If you work on Foucault, and you aren't familiar with Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Indiana UP, 1999), you should be. It's one hell of a read, providing an interpretation of Foucault that is both personal and political (and it discusses, at one point, line dancing). An interview of her with John Protevi is now available at New APPS. After noting that she was a "queer child in every sense of that word," born in a northern Alabama town in 1960 (and don't forget about segregation), McWhorter states:
What I remember most about childhood was the sense that so many things had to go unspoken—because speaking them might destroy our world or because there just weren’t any words to speak them with. I know that one thing that drove me to philosophy was the deep need to find ways to speak, which involved critiquing how the world was put together so as to preclude speaking so much of what I half-perceived and felt. I had to find my way out of that world in order to survive.
Of course, the whole interview is worth reading.
Now I've got to go to work.
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