Auto-archaeology of Homosexuality: A Foucauldian Reading of the Psychiatric–Industrial Complex

Abstract

This essay explores two primary questions. (1) Can there be a Foucauldian autoethnography? (2) How might a Foucault-driven autoethnography detail my experiences in the psychiatric–industrial complex? Pulling largely from Michel Foucault's earliest work History of Madness, I look at how interconnected organizations have rendered homosexuality as senseless, used a “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” to rationalize this senselessness, and relied on expensive psychoanalysis and pharmaceuticals to invoke the madness they claim to cure.