Ladelle McWhorter 2012

ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78, September 2012

ARTICLE

Queer Economies
Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond

ABSTRACT: Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories.

Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of
resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices
at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily
normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neo-
liberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine
normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance
through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The
Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis.

Keywords: Foucault, queer theory, neoliberalism, entrepreneur of the self.

Early homosexual rights activists followed the sexologists of their day in reifying same-sex
acts, relationships, desires, and pleasures into a type of personhood, the outcome of biologi-
cal and/or psychological developmental processes. On that basis, most called for tolerance
and acceptance of homosexual persons (although a few went further, celebrating homo-
sexual personhood as a superior human type). Somewhere in the middle—between mere
tolerance and exuberant veneration—lay a potential for equality implicit in the idea of what
geneticists came to call “normal variation”: Perhaps homosexuality occurs with a regular
frequency in any given population; perhaps it is just a minority trait like blue eyes or the
absence of wisdom teeth, and therefore is not to be viewed as pathological or even inferior
to heterosexuality in any way.
In the main, this rhetoric of equality—like the rhetoric of pathological deviance—
preserved the basic framework for thinking about differences in human groups that had
been developing in biological and medical research at the end of the nineteenth and
through the first few decades of the twentieth centuries. Any population evinces a set of
statistical norms, which in the scientific sense just means the frequency with which some set
of traits occurs. For example, in a given adult human population most individuals have (or
at one time had) four wisdom teeth, so the trait “having four wisdom teeth” occurs with
high frequency. But there are also individuals with only three, two, or no wisdom teeth. In

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some perhaps less scientific discourses, relative infrequency of a trait may be thought to
indicate that that trait is non-optimal or “abnormal.” As a result, those individuals whose
traits most approximate alternatives of highest frequency may be considered normal not
only in a descriptive but also in a prescriptive sense, and those with less frequently mani-
fested traits are considered more or less deviant, their differences likely produced by dis-
ruptions in the normal course of development brought about by trauma or disease.
Homosexual rights activists who asserted this kind of equality challenged the idea
that heterosexuality was the single normal—healthy, natural—outcome in the development
of sexual orientation. They suggested that some people can develop “normally”—that is,
non-pathologically—as homosexuals, that homosexuality is not the result of deviation from
normal sexual development but rather has developmental norms of its own. In other
words, the trait of sexual orientation accommodates a range of “normal” variation.
It is abundantly clear why early (and even much later) activists took this approach.
It is much easier to challenge discrimination within the conceptual framework in which it
receives justification than it is to challenge the framework itself; challenging a particular
justification is not nearly as difficult as challenging an entire justificatory regime. But by
the end of the twentieth century, some activists and theorists were in fact mounting that
much more difficult challenge. In the 1970s, Gay Liberation raised the question of why we
have to lock individuals into sexual identities at all; liberationists encouraged all people to
experience a full range of sexual possibilities and to question the demand for conformity
that pervades our social world. Queer Nation continued this challenge with some modifi-
cation in the 1980s.1 And then, by the early 1990s, queer theorists were tracing the psycho-
logical and historical emergence of various identity categories and exposing not only their
cultural and historical contingency but also their political and economic investments.
Queer politics was not about conferring acceptance upon a wider range of identity cate-
gories than heretofore; queer politics was about displacing the whole notion of identities
constructed out of deviations and norms. As sociologist Joshua Gamson writes:

Queerness in its most distinctive forms shakes the ground on which gay and lesbian
politics has been built, taking apart the ideas of a “sexual minority” and a “gay com-
munity,” indeed of “gay” and “lesbian” and even “man” and “woman.” It builds on cen-
tral difficulties of identity-based organizing: the instability of identities both individual
and collective, their made-up yet necessary character.2

1 For some discussion of the historical connection between Queer Nation and Queer Theory, see Joshua
Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma,” Social Problems, vol. 42, no. 3 (Au-
gust, 1995), 393. For some political analysis of Queer Nation, see Lauren Berlant, and Elizabeth Freeman,
“Queer Nationality,” in Michael Warner (eds.) Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 193-229.
2 Gamson, 390.

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Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78.

