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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
LGBTQ social, cultural, and political issues have become a defining feature of twenty-first
century life, transforming on a global scale any number of institutions, including the insti-
tution of education. Situated within the context of these major transformations, this series
is home to the most compelling, innovative, and timely scholarship emerging at the inter-
section of queer studies and education. Across a broad range of educational topics and
locations, books in this series incorporate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex
categories, as well as scholarship in queer theory arising out of the postmodern turn in
sexuality studies. The series is wide-ranging in terms of disciplinary/theoretical perspectives
and methodological approaches, and will include and illuminate much needed intersec-
tional scholarship. Always bold in outlook, the series also welcomes projects that challenge
any number of normalizing tendencies within academic scholarship, from works that move
beyond established frameworks of knowledge production within LGBTQ educational
research to works that expand the range of what is institutionally defined within the field of
education as relevant queer studies scholarship.
International Advisory Board

Louisa Allen, The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Edward Brockenbrough, University of Pennsylvania, USA
James Burford, Thammasat University, Thailand
Anna Carastathis, Independent Scholar, Greece
Rob Cover, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
Cindy Cruz, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Xinyan Fan, The University of British Columbia, Canada
Anne Harris, RMIT University, Australia
Tiffany Jones, Macquarie University, Australia
Jón Ingvar Kjaran, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, Iceland
Kevin Kumashiro, Kevin Kumashiro Consulting, USA
Alicia Lapointe, Western University, Canada
Máirtín Mac an Ghaill, Newman University, UK
Paul Chamness Miller, Akita International University, Japan
sj Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Robert Mizzi, University of Manitoba, Canada
Thabo Msibi, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Aoife Neary, University of Limerick, Ireland
Z Nicolazzo, University of Arizona, USA
Gul Ozyegin, William & Mary, USA
Moira Pérez, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Christine Quinan, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Mary Lou Rasmussen, Australian National University, Australia
Eva Reimers, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Emma Renold, Cardiff University, UK
Finn Reygan, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa
Nick Rumens, Middlesex University, UK
Jacqueline Ullman, Western Sydney University, Australia
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14522
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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
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publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan
This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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
© The Author(s) 2019 9

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_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.
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Fig. 96.—Cybister roeseli (= laterimarginalis De G.) Europe. A, Larva
(after Schiödte); B, ♂ imago.
Fam. 9. Dytiscidae (Water-beetles).—Antennae bare; hind legs

formed for swimming, not capable of ordinary walking: metasternum
without a transverse line across it; behind closely united with the
extremely large coxae. Outer lobe of maxilla forming a two-jointed
palpus. The Dytiscidae, or true water-beetles, are of interest
because—unlike the aquatic Neuroptera—they exist in water in both
the larval and imaginal instars; nevertheless there is reason for
supposing that they are modified terrestrial Insects: these reasons
are (1) that in their general organisation they are similar to the
Carabidae, and they drown more quickly than the majority of land
beetles do; (2) though the larvae are very different from the larvae of
terrestrial beetles, yet the imaginal instars are much less profoundly
changed, and are capable of existing perfectly well on land, and of
taking prolonged flights through the air; (3) the pupa is, so far as
known, always terrestrial. The larvae and imagos are perfectly at
home in the water, except that they must come to the surface to get
air. Some of them are capable, however, when quiescent, of living for
hours together beneath the water, but there appears to be great
diversity in this respect.[92] The hind pair of legs is the chief means
of locomotion. These swimming-legs (Fig. 97) are deserving of
admiration on account of their mechanical perfection; this, however,
is exhibited in various degrees, the legs in the genera Dytiscus and
Hydroporus being but slender, while those of Cybister are so broad
and powerful, that a single stroke propels the Insect for a
considerable distance.
Fig. 97—Hind- or swimming-leg of Cybister tripunctatus. A, The whole
leg detached; B, the movable parts in the striking position. a,
Coxa; b, trochanter; c, femur; d, tibia; e, last joint of tarsus.
The wing-cases fit perfectly to the body, except at the tip, so as to

