Gillian Harkins

Introduction Genres of Neoliberalism

DOI 10.1215/01642472-2081103

Foucault, the Family and the Cold Monster of Neoliberalism

This chapter takes as its point of departure Michel Foucault’s late 1970s intervention in French legal reform, specifically his work to change age of consent laws during the Penal Code reform of 1977–78.2 Foucault’s biographers note the range of his post-1968 activism, including the occupation of a university building at Paris VIII Vincennes (1969), work with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) (1971–73), participation in efforts to change the age of sexual majority (1977–78), and travel to observe the unfolding Iranian Revolution (1979).3 This activity has been linked to Foucault’s turn towards genealogies of power rather than archaeologies of knowledge.4 But this activity might also contradict his genealogical work, manifesting belief in radical transformation—even revolution—seemingly undermined by the more diffuse modalities of power described in Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). This chapter considers Foucault’s efforts to change French age of consent law, including decriminalisation of consensual sex with persons under the age of fifteen, in relation to his College de France lectures from 1974 to 1979, focusing on the intersections between Foucault’s academic writings on monstrosity and his activism in the public arena.

Sisters at the Gate: Mean Girls and Other Sibling Phenomena

The Lot saga is a familiar one. The Lot family of Sodom and Gomorrah is visited by angels in men’s form; male citizens flock to the door of the Lot home seeking to “know” the visitors. Lot offers the citizens his daughters instead, who have not yet “known” man, but ultimately the angels decide to punish the cities with fire and brimstone. Lot, along with his wife and daughters, are spared this fate so long as none turns back to look upon the cities’ destruction while they leave. Lot’s wife however does glance backward, and as a result turns to salt. Bereft of both human community and maternal presence, Lot’s daughters seek to become mothers themselves by lying with their father (after an appropriate plying of wine to induce lethargy and forgetfulness) and reproducing the line through themselves. Daughters become mothers of their own siblings, creating a new human community from the crossing of what Juliet Mitchell calls the lateral and vertical axes of sexuality and reproduction (Mitchell 2003).

Access or Justice? Inside-Out and Transformative Education

In keeping with the spirit of the epigraphs offered here, this essay raises more questions than it answers. How do we imagine and institute the aims of higher education in systems that have historically separated “scholarly research” and “activism”? And how do we shift our tactics to address recent changes in these systems brought about by neoliberal reforms, which combine a philosophy of free-market enterprise with policies limiting state support for education and increasing state support for incarceration? Given this context, how can we strategize to link efforts to increase access to higher education inside prisons with the broader goals of education justice? Efforts to answer these questions are already underway among activists and scholars working within the constraints of existing institutions. This essay adds to the conversation by exploring how higher education in prison programs can create institutional mechanisms or systems that contribute to broader education justice movements. Focusing specifically on the historical context of neoliberalism, I ask how providing increased access to higher education—specifically access that crosses prison walls—can become a strategy in broader educational justice efforts rather than another component of neoliberalism’s restructured access to higher education.3 My goal is to situate the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program in relation to the broader impact of neoliberal incorporations of education justice efforts and higher education programs in prison more generally.

Aye, and Neoliberalism

This reflection reads Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” to explore how sexualities and genders appear in a neoliberal age, when and where we allegedly see the “law of the dialectic at a standstill” (Benjamin, 1973, p.171). Neoliberalism attempts to totalize the social field through market mechanisms, conflating earlier differentiations between economic, political, and cultural domains and producing new forms of valorized, surplus, or residual life. This complicates earlier methods of reading life forms dialectically, whether psychoanalytic (subjection through the dialectic of desire) or Marxist (subjection through the dialectic of historical materialism). To develop a method of reading sexualities and genders in an age of neoliberalism, I turn to postmodern science fiction. This may seem paradoxical, since postmodernism is noted for freezing dialectics by privileging ambiguity over ambivalence (dialectic of desire) or antagonism (dialectic of historical materialism). But such narratives can be read to interrupt neoliberal reifications of all life into specific cultural forms, so long as we attend to narrative as a critical practice; the figurative appearance or image (Benjamin, 1973, p. 171) of ambiguity becomes through this narrative practice, here, the practice of science fiction, a vehicle for queer critique of neoliberalism. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” provides a critical narrative of sexualities and genders produced for an age uncannily like neoliberalism. Written in 1966, “Aye, and Gomorrah” follows a group of spacers across space and time, from the narrative’s opening moment when they “came down in Paris” (Delany, 2003a, p. 91) through its closing when they “went up” from Istanbul (p. 101). In between, the reader discerns the narrative is set sometime after