aired from 2005 to 2010) and
(2) Charlie David’s (2016) documentary titled I’m a Pornstar: Gay4Pay.
Due to space limitations, I can only focus in this essay on two segments from
the episode. However, it’s worth noting that the documentary is rich with
possibilities for an analysis theoretically framed by Foucault’s reflections on
friendship.
In one of the segments, Tyra Banks asks one of her guests, gay-for-pay
porn star “Kurt Wild,” the following question: “Is there anything about it
that you like, anything about the gay porn that you like?” (UsaTvShows22
2013). Kurt Wild responds with: “Um, well, it’s kind of, it’s kinda weird,
you get to actually kinda make really good friends with your partner. It’s
like, you know, after the scene you guys aren’t weird about each other”
(ibid.). And Tyra Banks’ (admittedly funny) reply is: “But you can make
friends on Myspace” (ibid.). The audience claps, seemingly in agreement
with her. This exchange has never really stood out for me when watching
the gay-for-pay episode on my own, nor has it ever been a focus in my
classroom discussions of the episode with my students. However, when
thinking with Foucault’s reflections in “Friendship as a Way of Life,” I find
Tyra Banks’ comment to Kurt Wild about making friends on Myspace,

presumably in lieu of making friends within the context of gay-for-pay
pornography, illuminating in a particular way. That is, in the interview
“Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault (1997a) suggests that what disturbs
a homophobic and heterosexist society isn’t same-sex sex itself; rather, it’s
the creation of a “homosexual mode of life” (p. 136). To argue, in other
words, that what is disturbing is “gay sex” misses the point, according to
Foucault, because such an argument:
cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship,

fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized
society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances
and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force …. Institutional codes
can’t validate these relations with multiple intensities, variable colors, imper-
ceptible movements and changing forms. (Foucault 1997a, pp. 136–137)
Thinking with Foucault, what is disturbing about gay-for-pay isn’t the

act of sex itself between straight men, but rather through sex reaching a
new relational system (“friendships”)—or as Foucault notes in the above-
quoted passage, the forming of “new alliances and the tying together of
unforeseen lines of force.” Indeed, the uneasiness that is suggested by Tyra
Banks’ comment—“But you can make friends on Myspace”—is an uneasi-
ness arguably not only with how gay-for-pay creates the conditions for
the emergence of new relational possibilities, in this case between straight-
identified men, but also with how these new relational forms potentially
subvert, that is, “short-circuit” (Foucault 1997a, p. 137) the normaliza-
tion of relationships. Gay-for-pay can be read as implicitly advocating, in
Foucault’s formulation, a new relational right that is most certainly trans-
ferable to heterosexuals. As Foucault (1997b) states, “By proposing a new
relational right, we will see that nonhomosexual people can enrich their
lives by changing their own schema of relations” (p. 160). In this way, as
Halperin (1995) aptly observes, “The future Foucault envisages for us is
not exclusively or categorically gay. But it is definitely queer” (p. 100).
In another segment of the episode, Tyra Banks asks a much more sexually
explicit question, one that she frames around the metaphor of “giving or
receiving presents.” Her question generates the following exchange with
Kurt Wild:
150 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
TB: How do I say this in daytime TV? Okay, it’s Christmas Day. It’s not
today, but just say it’s Christmas Day. Do you like to give presents
or receive them?
KW: I mean it’s a job. I mean you have to be mutual. I mean you do
whatever you want to do …. The giving and receiving, either way
to me, it’s the same thing.
TB: Really? I heard that you were more comfortable being submissive,
or receiving the present …. But why would you be more comfort-
able with that? I heard it was because you didn’t have to look at
him?
KW: I feel more in control …. I’m not comfortable all the time … when
I work with another guy, I’m not comfortable necessarily giving
compared to receiving … I feel like it’s easy for me to do and I
can do it and at least feel like I’m having a good time, you know,
without being, you know, gay ….
TB: … Cuz at first when I heard that you liked to receive the presents
on Christmas Day or Hanukkah or whatever …. I was like “that
doesn’t make sense. He’s gay, and he is just, you know, lying and
saying that he’s straight.” Because I mean if you’re gonna receive,
I mean, come on, that’s like kind of more gay. But in your defense,
I was talking to one of my producers and they said, “But Tyra did
you think about this? When you are the Christmas gift giver, you
have to be aroused as a man to perform. To receive the present,
you don’t have to be.” You ever thought about that?
There’s so much to unpack in this exchange that it’s difficult to even know
where to start! One way, however, to provide a focus for the analysis of this
exchange is by situating it within a discussion of the difference between the
concepts of desire and pleasure in Foucault’s thinking. In this way, such as
focus can help to further explicate Foucault’s reflections on friendship as
ascesis. When following the sequence of the above exchange, it seems that
Tyra Banks’ question regarding Kurt Wild’s preferred sexual position—
“Do you like to give presents or receive them?”—is a way to figure out
whether he is really straight or not. The assumption operating here of
course is that a straight-identified man who is penetrated by another man
can’t possibly be straight—“Because I mean if you’re gonna receive, I mean,
come on, that’s like kind of more gay.” The exchange above ends with Tyra
Banks trying to further make sense of Kurt Wild’s claims to a heterosexual
identity by returning to the topic of sexual positions in order to highlight
that a straight man could be penetrated by another man while not being
sexually aroused. Thus, Kurt Wild’s heterosexual claims are “confirmed”
as plausible—“But in your defense … ‘When you are the Christmas gift