form an air-tight space between themselves and the back of the
Insect; this space is utilised as a reservoir for air. When the Dytiscus
feels the necessity for air it rises to the surface and exposes the tip
of the body exactly at the level of the water, separating at the same
time the abdomen from the wing-cases so as to open a broad chink
at the spot where the parts were, during the Insect's submersion, so
well held together as to be air- and water-tight. The terminal two
pairs of spiracles are much enlarged, and by curving the abdomen
the beetle brings them into contact with the atmosphere; respiration
is effected by this means as well as by the store of air carried about
under the wing cases. The air that enters the space between the
elytra and body is shut in there when the Insect closes the chink and
again dives beneath the water. The enlargement of the terminal
stigmata in Dytiscus is exceptional, and in forms more highly
organised in other respects, such as Cybister, these spiracles
remain minute; the presumption being that in this case respiration is
carried on almost entirely by means of the supply the Insect carries
in the space between the elytra and the base of the abdomen.[93]
The structure of the front foot of the male Dytiscus, and of many
other water-beetles, is highly remarkable, the foot being dilated to
form a palette or saucer, covered beneath by sucker-like structures
of great delicacy and beauty; by the aid of these the male is enabled
to retain a position on the female for many hours, or even days,
together. Lowne has shown that the suckers communicate with a sac
in the interior of the foot containing fluid, which exudes under
pressure. As the portions of the skeleton of the female on which
these suckers are brought to bear is frequently covered with pores,
or minute pits, it is probable that some correlation between the two
organisms is brought about by these structures. The females in
many groups of Dytiscidae bear on the upper surface of the body a
peculiar sculpture of various kinds, the exact use of which is
unknown; in many species there are two forms of the female, one
possessing this peculiar sculpture, the other nearly, or quite, without
it. The larvae of Dytiscidae differ from those of Carabidae chiefly by
the structure of the mouth and of the abdomen. They are excessively
rapacious, and are indeed almost constantly engaged in sucking the
juices of soft and small aquatic animals, by no means excluding their
own kind. The mode of suction is not thoroughly known, but so far as
the details have been ascertained they are correctly described, in the
work on aquatic Insects, by Professor Miall, we have previously
referred to; the mandibles are hollow, with a hole near the tip and
another at the base, and being sharp at the tips are thrust into the
body of a victim, and then by their closure the other parts of the
mouth, which are very beautifully constructed for the purpose, are
brought into fitting mechanical positions for completing the work of
emptying the victim. Nagel states that the larva of Dytiscus injects a
digestive fluid into the body of its victim, and that this fluid rapidly
dissolves all the more solid parts of the prey, so that the rapacious
larva can easily absorb all its victim except the insoluble outer skin.
The abdomen consists of only eight segments, and a pair of terminal
processes; the stigmata are all more or less completely obsolete—
according to species—with the exception of the pair on the eighth
segment at the tip of the body; the terminal segments are frequently
fringed with hairs, that serve not only as means of locomotion, but
also to float the pair of active stigmata at the surface when the
creature rises to get air. Although the larvae of Dytiscidae are but
little known, yet considerable diversity has already been found.
Those of Hyphydrus and some species of Hydroporus have the front
of the head produced into a horn, which is touched by the tips of the
mandibles.
Dytiscidae are peculiar inasmuch as they appear to flourish best in

the cooler waters of the earth. Lapland is one of the parts of Europe
richest in Dytiscidae, and the profusion of species in the tropics
compared with those of Europe is not nearly so great as it is in the
case of most of the other families of Coleoptera. About 1800 species
are at present known, and we have rather more than 100 species in
Britain.[94]
Series III. Polymorpha.
Antennae frequently either thicker at the tip (clavicorn) or serrate

along their inner edge (serricorn); but these characters, as well
as the number of joints in the feet and other points, are very
variable.
Upwards of fifty families are placed in this series; many of these

families are of very small extent, consisting of only a few species;
other families of the series are much larger, so that altogether about
40,000 species—speaking broadly, about one-fourth of the
Coleoptera—are included in the series. We have already (p. 189)
alluded to the fact that it is formed by certain conventional series,
Clavicornia, Serricornia, etc. united, because it has hitherto proved
impossible to define them.
Fam. 10. Paussidae.—Antennae of extraordinary form, usually two-