Along with queer politics, queer theory, as Michael Warner suggests in his introduction to
Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, was born in opposition to the norma-
lizing power regimes that gave rise to those identities.3
The question to be considered in this article is what happens when normalizing
regimes begin to shift and transform, giving way to (or being adapted to) forms of power
not so focused on individual bodies and their development, as I believe is occurring with a
transition from neoclassical to neo-liberalism, to regimes more primarily organized in terms
of what Michel Foucault calls apparatuses of security and population management. If
twentieth-century identities were, in large part, creatures of normalization and such re-
gimes are losing their primacy, what happens to the project of queering identities? Are
practices of queering as desperately needed as they were in previous decades? Are they
even relevant? Is it possible for practices of queering to engage and resist regimes of secu-
rity as effectively as they have engaged regimes of normalization? In this essay I cannot be-
gin to answer all these questions, but I will articulate their significance and explore some
possible routes toward answers here.
My analysis will begin with a brief overview of Foucault’s discussion of biopower in
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. I will draw additionally upon Foucault’s lecture series of
1977-1978, published in English as Security, Territory, Population, to sharpen the distinction
he makes between disciplinary normalization and population management conjoined with
techniques of security. Then I will turn to his lecture series of 1978-1979, published in Eng-
lish as The Birth of Biopolitics, to trace the emergence of the management strategies that Fou-
cault calls “neoliberalism.” I will argue that neoliberal management tends to displace and
even undermine normalized identities in some of the same ways that practices of “queer-
ing” do, and that for a variety of political and strategic reasons it is important for queer
theory to distinguish itself carefully from, and develop a sophisticated critique of, neolibe-
ralism.

Biopower, Normalization, and Population Management

In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault speaks of two aspects or poles of power over
life that emerged separately but came together in the nineteenth century to form biopower.
The first to develop centered on the individual body and encompassed “its disciplining, the
optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its useful-
ness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls…”4
These are the normalizing disciplinary regimes that Foucault had studied in detail in Dis-
cipline and Punish, published about eighteen months earlier. The second pole centered not
on the individual body but on the “species body”5 and concerned itself with regulating the

3 Michael Warner, “Introduction,” in Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi.

4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), 139.
5 Ibid.

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population as an entity unto itself—its rates of morbidity and mortality, birth, migration,
consumption, and so forth.

The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two
poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed. The setting up, in
the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar technology—anatomic and biological,
individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with
attention to the processes of life—characterized a power whose highest function was
perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through. 6

In the eighteenth century, these two poles of biopolitical development were still to be found
in wholly separate institutions and practices, but in the nineteenth century they began to
come together, not at the level of theory but “in the form of concrete arrangements” that
would become “the great technology of power in the nineteenth century.”7 By the end of
the nineteenth century, sexuality would be one of this vast biopolitical system’s most im-
portant deployments (although certainly not its only one), for sexuality is constituted at the
intersection of individual bodies and the species as a whole.
In this text, published in French in 1976, biopower includes disciplinary normali-
zation. In later texts, however, Foucault seems to retain the label “biopower” for popula-
tion management alone. Disciplinary power exercised upon individual bodies becomes in-
creasingly distinct in his analysis in the lecture course of 1977-1978, published in English as
Security, Territory, Population in 2007. On the first page of the first lecture, Foucault defines
biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the hu-
man species became the object of a political strategy, a general strategy of power, or, in
other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on
board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.”8 Population ma-
nagement takes precedence in Foucault’s analyses for the next few years, and, unlike many
of his queer theoretical successors and fans, this proto-queer-theorist never returns to disci-
plinary normalization.
Instead, Foucault devotes himself to tracing the genealogy of population manage-
ment. Population management obviously requires the object “population,” which does not
exist in any recognizable form in the classical age. Population emerges gradually through
the work of eighteenth-century economists.9 It forms in the midst of governmental tech-
niques concentrated on facilitating the circulation of people and goods in and out of towns
and, at the same time, minimizing the contagion, crime, and violence that open circulation
risks allowing. These risks cannot be eliminated without compromising free circulation, so
techniques of security must be invented and refined. These techniques focus on calculating

6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 140.
8 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, translated by

Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1.

9 Ibid., 70.

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probabilities and projecting acceptable trade-offs.10 Thus, biopower (in this new formula-
tion) contrasts starkly with both sovereign power and disciplinary normalization. Whereas
sovereign power prohibits actions, and normalizing disciplinary power prescribes indivi-
dual development according to model norms, techniques of security regulate flows.11 These
managerial techniques, along with the philosophy of utilitarianism, which Foucault claims
constituted the theoretical instrument underpinning the government of populations,12 en-
able “the game of liberalism.”13 By the nineteenth century, then, biopower and liberalism
coincide.14
Foucault is careful to insist that mechanisms of security do not replace techniques of
disciplinary normalization, any more than disciplinary normalization replaced sovereignty.
“In reality you have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques them-
selves change and are perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in which what
above all changes is the dominant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation
between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of secu-
rity.”15 But he does suggest in this and the next year’s lecture series that as liberalism evol-
ves and techniques of security become dominant in power regimes some aspects of discipli-
nary normalization become untenable.