giver, you have to be aroused as a man to perform. To receive the present,
you don’t have to be.’”
Framing a conversation about gay-for-pay through the language of
desire, thus, not only produces an endless loop of trying to figure out
the “real” sexual identity of gay-for-pay men; it also presents these men as
“‘subjects of desire,’ or as subjects with ‘sexualities,’” (Taylor 2017, p. 236)
who may be hiding their “true” sexual self. This way of framing the topic
reifies the notion that “desire is not an event but a permanent feature of
the subject … [thus providing] a basis onto which all that psychologico-
medical armature can attach itself” (Foucault as cited in Halperin 1995,
pp. 93–94). But what if the topic of gay-for-pay were framed by a language
of pleasure, in the Foucauldian sense, rather than desire? Foucault notes
that pleasure is an “‘event outside the subject or at the limit of the subject’
… [and further adds that] ‘[p]leasure is something which passes from one
individual to another; it is not secreted by identity. Pleasure has no passport,
no identification papers’” (as cited in Halperin 1995, pp. 94–95). In short,
pleasure is desubjectivating. As Halperin (1995) helps to explain: “Unlike
desire, which expresses the subject’s individuality, history, and identity as
a subject, pleasure is desubjectivating, impersonal: it shatters identity, sub-
jectivity, and dissolves the subject, however fleetingly, into the sensorial
continuum of the body” (p. 95). Even though in the episode gay-for-pay
is framed around a language of desire, and even though Kurt Wild himself
deploys a discourse of “not-gay” (Ward 2015) in the above exchange with
Tyra Banks, his comment that—“I feel like it’s easy for me to do [‘receiv-
ing’] and I can do it and at least feel like I’m having a good time”—suggests
that gay-for-pay is not about hidden identities or repressed sexual feelings
associated with a repressed “true” sexual self. It’s about something else.
It’s about bodies and pleasures. From this perspective, Kurt Wild’s com-
ment can help us to consider ways to reframe discussions of gay-for-pay,
particularly within contexts of teaching and learning, in terms of what it
does rather than what it supposedly reveals: Namely, as a modern version
of ascesis, gay-for-pay marks a technology of ethical self-transformation by
way of the invention of new relational forms—“friendships”—that provide
the basis for the intensification of pleasure, sexual, or otherwise, that the
constraints of desire may very well foreclose. Constituted as such, gay-for-
pay, as a strategy for the creation of pleasure based on a queer ascesis, can
help to foster “a rich relational world [that] would be very complex to
manage” (Foucault 1997b, p. 158).
152 N. M. RODRIGUEZ
Notes
1. In this essay, I utilize the phrase gay-for-pay to refer to men who identity as
heterosexual but who are paid to perform same-sex sex within the context of
the profession of the gay pornography industry.
2. In her study, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, Ward (2015) explores
the overall phenomenon of straight white men engaging in homosexual
sex/behavior with one another while constructing themselves as heterosexual,
that is, as “not gay.”
3. See Halperin (1995, pp. 91–97), for further explication on the difference
between desire and pleasure in Foucault’s thinking.
4. See, for example, Halperin (1995, p. 80).
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Author Index
A F
Ahmed, Sara, 30, 31, 108, 119 Faderman, Lillian, 28, 29
Allan, Jonathan A., 5 Foucault, Michel, 2–8, 11, 12, 14, 16,
19, 20, 24–26, 28–30, 33, 35–37,
40–43, 45–48, 50–55, 58–60,
B 63–66, 72, 80–82, 86, 93–97,
Bersani, Leo, 12, 15, 42, 43, 45, 49, 104–118, 125–127, 133, 135,
54, 55 141–152
Burke, Kevin J., 7
G
Garlick, Steve, 14, 20
C Gilligan, James R., 5, 6
Carlson, David L., 6, 106, 125 Greteman, Adam J., 7, 105
D H
Delany, Samuel, 31, 32, 35 Halperin, David, 3, 4, 41, 42, 45, 46,
D’Emilio, John, 44, 54 48, 141–143, 145–147, 149, 151
K
E Karioris, Frank G., 5
Edelman, Lee, 26 Kemp, Jonathan, 5
Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 94, 96–99 Kimmel, Michael, 13, 16, 58, 65,
Eribon, Didier, 95 125–131, 135, 136
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 155
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9
156 AUTHOR INDEX
M Robinson, Sean, 6, 83, 84