jointed, sometimes six- or ten-jointed. Elytra elongate, but truncate
behind, leaving the pygidium exposed. Tarsi five-jointed. The
Paussidae have always been recognised as amongst the most
remarkable of beetles, although they are of small size, the largest
attaining scarcely half an inch in length. They are found only in two
ways; either in ants' nests, or on the wing at night. They apparently
live exclusively in ants' nests, but migrate much. Paussidae usually
live in the nests of terrestrial ants, but they have been found in nests
of Cremastogaster in the spines of Acacia fistulosa. They have the
power of discharging, in an explosive manner, a volatile caustic fluid
from the anus, which is said by Loman to contain free iodine. Their
relations to the ants are at present unexplained, though much
attention has been given to the subject. When observed in the nests
they frequently appear as if asleep, and the ants do not take much
notice of them.
Fig. 98.—Paussus cephalotes ♂. El Hedjaz. (After Raffray.)
On other occasions the ants endeavour to drag them into the interior
of the nest, as if desirous of retaining their company: the Paussus
then makes no resistance to its hosts; if, however, it be touched,
even very slightly, by an observer, it immediately bombards: the ants,
as may be imagined, do not approve of this, and run away. Nothing
has ever been observed that would lead to the belief that the ants
derive any benefit from the presence of the Paussi, except that these
guests bear on some part of the body—frequently the great
impressions on the pronotum—patches of the peculiar kind of
pubescence that exists in many other kinds of ants'-nest beetles,
and is known in some of them to secrete a substance the ants are
fond of, and that the ants have been seen to lick the beetles. On the
other hand, the Paussi have been observed to eat the eggs and
larvae of the ants. The larva of Paussus is not known,[95] and
Raffray doubts whether it lives in the ants' nests. There are about
200 species of Paussidae known, Africa, Asia and Australia being
their chief countries; one species, P. favieri, is not uncommon in the
Iberian peninsula and South France, and a single species was
formerly found in Brazil. The position the family should occupy has
been much discussed; the only forms to which they make any real
approximation are Carabidae, of the group Ozaenides, a group of
ground beetles that also crepitate. Burmeister and others have
therefore placed the Paussidae in the series Adephaga, but we
follow Raffray's view (he being the most recent authority on the
family),[96] who concludes that this is an anomalous group not
intimately connected with any other family of Coleoptera, though
having more affinity to Carabidae than to anything else. The recently
discovered genus Protopaussus has eleven joints to the antennae,
and is said to come nearer to Carabidae than the previously known
forms did, and we may anticipate that a more extensive knowledge
will show that the family may find a natural place in the Adephaga.
The description of the abdomen given by Raffray is erroneous; in a
specimen of the genus Arthropterus the writer has dissected, he
finds that there are five ventral segments visible along the middle, six
at the sides, as in the families of Adephaga generally. There is said
to be a great difference in the nervous systems of Carabidae and
Paussidae, but so little is known on this point that we cannot judge
whether it is really of importance.
Fig. 99.—A, Larva of Gyrinus (after Schiödte); B, under side of Gyrinus

sp. (after Ganglbauer). 1, Prosternum; 2, anterior coxal cavity; 3.
mesothoracic episternum; 4, mesoepimeron; 5, mesosternum; 6,
metathoracic episternum; 7, middle coxal cavity; 8, metasternum;
9, hind coxa; 10, ventral segments. [N.B.—The first ventral
segment really consists, at each side, of two segments united; this
may be distinctly seen in many Gyrinidae.]
Fam. 11. Gyrinidae (Whirligig beetles).—Antennae very short; four

eyes; middle and hind legs forming short broad paddles; abdomen
with six segments visible along the middle, seven along each side.
These Insects are known to all from their habit of floating lightly on
the surface of water, and performing graceful complex curves round
one another without colliding; sometimes they may be met with in
great congregations. They are admirably constructed for this mode
of life, which is comparatively rare in the Insect world; the
Hydrometridae amongst the bugs, and a small number of different
kinds of Diptera, being the only other Insects that are devoted to a
life on the surface of the waters. Of all these, Gyrinidae are in their
construction the most adapted for such a career. They are able to
dive to escape danger, and they then carry with them a small supply
of air, but do not stay long beneath the surface. Their two hind pairs
of legs are beautifully constructed as paddles, expanding
mechanically when moved in the backward direction, and collapsing
into an extremely small space directly the resistance they meet with
is in the other direction. The front legs of these Insects are
articulated to the thorax in a peculiar direction so that their soles do
not look downwards but towards one another; hence the sensitive
adhesive surface used during coupling is placed on the side of the
foot, forming thus a false sole: a remarkable modification otherwise
unknown in Insects. They breathe chiefly by means of the very large
metathoracic spiracles.
The larvae (Fig. 99, A) are purely aquatic, and are highly modified for
this life, being elongate creatures, with sharp, mandibles and nine
abdominal segments, each segment bearing on each side a trachea
branchia; these gills assist to some extent in locomotion. The
stigmata are quite obsolete, but the terminal segment bears four
processes, one pair of which may be looked on as cerci, the other as
a pair of gills corresponding with the pair on each of the preceding
segments. The mandibles are not suctorial, but, according to
Meinert, possess an orifice for the discharge of the secretion of a
mandibular gland. Gyrinidae are chiefly carnivorous in both the larval
and imaginal instars. Fully 300 species are known; they are
generally distributed, though wanting in most of the islands of the
world except those of large size. The finest forms are the Brazilian
Enhydrus and the Porrorhynchus of tropical Asia.[97] In Britain we
have nine species, eight of Gyrinus, one of Orectochilus; the latter
form is rarely seen, as it hides during the day, and performs its rapid
gyrations at night.
The Gyrinidae are one of the most distinct of all the families of
Coleoptera: by some they are associated in the Adephagous series;
but they have little or no affinity with the other members thereof.
Without them the Adephaga form a natural series of evidently allied
families, and we consider it a mistake to force the Gyrinidae therein
because an objection is felt by many taxonomists to the maintenance
of isolated families. Surely if there are in nature some families allied
and others isolated, it is better for us to recognise the fact, though it
makes our classifications look less neat and precise, and increases
the difficulty of constructing "tables."
Fam. 12. Hydrophilidae.—Tarsi five-jointed, the first joint in many