By definition, discipline regulates everything. Discipline allows nothing to escape. Not

only does it not allow things to run their course, its principle is that things, the smallest
things, must not be abandoned to themselves. […] The apparatus of security, by contrast,
[…] ‘lets things happen.’ Not that everything is left alone, but laissez-faire is indispensable
at a certain level: allowing prices to rise, allowing scarcity to develop, and letting people
go hungry so as to prevent something else happening […]. In other words, discipline
does not deal with detail in the same way as apparatuses of security.16

Within a regime of sexual normalization where heterosexuality has been deemed the only
non-pathological developmental outcome, every human body must become a genitally
oriented heterosexual or be labeled deviant and subject to attempts at rehabilitation, con-
finement, and/or deployment as means for reinforcing the general fear of deviance. Disci-
pline prescribes.17 And when it runs up against what cannot be disciplined according to the
prescriptions—its own “residuum,” that is to say—it establishes new regimes of discipline

10 Ibid., 6, 11.
11 Ibid., 47.
12 Ibid., 74.

13 Ibid., 48.

14 For Foucault’s discussion of his use of the term “liberalism” and its broad meaning, see Michel Fou-

cault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, translated by Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 20-22.
15 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 8.

16 Ibid., 45.

17 Ibid., 47.

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for those individuals, as Foucault discusses in the lecture course of 1973-1974.18 Within a
regime of liberal regulation, by contrast, what matters is that a statistically significant subset
of the population presents a certain specifiable range of developmental outcomes; outliers
will be tolerated without interference, if it is determined that the cost of tighter control is
too high—that is, if intolerance and intervention are likely to impede the circulation of
money and goods to too great a degree.19
Foucault marks this difference in the third lecture of Security, Territory, Population,
where he introduces the word “normation” to name disciplinary practices of the type he
described in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere and reserves the word “normalization” for
techniques of security applied to populations. On the one hand, disciplinary “normation”
posits an optimal model and then applies techniques designed to achieve conformity to that
model; “the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal
that which is incapable of conforming to the norm.”20 On the other hand, techniques of se-
curity normalize in the sense that they attempt to alter the frequency with which a trait or
an event occurs within a given population. Foucault’s extended example is the frequency
of death from small pox.21 Techniques, such as variolization and inoculation coupled with
policies and systems for carrying them out, were deployed to reduce morbidity and mor-
tality. The goal was not total conformity to a model norm, and the focus was not individual
bodies; populations as statistically characterizable entities were the target of these efforts,
and the goal was “to bring the most unfavorable [frequency] in line with the more favo-
rable”22 in a particular population.
As liberal security gains ascendency, then, subject positions formed as deviant with-
in regimes of normalization will undergo some alteration (along with those deemed “nor-
mal”). Some formerly deviant homosexuals, for example, might be allowed to become the
trendy (white, middle-class) gay couple next door—neither normal nor abnormal, just a
variant within the general population. But, while this may look like a release from a regime
of power—in other words, it may look and feel like freedom—in fact it cannot be accepted
uncritically as precisely that, if by freedom one means freedom from power, for there is no
outside to power, as Foucault has said; no society, community, or even friendship is utterly
unstructured by relations of power. Instead, in this turn of events, power is simply re-

18 Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France 1973-1974, translated by Graham Bur-
chell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 53-55.
19 I do not mean to suggest that conflict is always inevitable. In many ways disciplinary regimes are essen-

tial to the success of neoliberal capitalism. “Investments” in “human capital” are in fact most often ap-
peals to the use of disciplinary regimes. We invest in human capital by going to or sending people to
schools and universities, for example. I would suggest, however, that there is less emphasis on single
normalized trajectories for large groups of people, and more room for (even demand for) greater variety
of disciplinary outcomes. Discipline is here to stay, but normalization is in some question.
20 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 57.

21 See ibid., 57-63.

22 Ibid., 63.

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forming itself; a new regime is shaping subject positions better suited for its goals and tar-
gets—which is not necessarily bad, but which should not be simply welcomed without cri-
tique. And, as I will show, there are reasons in this instance to be concerned.
In the lecture course of 1978-1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault suggests that libe-
ral regimes of power transform through the twentieth century in some fascinating ways to
become what he there terms “neoliberalism.”23 It is at this point, in the regimes of neolibe-
ralism as they develop in the mid-twentieth century, that Foucault locates the type of sub-
ject positions under development in contemporary liberal apparatuses of security. And it is
also at this point that I want to concentrate my own analysis