Mac an Ghaill, Máirtín, 58–60, 62 Rodriguez, Nelson M., 7, 8
Malatino, Hilary, 5 Rumens, Nick, 79, 80
Muñoz, José E., 26, 27
R
Ricco, John P., 14 S
Roach, Tom, 5, 40, 41, 43, 48–50, 52, Sedgwick, Eve K., 11, 13, 16, 109
104, 105, 107, 109, 116 Sweet, Joseph D., 7, 125–128, 131
Subject Index
A desire, 2, 3, 8, 16, 17, 19, 29, 30, 32,

affective conversion, 31 33, 36, 41, 47, 49, 53, 58, 85,
alterity, 45 92–95, 101, 110, 132, 141, 142,
antirelationality, 27 144, 145, 148, 150–152
antisociality, 26 desire-in-uneasiness, 6, 30, 33, 47, 94,
antisocial thesis, 26, 27 148
ascesis, 4–8, 13, 17, 19, 26, 36, 37, desubjectivating, 3, 151
45, 53, 58, 64, 66, 70, 72, 93–97,
100, 101, 117, 141–147, 150,
151 E
askesis, 5, 40, 41, 45–47, 49–52 education, 4–6, 11, 18–20, 48, 59,
62–65, 67, 72, 84, 105, 106, 109,
112, 115, 118
B eros , 17, 18, 45, 60, 118
biopower, 40–44, 50, 144
F
C fractured masculinities, 7, 126,
capitalism, 41, 43, 44, 54 134–136
collaboration, 5, 11, 13, 15–17, 19, friendship, 2, 4–8, 10–20, 25, 26,
20, 26, 68, 69, 83, 99 28–30, 32, 36, 41, 43, 45–53,
58, 60, 61, 65–72, 78–83, 85,
86, 93–97, 100, 101, 104–106,
D 108–112, 114–118, 125, 126,
degaying, 13, 15 135, 141–143, 148–151
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 157
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31737-9
158 SUBJECT INDEX
G N
gay marriage, 40, 41, 43, 44, 113 neoliberal/neoliberalism, 37, 42, 43,
gay-for-pay, 7, 8, 140, 142, 147–149, 45
151, 152 #nohomo, 13
Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), 70, 71 normalization, 3, 4, 8, 85, 112, 113,
gender and sexual minority faculty, 80, 142, 143, 147, 149
81
P
pedagogy, 5, 7, 11, 17, 19, 36, 37, 48,
H
52, 53, 60, 64, 67, 71, 72, 94, 96,
hegemonic masculinity, 5, 7, 30,
97, 105, 126
58–61, 65, 128, 129, 131–136
pedagogy of ascesis, 5, 17, 19, 20
heteronormativity, 58, 61, 65, 71, 81,
philia, 18, 58, 61, 66, 67, 72
110
pleasure, 2–5, 8, 12–19, 40, 51, 52,
heteropatriarchy, 54, 125, 127, 130,
66, 93–96, 100, 101, 108, 115,
131, 133, 134
116, 142–144, 150–152
hidden curriculum, 61
homonormativity, 32, 33, 110, 111,
114 Q
homophobia, 6, 14–16, 81, 83, 86, queer, 2, 5, 6, 8, 25–28, 32, 34–37,
110, 125–127, 129, 130, 133–135 40, 42–46, 50, 52, 53, 58,
homosocial continuum, 11 70–72, 81, 92, 104, 105, 107,
homosociality, 11, 16, 17, 24, 28, 30 110–112, 141, 142, 144, 145,
147, 149
queer publics, 27, 31, 34
I
inclusive masculinity theory, 14
R
relationality, 5, 7, 12, 13, 26, 37,
J 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 95,
jouissance, 45 104–106, 109–111, 116, 117,
143
reproductive futurism, 26, 27
L
Le Gai Pied, 2, 24, 29, 40, 66, 93, 141 S
school gender regimes, 5, 6,
58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67,
M 70–72
marriage equality, 34, 41–46, 50, 54 schools, 6, 7, 58–65, 68–72, 105–107,
masculinities, 7, 10–12, 14, 16, 37, 109, 112, 113, 115–118, 125,
59–61, 63, 65, 110, 125–136 126, 130, 134–136
SUBJECT INDEX 159
strategic disorientation, 6, 93, 94, 100, W