cases so small as to be scarcely evident: antennae short, of less
than eleven joints, not filiform, but consisting of three parts, a basal
part of one or two elongate joints, an intermediate part of two or
more small joints, and an apical part of larger (or at any rate broader)
joints, which are pubescent, the others being bare. Outer lobe of
maxillae usually complex, but not at all palpiform, maxillary palpi
often very long; the parts of the labium much concealed behind the
mentum, the labial palpi very widely separated. Hind coxae
extending the width of the body, short, the lamina interior small in
comparison with the lamina exterior. Abdomen of five visible
segments. The Hydrophilidae are an extensive family of beetles,
unattractive in colours and appearance, and much neglected by
collectors. A large part of the family live in water, though most of
them have only feeble powers of aquatic locomotion, and the beetles
appear chiefly to devote their attention to economising the stock of
air each individual carries about. The best known forms of the family
are the species of Hydrophilus. They are, however, very exceptional
in many respects, and are far more active and predaceous than most
of the other forms. Much has been written about Hydrophilus piceus,
one of the largest of British beetles. This Insect breathes in a most
peculiar manner: the spiracles are placed near bands of delicate
pubescence, forming tracts that extend the whole length of the body,
and in this particular species cover most of the under surface of the
body; these velvety tracts retain a coating of air even when the
Insect is submerged and moves quickly through the water. It would
appear rather difficult to invent a mechanism to supply these tracts
with fresh air without the Insect leaving the water; but nevertheless
such a mechanism is provided by the antennae of the beetle, the
terminal joints of which form a pubescent scoop, made by some
longer hairs into a funnel sufficiently large to convey a bubble of air.
The Insect therefore rises to the surface, and by means of the
antennae, which it exposes to the air, obtains a supply with which it
surrounds a large part of its body; for, according to Miall, it carries a
supply on its back, under the elytra, as well as on its ventral surface.
From the writer's own observations, made many years ago, he
inclines to the opinion that the way in which the Hydrophilus uses the
antennae to obtain air varies somewhat according to circumstances.
Many of the members of the sub-family Hydrophilides construct egg-

cocoons. In the case of Hydrophilus piceus, the boat-like structure is
provided with a little mast, which is supposed by some to be for the
purpose of securing air for the eggs. Helochares and Spercheus
(Fig. 100) carry the cocoon of eggs attached to their own bodies.
Philydrus constructs, one after the other, a number of these egg-
bags, each containing about fifteen eggs, and fixes each bag to the
leaf of some aquatic plant; the larvae as a rule hatch speedily, so
that the advantage of the bag is somewhat problematic.
Fig. 100.—Spercheus emarginatus ♀. Britain. A, Upper surface of

beetle; B, under surface of abdomen, with the egg-sac ruptured
and some of the eggs escaping.
The larvae of the aquatic division of the family have been to a certain
extent studied by Schiödte and others; those of the Sphaeridiides—
the terrestrial group of the family—are but little known. All the larvae
seem to be predaceous and carnivorous, even when the imago is of
vegetable-feeding habits; and Duméril states that in Hydrous
caraboides the alimentary canal undergoes a great change at the
period of metamorphosis, becoming very elongate in the adult,
though in the larva it was short. The legs are never so well
developed as they are in the Adephaga, the tarsi being merely claw-
like or altogether wanting; the mandibles are never suctorial. The
respiratory arrangements show much diversity. In most of the
Hydrophilides the process is carried on by a pair of terminal spiracles
on the eighth abdominal segment, as in Dytiscidae, and these are
either exposed or placed in a respiratory chamber. In Berosus the
terminal stigmata are obsolete, and the sides of the body bear long
branchial filaments. Cussac says that in Spercheus (Fig. 101) there
are seven pairs of abdominal spiracles, and that the larva breathes
by presenting these to the air;[98] but Schiödte states that in this form
there are neither thoracic nor abdominal spiracles, except a pair
placed in a respiratory chamber on the eighth segment of the
abdomen, after the manner described by Miall as existing in
Hydrobius. No doubt Cussac was wrong in supposing the peculiar
lateral abdominal processes to be stigmatiferous. In Berosus there
are patches of aëriferous, minute pubescence on the body. The
pupae of Hydrophilides repose on the dorsal surface, which is
protected by spinous processes on the pronotum, and on the sides
of the abdomen.
We have already remarked that this is one of the most neglected of