Neoliberal Governmentality
First, we must distinguish neoliberalism from classical and neoclassical liberalism. Fou-
cault notes that neoliberals, in contrast to their predecessors, explicitly reject laissez-faire.
Consider Friedrich von Hayek’s comments in the neoliberal classic The Road to Serfdom:
“Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of
some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.”24 The
classical liberals of the eighteenth century had held that economic activity is essentially
exchange, existing in primitive form in barter; government should stay out of the way so
that free exchange can occur.25 Nineteenth century neoclassical liberal theorists rejected the
classical account of economic activity as essentially the exchange of equivalences, substitu-
ting the idea that the essence of economic activity is competition and, therefore, that inequa-
lity is a necessary and perennial feature of the economic system. Government should stay
out of the way, they held in common with their classical predecessors, but now its non-
interference was in order to allow unfettered and, therefore, fair competition to occur. Neo-
liberals, in turn, follow their nineteenth-century forebears in seeing competition rather than
exchange as the primary feature of economic activity, but they depart from both classical
and neoclassical liberalism in their insistence that competition, at least of the sort they en-
dorse, does not occur naturally in the absence of governmental activity. For neoliberals,
government is a pre-condition of the free market’s very existence and, thus, laissez-faire is
nonsense. Foucault describes this view:

The game, mechanisms, and effects of competition which we identify and enhance are
not at all natural phenomena; competition is not the result of a natural interplay of

23 Foucault uses the term, but he did not invent it. In fact, neoliberal Milton Friedman referred to his
views as “neoliberalism” back in 1951 in an article entitled “Neoliberalism and its Prospects.” This article
was published in Norwegian in the journal Farmand, where it was entitled “Nyliberalismen og dens Mu-
ligheter.” See Milton Friedman, “Neo-liberalism and its Prospects,” [1951]. Unpublished paper available in
the archives of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and Friedman, “Nyliberalismen og dens Mulig-
heter,” Farmand, Vol. 56 (February 17, 1951), 89-93.
24 F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 17.

25 For an in-depth anthropological challenge to this story of primitive barter, see David Graeber, Debt: The

First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2011), especially chapter 2.

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appetites, instincts, behavior, and so on. In reality, the effects of competition are due
only to the essence that characterizes and constitutes it. The beneficial effects of com-
petition are not due to a pre-existing nature, to a natural given that it brings with it. […]
Competition is a principle of formalization. [It] has an internal logic […]. Its effects are
only produced if this logic is respected. It is, as it were, a formal game between in-
equalities; it is not a natural game between individuals and behaviors. […] Competition
is therefore an historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given […]. Go-
vernment must accompany the market from start to finish. […] One must govern for the
market, rather than because of the market. To that extent you can see that the relation-
ship defined by eighteenth century liberalism is completely reversed. 26

Foucault’s description reflects views clearly stated in the works of both Hayek and Milton
Friedman. Hayek writes, “The functioning of a competition not only requires adequate or-
ganization of certain institutions like money, markets, and channels of information—some
of which can never be adequately provided by private enterprise—but it depends, above
all, on the existence of an appropriate legal system, a legal system designed both to pre-
serve competition and to make it operate as beneficially as possible. Private property has to
be defined.”27 Friedman makes a similar point: “The notion of property, as it has developed
over the centuries and as it is embodied in our legal codes, has become so much a part of us
that we tend to take it for granted, and fail to recognize the extent to which just what
constitutes property and what rights the ownership of property confers are complex social
creations rather than self-evident propositions.”28 For this and other important reasons,
Friedman asserts, “the organization of economic activity through voluntary exchange pre-
sumes that we have provided, through government, for the maintenance of law and order
to prevent coercion of one individual by another, the enforcement of contracts voluntarily
entered into, the definition of the meaning of property rights, the interpretation and
enforcement of such rights, and the provision of a monetary framework.”29 Unlike their
liberal predecessors, neoliberals see a major and foundational role for the institutions of
government in markets. This means that not only is neoliberal government likely to be big-
ger than classical or neoclassical liberal government; it also has a different purpose and tar-
get. Older forms of liberalism drew a distinction between the domain of government and
the domain of the markets, and they wanted government, as much as possible, to keep to its
own sphere. For neoliberals, by contrast, there is no purpose for government except to se-
cure markets.30

26 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 120-21.

27 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 38.
28 Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 26.

29 Ibid., 27.

30 See Ibid., chapter II. Friedman does allow that government would also need to supplement private cha-

rity to protect the incompetent, “whether madman or child.” (34) Of course, this idea that government’s
role in charity and community work should be and could be minimal and still sustain capitalism is highly
questionable. For a critique, see Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), especially chapter 3.

