Writing and reading queerly: Foucault’s aesthetics of existence and queer self-making

Abstract

Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. The purpose of this transformative self-bricolage is to make philosophy a ‘way of life’. One of the examples Foucault gave of a technique used in such an ethics of the self – implemented to produce a desired or altered/transformed subject – was reflective writing. This article explores the ways that writing informed by Queer Theory can be used as a technique in a Foucauldian ethics of the self, especially within the context of the teacher-student relationship in the discipline of creative writing. It further argues that creative writing is an appropriate site for ‘ethical interventions’ into subjectivity and for explorations into how philosophy, in this case Queer Theory, can be applied as a way of life in which new forms of subjectivity are explored and produced. Furthermore, the paper discusses the way that queer readings of literary texts can also be part of an ethics of the self or queer selfmaking.