the families of Coleoptera, and its classification is not satisfactory. It
is usually divided into Hydrophilides and Sphaeridiides. The
Sphaeridiides are in large part terrestrial, but their separation from
the purely aquatic Hydrophilides cannot be maintained on any
grounds yet pointed out. Altogether about 1000 species of
Hydrophilidae are known, but this probably is not a tenth part of
those existing. In Britain we have nearly ninety species. Some
taxonomists treat the family as a series with the name Palpicornia.
The series Philhydrida of older authors included these Insects and
the Parnidae and Heteroceridae.
Fig. 101—Larva of Spercheus emarginatus. (After Schiödte).
Fam. 13. Platypsyllidae.—This consists of a single species. It will

be readily recognised from Fig. 102, attention being given to the
peculiar antennae, and to the fact that the mentum is trilobed behind.
This curious species has been found only on the beaver. It was first
found by Ritsema on American beavers (Castor canadensis) in the
Zoological Gardens at Amsterdam, but it has since been found on
wild beavers in the Rhone in France; in America it appears to be
commonly distributed on these animals from Alaska to Texas. It is
very remarkable that a wingless parasite of this kind should be found
in both hemispheres. The Insect was considered by Westwood to be
a separate Order called Achreioptera, but there can be no doubt that
it is a beetle. It is also admitted that it shows some points of
resemblance with Mallophaga, the habits of which are similar. Its
Coleopterous nature is confirmed by the larva, which has been
described by both Horn and Riley.[99] Little is known as to the food
and life-history. Horn states that the eggs are placed on the skin of
the beaver amongst the densest hair; the larvae move with a sinuous
motion, like those of Staphylinidae. It has been suggested that the
Insect feeds on an Acarid, Schizocarpus mingaudi; others have
supposed that it eats scales of epithelium or hairs of the beaver.
Fig. 102—Platypsyllus castoris. A, Upper side; B, lower side, with legs
of one side removed; C, antenna. (After Westwood.)
Fig. 103—Leptinus testaceus. Britain.
Fam. 14. Leptinidae.—Antennae rather long, eleven-jointed, without

club, but a little thicker at the extremity. Eyes absent or imperfect.
Tarsi five-jointed. Elytra quite covering abdomen. Mentum with the
posterior angles spinously prolonged. A family of only two genera
and two species. Their natural history is obscure, but is apparently of
an anomalous nature; the inference that may be drawn from the little
that is known being that they are parasitic on mammals. There is
little or nothing in their structure to indicate this, except the condition
of blindness; and until recently the Insects were classified amongst
Silphidae. Leptinus testaceus (Fig. 103) is a British Insect, and
besides occurring in Europe is well known in North America. In
Europe it has been found in curious places, including the nests of
mice and bumble-bees. In America it has been found on the mice
themselves by Dr. Ryder, and by Riley in the nests of a common
field-mouse, together with its larva, which, however, has not been
described. The allied genus Leptinillus is said by Riley to live on the
beaver, in company with Platypsyllus.[100] It has been suggested that
the natural home of the Leptinus is the bee's nest, and that perhaps
the beetle merely makes use of the mouse as a means of getting
from one nest of a bumble-bee to another.
Fam. 15. Silphidae.—The mentum is usually a transverse plate,