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Markets, not people, are the focus of neoliberal government. However, markets only
exist as a result of multiple human decisions and interactions and the consequent circula-
tion of goods and money. Any particular market’s “behavior,” therefore, is a subspecies of
the collective behavior of many people. Governing for the market means, then, managing
and channeling collective human behavior. And with this formulation we see clearly that
the governance of markets is continuous with the governance of populations—populations,
not individuals. It is not necessary that any given individual invest in a given financial ven-
ture or that any given individual purchase a given commodity, only that some do. Hence,
disciplinary techniques applied across the board are not the right kind of tool to insure
market viability. For markets to function efficiently and produce wealth, it is necessary on-
ly that sufficient numbers of people (whose individual identities are irrelevant) invest and
purchase at optimal rates. And it is government’s job (although not government’s alone) to
secure those rates, whether through monetary or fiscal policy or by a variety of other
means, from anti-trust laws to regulations on advertising, and sometimes even to direct en-
titlement payments so that the non-productive can contribute to the Gross Domestic Pro-
duct through consumption.31
Even when neoliberal policies do in fact enhance individuals’ well-being, however,
that is not their purpose. Individuals are simply not important as individuals; they are only
important in aggregates as factors in markets. The behavior of this or that individual body
necessarily decreases in importance as neoliberal governmentality spreads, which means
would-be comprehensive disciplinary regimes targeting individual bodies decrease in sig-
nificance. Insofar as a certain number of skilled and docile bodies might be needed for the
market’s sake, such regimes might retain some value in some sectors, but those sectors are
limited. Compared to the vast and increasingly global mechanisms and networks of popu-
lation management, networks for disciplinary normalization are parochial and fragmented.
Foucault’s careful studies of prison, hospital, asylum, and school discipline and their
interconnections are revealing and both historically and philosophically valuable, but they
are increasingly out of date. Instead of spreading, disciplinary networks may well be rece-
ding.
With the vast expansion of the carceral system in the US since the 1970s, however,
this claim of disciplinary recession may well be questioned. As Bernard Harcourt and
many others have noted, the number of Americans incarcerated in 1970 was about 200,000,
but by 2001 the number was close to 2 million, an increase much greater than the increase in

31One of government’s jobs may be to establish and maintain the institutions of discipline that will pro-
vide that sufficient number of people with the skills of production and consumption. However, if market
incentives are in place, the more ambitious, resourceful, and intelligent individuals will decide them-
selves to “invest” in their own disciplining and will seek out private sector solutions for their needs.
Thus discipline is privatized and market-driven, and its totalizing aspects may well be tempered or even
in some instances abandoned. If so, it may not be correct to speak of normalizing discipline.

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the US population.32 Michelle Alexander puts the number by 2008 at 2.3 million, with
another 5.1 million in “community correctional supervision,” either probation or parole.33 If
we assume that incarceration, probation, and parole are essentially disciplinary mecha-
nisms, then disciplinary normalization would surely be expanding rather than contracting.
However, a closer look at current mechanisms suggests that a transformation has occurred.
As Harcourt points out, early 20th century penologists were concerned with rehabilitation,
and institutions and policies reflected that concern. However, in the last quarter of the cen-
tury, institutions and policies from mandatory sentencing to fixed sentences, abolition of
parole, federalization of crimes and criminal enforcement, and profiling practices reduced
concern with both rehabilitation and the specifics of individual criminal lives and increased
the resources spent on crime prediction among identifiable populations.34 From a different
angle, Alexander points to a shift from concern with developing prisoners’ skills and cha-
racter for return to the general labor force toward a concern with simply warehousing
people deemed irrelevant to the global economy.35 In Foucaultian terms, these changes
amount to transformation of the mechanisms from primarily disciplinary techniques to pri-
marily techniques of security; the expansion of the carceral is, precisely, an expansion of
techniques of security at the expense of techniques of discipline. I would argue that some
similar changes have occurred during the same time period in public education. This is not
to say that disciplinary normalization no longer has a role to play; the two sets of tech-
niques are not at all antithetical in some contexts.
In fact, most disciplinary institutions in the US have been systematically neglected
and under-funded for the last forty years, leaving many hardly more than containment
facilities. Consider, in particular, public school systems in poor and working class com-
munities. Capacities are not cultivated, and docility is achieved more often by force than by
training.
In the Academy, we still see the effects of operative disciplinary regimes, because we
serve a population whose skills in both production and consumption are still necessary for
market functioning. But fewer and fewer people are able to enter the Academy, because of
rising costs and increasingly poor high school training in many school districts. Likewise,
fewer and fewer people are able to enter (or, since 2008 especially, re-enter) the job market.
Many people who cannot finance their own training receive very little training to develop

32 Bernard E. Harcourt, “The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of
the Twenty-First Century,” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 70, no. 1 (winter, 2003), 110.
33 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The

New Press, 2010), 92.