101 workplace friendships, 6, 79–83, 85,
86
V
visitor, 7, 116, 117

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Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Educationpdf

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QUEER STUDIES & EDUCATION

SERIES EDITORS: WILLIAM F. PINAR

Michel Foucault and

Reta Ugena Whitlock

International Advisory Board

More information about this series at

Queer Studies and Education

Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan

1 Foucault, Friendship, and Education 1

2 #NoHomo: Men’s Friendships, or “Something Else” 9

3 Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture, Exclusion,

4 Queer Ascesis and the Invention of New Games 39

5 Transcendent Friendship: The Potential of Foucault’s

6 Gender and Sexual Minority Faculty Negotiating

7 Gay Ascesis: Ethics of Strategic Disorientation

8 Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life 103

9 Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party: A Foucauldian

10 Michel Foucault and Queer Ascesis: Toward

Author Index 155

Subject Index 157

Kevin J. Burke is an Associate Professor in the Department of

His current research focuses on using proleptic discourse to support the

Sean Robinson (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D.) is an

Foucault, Friendship, and Education

David Lee Carlson and Nelson M. Rodriguez

Abstract This chapter serves as the introduction to our edited volume

Keywords Ascesis · Friendship · Foucault · Le Gai Pied · Education

© The Author(s) 2019 1

The main theme of Michel Foucault’s 1980–1981 Collège de France lec-

as an episode that cannot be the final stage” (Foucault 1997b, p. 157). In

For Foucault, pleasure, unlike desire, could not be coopted by

in “Friendship as a Way of Life” that gays need to exist in a continual state

Asceticism as the renunciation of pleasure has bad connotations. But ascesis

Foucault’s notion of advancing into a homosexual ascesis also constitutes an

of life,” by engendering new relational forms and opportunities for ethical

while it works to aggressively constrain or filter what we are able to envi-

framing in classroom discussions the topic of gay-for-pay, Rodriguez first

#NoHomo: Men’s Friendships,

Frank G. Karioris and Jonathan A. Allan

© The Author(s) 2019 9

pursuit is “a way of rediscovering sociality” (p. 63). The relation between

Keywords #NoHomo · Friendship · Collaboration · Masculinities

Friendship between men and friendship between women interested him to a

Degaying Gesture: #NoHomo

think about men’s friendships alongside and through Foucault’s “some-

Collaborating on Friendship, Pleasure,

necessarily in simple reciprocation, but, as a more abstracted and freeform

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of

It is this “unbridgeable” gap that one confronts head-on through ideas

through a questioning of the singularity of eros and by bringing into play

Education, Ascesis, and Friendship

In setting friendship up in relation to education (within a measure of

The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to

This polarization posits a form of friendship as wisdom, a relation to the

Educational or psychiatric institutions, with their large populations, their

Through the explicit linkage of “nonconjugal” and “nonmonogomous”

Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. Berkeley: University of California

Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture,

Abstract This chapter revisits Foucault’s brief, influential interview

© The Author(s) 2019 23

Foucault. A contemporary account of queer friendship as a way of life neces-

Keywords Queer intimacy · Queer community · Friendship ·

I am in Wilton Manors, an historic gayborhood in the center of Fort Laud-

Homosexuality, Hegemonic Masculinity,

1 Foucault, Friendship, and Education 1

2 #NoHomo: Men’s Friendships, or “Something Else” 9

3 Intimacy and Access: Clone Culture, Exclusion,

4 Queer Ascesis and the Invention of New Games 39

5 Transcendent Friendship: The Potential of Foucault’s

6 Gender and Sexual Minority Faculty Negotiating

7 Gay Ascesis: Ethics of Strategic Disorientation

8 Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life 103

9 Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party: A Foucauldian

10 Michel Foucault and Queer Ascesis: Toward