having in front a membranous hypoglottis, which bears the exposed
labial palpi, and immediately behind them the so-called bilobed
ligula. The anterior coxae are conical and contiguous: prothoracic
epimera and episterna not distinct. Visible abdominal segments
usually five, but sometimes only four, or as many as seven. Tarsi
frequently five-jointed, but often with one joint less. Elytra usually
covering the body and free at the tips, but occasionally shorter than
the body, and even truncate behind so as to expose from one to four
of the dorsal plates; but there are at least three dorsal plates in a
membranous condition at the base of the abdomen. These beetles
are extremely diverse in size and form, some being very minute,
others upwards of an inch long, and there is also considerable range
of structure. In this family are included the burying-beetles
(Necrophorus), so well known from their habit of making excavations
under the corpses of small Vertebrates, so as to bury them. Besides
these and Silpha, the roving carrion-beetles, the family includes
many other very different forms, amongst them being the larger part
of the cave-beetles of Europe and North America. These belong
mostly to the genera Bathyscia in Europe, and Adelops in North
America; but of late years quite a crowd of these eyeless cave-
beetles of the group Leptoderini have been discovered, so that the
European catalogue now includes about 20 genera and 150 species.
The species of the genus Catopomorphus are found in the nests of
ants of the genus Aphaenogaster in the Mediterranean region.
Scarcely anything is known as to the lives of either the cave-
Silphidae or the myrmecophilous forms.
The larvae of several of the larger forms of Silphidae are well known,
but very little has been ascertained as to the smaller forms. Those of
the burying-beetles have spiny plates on the back of the body, and
do not resemble the other known forms of the family. The rule is that
the three thoracic segments are well developed, and that ten
abdominal segments are also distinct; the ninth abdominal segment
bears a pair of cerci, which are sometimes elongate. Often the dorsal
plates are harder and better developed than is usual in Coleopterous
larvae. This is especially the case with some that are endowed with
great powers of locomotion, such as S. obscura (Fig. 104). The food
of the larvae is as a rule decomposing animal or vegetable matter,
but some are predaceous, and attack living objects. The larger
Silpha larvae live, like the Necrophorus, on decomposing animal
matter, but run about to seek it; hence many specimens of some of
these large larvae may sometimes be found amongst the bones of a
very small dead bird. We have found the larva and imago of S.
thoracica in birds' nests containing dead nestlings. S. atrata and S.
laevigata make war on snails. S. lapponica enters the houses in
Lapland and ravages the stores of animal provisions. S. opaca
departs in a very decided manner from the habits of its congeners,
as it attacks beetroot and other similar crops in the growing state; it
is sometimes the cause of serious loss to the growers of beet. The
larvae of the group Anisotomides are believed to be chiefly
subterranean in habits; that of A. cinnamomea feeds on the truffle,
and the beetle is known as the truffle-beetle.
Fig. 104—A, Larva of Silpha obscura. Europe. (After Schiödte). B,

Ptomaphila lacrymosa, Australia.
The number of species of Silphidae known must be at present

nearer 900 than 800. Of these an unusually large proportion belong
to the European and North American regions; Silphidae being
apparently far from numerous in the tropics. Rather more than 100
species are natives of Britain. The family reappears in considerable
force in New Zealand, and is probably well represented in South
Australia and Tasmania. The most remarkable form known is
perhaps the Australian genus Ptomaphila (Fig. 104, B). The
classification of the family is due to Dr. Horn.[101] The only change of
importance that has since been suggested is the removal of
Sphaerites from this family to Synteliidae. Anisotomidae and
Clambidae have been considered distinct families, but are now
included in Silphidae.
Fam. 16. Scydmaenidae.—Minute Insects allied to Silphidae, but
with the hind coxae separated, and the facets of the eyes coarser;
the tarsi are five-jointed; the number of visible abdominal segments
is six. These small beetles are widely spread over the earth's
surface, and about 700 species are now known, of which we have
about a score in Britain; many live in ants' nests, but probably
usually rather as intruders than as guests that have friendly relations
with their hosts. Nothing is known as to their life-histories, but the
food of the imago, so far as is known, consists of Acari. Mastigus is a
very aberrant form, found in moss and dead leaves in Southern
Europe. By means of Brathinus the family is brought very near to
Silphidae; Casey, however, considers Brathinus to belong to
Staphylinidae rather than to Scydmaenidae. The South European
Leptomastax is remarkable on account of the slender, long, sickle-
shaped mandibles. The Oriental genus Clidicus is the largest and
most remarkable form of the family; it has a very slender neck to its
broad head, and is more than a quarter of an inch long.
Fam. 17. Gnostidae.—Minute Insects with three-jointed antennae,

five-jointed tarsi, and three apparent ventral segments, the first of
which, however, is elongate, and consists of three united plates.
Elytra entirely covering the after-body. The family consists of two
species which have been found in the nests of ants, of the genus
Cremastogaster, in Brazil.[102]
Fam. 18. Pselaphidae.—Very small Insects; the elytra much