34 Bernard E. Harcourt, “The Shaping of Chance: Actuarial Models and Criminal Profiling at the Turn of

the Twenty-First Century,” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 70, no. 1 (winter, 2003), 105.
35 See Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 207.

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whatever potentials they may have. Neoliberal governmentality simply will not “invest” in
any more “human capital” than markets require.36

Neoliberal Subjectivity
My focus in this article, however, is not population management but the types of subjec-
tivity that are generated through population management within neoliberal apparatuses of
security. In other words, who (or what) are we becoming? Foucault’s work suggests that
those of us who participate in markets are becoming entrepreneurs who invest in our own
human capital in order to generate income streams. After explaining Foucault’s claim, in
this section I will argue that this process reshapes the notion of identity, seriously fraying
its ties to normalized development and rendering its variants quite a bit less rigid than they
were previously. Ultimately, my contention will be that within neoliberal regimes, the
practice of queering identities is not as resistant to dominant power networks as it might
seem or as we might want it to be, and in some domains it may actually facilitate neoliberal
governmentality rather than resist it at all.
Neoliberal theory follows economist Lionel Robbins in his definition of economics as
“the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which
have mutually exclusive uses.”37 This definition, as Foucault points out, shifts the discipline
away from analyses of processes and toward analyses of activities.38 Production, for exam-
ple, is no longer central; rather, income acquisition and allocation are. This shift seriously
blurs the distinction between labor and capital. Laborers’ wages are, simply, income, just as
capitalists’ rent, interest, and profit from sales are income. There may be a difference in
quantity (in fact, of course there is a difference in quantity), but there is no difference in
quality between various incomes. Furthermore, neoliberal theorists, following Irving
Fisher, define “capital” as anything from which an income can be derived, and hold
that minds and bodies themselves can be capital. Voilà, wage earners are capitalists! Or, to
be more precise, wage earners are entrepreneurs. They invest in their human capital,
market themselves, and sell their time, energy, knowledge, and skills. As Nobel Prize
winning economist Gary Becker puts it, “Persons investing in human capital can be
considered ‘firms’ that combine such capital perhaps with other resources to produce
earning capital…”39 Thus, “the basic element to be deciphered by economic analysis is not

36 This language was introduced into academic economic discourse by neoliberal economists Theodore
Schultz and Gary Becker in the 1950s. Its best known early formulation is in Gary Becker, Human Capital:
A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964).
37 This is from Lionel Robbins, Essays on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Mac-

millan, 1962), 16 (originally published in 1932). Gary Becker quotes it on the first page of his The Economic
Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Foucault quotes it in The Birth of
Biopolitics, 223.
38 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 223.

39 Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, 2nd

ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 115-6.

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so much the individual, or processes and mechanisms, but enterprises,” Foucault writes.
“An economy made up of enterprise-units, a society made up of enterprise-units, is at once
the principle of decipherment linked to liberalism and its programming for the rationali-
zation of a society and an economy.”40 In other words, these entrepreneurs-of-themselves
are both theoretical assumptions that neoliberal theorists make in order to describe human
market behavior and, at the same time, neoliberal prescriptions for how human beings
should behave. Neoliberalism is both analytic and normative.
Good neoliberal subjects, then, are more or less successful enterprise-units.41 The in-
come streams they generate enable them to maximize their utility functions (or, at least, the
purpose of generating income streams is to amass the resources necessary to maximize uti-
lity, whether this is realized or not). Ultimately, what these enterprises produce (or at least
endeavor to produce) is their own preference satisfaction. The income stream may be used
to purchase (or attract) the raw materials—shelter, groceries, a mate, etc.—which may be
combined with non-market labor to produce whatever the neoliberal subject wishes to con-
sume (warmth, nutrients, orgasm, etc.).
This way of construing human activity makes of each individual a self-interested
bundle of sui generis preferences calculating the costs and benefits of every available option
for conduct and relationship in view of his or her own likelihood of satisfaction. Every-
thing we do is to be understood as utility maximizing behavior based on preferences and
calculation. Even our most intimate associations—with our parents, with our spouses, with
our children—are explicable on this model, according to Becker.42 Generosity and self-sacri-
fice are investments; genetically related offspring are commodities for which close substi-
tutes are scarce;43 and friendships are valuable insofar as they maximize one’s utility func-
tion.
Becker is famous for having analyzed criminal behavior in this way. Law-breaking,
he argues, be it parking in a tow-away zone or selling narcotics, is market behavior, and if
authorities want to reduce it, they have simply to reduce the incentives to engage in it.
There is no qualitative difference between people who break laws and people who do not;
the “delinquent” is not a special kind of person.44 Repetitions of the choice to break laws
leading to multiple arrests and incarcerations might generate the label and even the sub-

40 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 225.

