An ethics of resistance: A consideration of Foucault on power, subjects and gay identity

The dissertation seeks to explore the ramifications of why Foucault's later genealogical work on sexuality is interesting to a concept of gay identity. The dissertation attempts to provide a fresh understanding of what the concepts of power and subjects mean, based on Foucault's texts. Power is not solely a form of constraint. The relationships of power Foucault discusses provide for a broad array of possibilities. Consequently, the idea of the subject, like the homosexual as a subject of Scientia Sexualis, is not restricted to the idea of a lobotomized individual dragged about by a power with deterministic and totalitarian sentiments. Rather, subjects are the productive sites of power. The dissertation also presents evidence that Foucault never rejects the idea of an individual who becomes these subjects and who can therefore utilize the possibilities provided by relationships of power. The final result of this study is that the earlier concept of resistance merges with Foucault's last concepts of an ethics. Becoming, not being gay, is the process of ethically transforming oneself and one's own identity. The importance of Foucault to gay identity is that he disrupts the easy categorizations of the sciences of sexuality so that an individual, multiply engaged as multiple subjects, may flourish in the arena of power/knowledge without the restrictions of a metaphysics or epistemology of sexuality. One resists the constrictive aspects of power, in knowledge systems like the sciences of sexuality, by ethically fashioning oneself by taking up what power really offers.