abbreviated, usually leaving as much as half the abdomen
uncovered; the maxillary palpi usually greatly developed, and of a
variety of remarkable forms; the segments of the abdomen not more
than seven in number, with little or no power of movement. Tarsi with
not more than three joints. These small Coleoptera mostly live in the
nests of ants, and present a great diversity of extraordinary shapes,
and very peculiar structures of the antennae and maxillary palpi.
Owing to the consolidation of some of its segments, the abdomen
frequently appears to have less than the usual number. In the
curious sub-family Clavigerides, the antennae may have the joints
reduced to two or even, to all appearance, to one; the tarsi suffer a
similar reduction. There are about 2500 species of Pselaphidae
known; many of them have never been found outside the ants' nests;
very little, however, is known as to their natural history. It is certain
that some of them excrete, from little tufts of peculiar pubescence, a
substance that the ants are fond of. The secretory patches are found
on very different parts of the body and appendages. Claviger
testaceus is fed by the ants in the same way as these social Insects
feed one another; the Claviger has also been seen to eat the larvae
of the ants. They ride about on the backs of the ants when so
inclined. The family is allied to Staphylinidae, but is easily
distinguished by the rigid abdomen. Only one larva—that of
Chennium bituberculatum—is known. It appears to be very similar to
the larvae of Staphylinidae. The best account of classification and
structure is that given by M. Achille Raffray,[103] who has himself
discovered and described a large part of the known species.
Fam. 19. Staphylinidae.—Elytra very short, leaving always some of

the abdominal segments exposed, and covering usually only two of
the segments. Abdomen usually elongate, with ten dorsal, and seven
or eight ventral segments; of the latter six or seven are usually
exposed; the dorsal plates as hard as the ventral, except sometimes
in the case of the first two segments; the segments very mobile, so
that the abdomen can be curled upwards. The number of tarsal joints
very variable, often five, but frequently as few as three, and not
always the same on all the feet. Staphylinidae (formerly called
Brachelytra or Microptera) is one of the most extensive of even the
great families of Coleoptera; notwithstanding their diversity, they may
in nearly all cases be recognised by the more than usually mobile
and uncovered abdomen, combined with the fact that the parts of the
mouth are of the kind we have mentioned in Silphidae. The present
state of the classification of this family has been recently discussed
by Ganglbauer.[104]
Fig. 105—Staphylinidae. A, Larva of Philonthus nitidus. Britain. (After
Schiödte.) B, Ocypus olens, Britain; C, tip of abdomen, of O.
olens with stink-vessels.
At present about 9000 species are known, some of which are

minute, while scarcely any attain a size of more than an inch in
length, our common British black cock-tail, or "devil's coach-horse
beetle," Ocypus olens, being amongst the largest. Though the elytra
are short, the wings in many forms are as large as those of the
majority of beetles; indeed many Staphylinidae are more apt at
taking flight than is usual with Coleoptera; the wings when not in use
are packed away under the short elytra, being transversely folded,
and otherwise crumpled, in a complicated but orderly manner. It is
thought that the power of curling up the abdomen is connected with
the packing away of the wings after flight; but this is not the case: for
though the Insect sometimes experiences a difficulty in folding the
wings under the elytra after they have been expanded, yet it
overcomes this difficulty by slight movements of the base of the
abdomen, rather than by touching the wings with the tip. What the
value of this exceptional condition of short elytra and corneous
dorsal abdominal segments to the Insect may be is at present quite
mysterious. The habits of the members of the family are very varied;
many run with great activity; the food is very often small Insects,
living or dead; a great many are found in fungi of various kinds, and
perhaps eat them. It is in this family that we meet with some of the
most remarkable cases of symbiosis, i.e. lives of two kinds of
creatures mutually accommodated with good will. The relations
between the Staphylinidae of the genera Atemeles and Lomechusa,
and certain ants, in the habitations of which they dwell, are very
interesting. The beetles are never found out of the ants' nests, or at
any rate not very far from them. The most friendly relations exist
between them and the ants: they have patches of yellow hairs, and
these apparently secrete some substance with a flavour agreeable to
the ants, which lick the beetles from time to time. On the other hand,
the ants feed the beetles; this they do by regurgitating food, at the
request of the beetle, on to their lower lip, from which it is then taken
by the beetle (Fig. 82). The beetles in many of their movements
exactly resemble the ants, and their mode of requesting food, by
stroking the ants in certain ways, is quite ant-like. So reciprocal is the
friendship that if an ant is in want of food, the Lomechusa will in its
turn disgorge for the benefit of its host. The young of the beetles are
reared in the nests by the ants, who attend to them as carefully as
they do to their own young. The beetles have a great fondness for
the ants, and prefer to sit amongst a crowd thereof; they are fond of
the ants' larvae as food, and indeed eat them to a very large extent,
even when their own young are receiving food from the ants. The
larva of Lomechusa, as described by Wasmann (to whom we are
indebted for most of our knowledge of this subject),[105] when not
fully grown, is very similar to the larvae of the ants; although it
possesses legs it scarcely uses them: its development takes place
with extraordinary rapidity, two days, at most, being occupied in the
egg, and the larva completing its growth in fourteen days. Wasmann
seems to be of opinion that the ants scarcely distinguish between the
beetle-larvae and their own young; one unfortunate result for the
beetle follows from this, viz. that in the pupal state the treatment that
is suitable for the ant-larvae does not agree with the beetle-larvae:
the ants are in the habit of digging up their own kind and lifting them
out and cleaning them during their metamorphosis; they also do this
with the beetle-larvae, with fatal results; so that only those that have
the good fortune to be forgotten by the ants complete their
development. Thus from thirty Lomechusa larvae Wasmann obtained
a single imago, and from fifty Atemeles larvae not even one.
Many other Staphylinidae are exclusively attached to ants' nests, but