41 I take this to be an analytic statement. Insofar as one is a neoliberal subject, one is an enterprise unit. I
do not believe neoliberalism is so prevalent that we all are, in fact, neoliberal subjects. I believe neoliberal
governmentality attempts to produce neoliberal subjects and that it is succeeding to some extent.
42 Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

43 Ibid., 8.

44 Andrew Dilts has argued that this analysis is probably what drew Foucault to a study of neoliberalism

in the first place; this account of criminal subjectivity—that is, a denial that there is such a thing as spe-
cifically criminal subjectivity—directly challenges Foucault’s claim in Discipline and Punish that the car-
ceral system produces delinquents as a type of subjectivity. See Andrew Dilts, “Michel Foucault Meets
Gary Becker: Criminality Beyond Discipline and Punish,” Carceral Notebooks, vol. 4 (2008), especially 78-79
and 88-89. Web: Accessed December 20, 2011 at http://www.thecarceral.org/cn4_dilts.pdf.

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Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78.

jective experience of oneself as “criminal” or “delinquent,” but those identities are simply
shorthand for aggregated preferences as expressed and implemented choices over time.
Obviously, the same case can be made for the “homosexual,” as well as for any of
the other sexual identity categories generated through the twentieth century. Everybody
starts with their own set of personal preferences. Neoliberal theorists are not interested in
the whence and wherefore of those preferences; it simply does not matter (although adver-
tisers are very interested in how to generate new preferences for market purposes). As neo-
liberals see it, we all make predictions regarding what will satisfy our preferences and en-
hance our utility, and then we calculate the costs and risks of attempting to achieve
satisfaction in each of the ways available to us at a given time. Our lives are made up of
these thousands of calculated choices. Our identities are to be understood not as some un-
derlying truth that comes into the world with us at conception or birth, or even as the
names for biological and psychological developmental outcomes, but simply as names for
relatively long-term patterns of behavior that can be thought of as manifestations of choice
and strategy.45
For identities to have any value or meaning in neoliberal regimes, they must play
some role in markets. And they do. “Lesbians” are a population with certain preferences
cohesive enough to form a market—for four-wheel drive vehicles, Birkenstocks, power
tools, wedding planners, and reproductive technologies. Likewise “gay men” are a popu-
lation with certain preferences (and statistically, being [white] men, with about 30% more
income to allocate than lesbians); so they are a market—for vodka, magazines, sophisticated
household furnishings, men-only cruise lines.46 We call these stereotypes, which make
them seem detrimental, and they do have detrimental effects. But unlike older stereotypes,
the detrimental effects fall not so much on those who do but rather on those who do not fit
them. Whereas it was terrible to be a limp-wristed sissy, it is not so bad to be an urban
sophisticate with artistic flare; in fact, it might greatly increase one’s income stream. What

45 Neoliberal theorists do not hold that people actually consciously calculate all the time. Rather, this
description of human life is a model of behavior rather than of mental activity. Gary Becker, for example,
makes clear that maximizing behavior need not be conscious or deliberative. He holds that we can use a
maximization model to describe, literally, all human and nonhuman animal behavior. See Becker, A
Treatise on the Family, x. This is consonant with Becker’s earlier claim that there is no such thing as “free”
time; all activity is to be understood as geared in one way or another to maximization of utility. See
Becker 1965, 513. Milton Friedman had already asserted the irrelevance of actual human decision-making
processes in his 1953 article “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” where he asserted that even the
growth of leaves on a tree could be understood theoretically as maximizing behavior. What is important
is not whether rationality is actually a factor in the process but the fact that, as Friedman puts it, “…under
a wide range of circumstances individuals will behave as if they were seeking to maximize their expected
returns…” (Milton Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” In Essays in Positive Economics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 21.
46 Scare quotes indicate not only that I am speaking here of labels but that I am not speaking here of actual

people. “Lesbians” and “gay men” in this paragraph are simply terms in market analyses and adverti-
sing discourses.