most of them are either robbers, at warfare with the ants—as is the
case with many species of Myrmedonia that lurk about the outskirts
of the nests—or are merely tolerated by the ants, not receiving any
direct support from them. The most remarkable Staphylinidae yet
discovered are some viviparous species, forming the genera
Corotoca and Spirachtha, that have very swollen abdomens, and live
in the nests of Termites in Brazil:[106] very little is, however, known
about them. A very large and powerful Staphylinid, Velleius dilatatus,
lives only in the nests of hornets and wasps. It has been supposed to
be a defender of the Hymenoptera, but the recent observations of
Janet and Wasmann make it clear that this is not the case: the
Velleius has the power of making itself disagreeable to the hornets
by some odour, and they do not seriously attack it. The Velleius finds
its nutriment in larvae or pupae of the wasps that have fallen from
their cells, or in other organic refuse.
The larvae of Staphylinidae are very similar to those of Carabidae,

but their legs are less perfect, and are terminated only by a single
claw; there is no distinct labrum. The pupae of some are obtected,
i.e. covered by a secondary exudation that glues all the appendages
together, and forms a hard coat, as in Lepidoptera. We have about
800 species of Staphylinidae in Britain, and it is probable that the
family will prove one of the most extensive of the Order. It is
probable that one hundred thousand species or even more are at
present in existence.
Fam. 20. Sphaeriidae.—Very minute. Antennae eleven-jointed,

clubbed. Tarsi three-jointed. Abdomen with only three visible ventral
segments. This family includes only three or four species of Insects
about 1⁄50 of an inch long. They are very convex, and be found
walking on mud. S. acaroides occurs in our fens. Mr. Matthews
considers that they are most nearly allied to Hydrophilidae.[107]
Fig. 106—Trichopteryx fascicularis. Britain. A, Outline of perfect Insect;
B, part of upper surface; C, larva from side; D, from above; E,
pupa; F, wing; G, natural size of imago.
Fam. 21. Trichopterygidae.—Extremely minute: antennae clavicorn

(basal and apical joints thicker than middle joints); tarsi three-jointed;
elytra sometimes covering abdomen, in other cases leaving a
variable number of segments exposed; wings fringed. This family
comprises the smallest Insects; Nanosella fungi being only 1⁄100 of
an inch long, while the largest Trichopterygid is only 1⁄12 of an inch.
The small size is not accompanied by any degeneration of structure,
the minute, almost invisible forms, having as much anatomical
complexity as the largest Insects. Very little is known as to the
natural history. Probably these Insects exist in all parts of the world,
for we have about eighty species in England, and Trichopterygidae
are apparently numerous in the tropics.[108]
Fam. 22. Hydroscaphidae.—Extremely minute aquatic Insects, with

elongate abdomen. Antennae eight-jointed. The other characters are
much the same as those we have mentioned for Trichopterygidae.
The family is not likely to come before the student, as only three or
four species from Southern Europe and North America are known.
[109]

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Michel Foucault and Sexualities and

Genders in Education Friendship as

Emergent Identities New Sexualities Genders and

Gay Men’s Working Lives, Retirement and Old Age

Genders, Sexualities, and Spiritualities in African

State Phobia and Civil Society The Political Legacy of

Texture in the Work of Ian Hacking Michel Foucault as

East Asian Pedagogies Education as Formation and

Social Theory and Education Research Understanding

Multicultural Education of Children and Adolescents M.

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