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is terrible is to be bullied out of an education, to try to survive among the ranks of the
working poor, to be ill without insurance, or to raise children or care for a disabled partner
without the civil rights necessary to protect their interests.
Neoliberalism has an answer to whatever discrimination people suffer, however. It
is to let the market handle it. Some people have a taste for racism or homophobia, a pre-
ference for avoiding contact with blacks or Jews or gays. They calculate the costs and risks
of satisfying that preference, and then they do so in whatever manner best maximizes their
utility. However, as Milton Friedman notes, “The man who exercises discrimination pays a
price for doing so.”47 If he happens to be an entrepreneur, this price interferes with opera-
tional efficiency. “A businessman or entrepreneur who expresses preferences in his busi-
ness activities that are not related to productive efficiency is at a disadvantage compared to
other individuals who do not. Such an individual is in effect imposing higher costs on him-
self than are other individuals who do not have such preferences. Hence, in a free market
they will tend to drive him out.”48
Indeed, markets have remedied some discrimination against non-heterosexuals.49
As of 2008, according to an Equality Forum survey, 473 of Fortune 500 companies included
sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies.50 Increasingly, such companies offer
partner benefits to employees in same-sex relationships. And the job market is not the only
market to address discrimination. For example, for many years the Commonwealth of Vir-
ginia prohibited insurance companies from selling domestic partner health insurance poli-
cies in Virginia. Having discovered a lucrative market niche outside the state that they felt
sure could be replicated within it, the companies lobbied hard to change the law. In fact,
when gay and lesbian activists attempted to attend the General Assembly hearings on the
question, insurance representatives urged them to stay away, so as not to confuse a free
market issue with a social issue; the companies’ spokespeople would handle everything.
And they did. The legal change that ensued was thus a result of market pressure, not of de-
mands for equality or justice.

47 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 110.

48 Ibid., 109-110. This is a common neoliberal claim, but it is clearly false, at least in many domains. In the
Deep South in the 1950s businesses would have lost white middle-class customers if they served blacks,
and thus they would have lost money (the disposable income of the two groups being unequal). Similar-
ly, many Christian businesses would suffer if they served queer people. Discrimination in some markets
does pay and will continue to do so.
49 This is not to say that market forces operating in complete isolation from other forces brought about

changes. I doubt that it is possible to isolate market forces from political or material or moral forces, al-
though I suspect neoliberals would disagree. What does seem to be clear is that market forces have
played a significant role in some of the positive changes that have occurred for queer people in the US
and elsewhere, just as market forces have played a role in promoting some aspects of feminist agendas
over the last fifty years.
50 This information can be found at http://www.equalityforum.com/fortune500/, which was accessed on

December 15, 2011.

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Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78.

Of course, this market approach only works to end discrimination if inclusion of the
groups of people in question is profitable. When it is not, there simply is no remedy. Those
lesbians and gay men, transpeople and queers of all sorts who are without sufficient human
capital and resources to allocate in markets may well still be subject not only to discrimi-
nation but to harassment and violence.
But to return to the question at hand, within a neoliberal framework, an identity is
not coincident with a subject position. Neoliberal subjects are (or should be, if they are ra-
tional) self-entrepreneurs; it is up to them to acquire whatever discipline is needed to en-
hance their human capital and compete in the marketplace. Identities, when they come into
play at all, are simply labels imposed on aggregated choices, which in turn are based on sui
generis preferences; they are not the names of developmental trajectories, as they are in
regimes of disciplinary normalization. Consequently, they will not be strictly enforced on
every individual human body. And this brings us back to queer theory and politics.

Queering in the Absence of Firm Identities

The project of queering identities began in the early 1990s as a way of breaking down rigid
delineations of experience and desire. Queer theorists pointed out numerous examples of
ambiguous or veiled homosexual desire in apparently heterosexual images, tropes, charac-
ters, and plot lines in classical literature, drama, and film, as well as in popular culture.
They showed us that our own real-life sexual and gender identities were simulacra, con-
stantly requiring reenactment, reiteration, and representation to bolster and sustain them-
selves. They resisted and challenged homogeneity of identification by inciting identities to
proliferate and endlessly differ from themselves. In short, where our normalized identities
defined and imprisoned us, they excavated exits and melted bars. They showed us that
those identities had histories and political investments and interests that transcended and
sometimes opposed our individual lives and well-being. They laid bare the mechanisms of
disciplinary normalization. They encouraged us to experience dis-identification and
estrangement. In Foucault’s terms, they helped us to get free of ourselves.51

51Eve Sedgwick’s work may be the premiere example of queer interrogations of literary culture. See
especially her 1994 book Tendencies (Duke University Press). Another example is Alexander Doty’s 1993
book Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (University of Minnesota Press). Of course
Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge) must be cited as an
example of exposing gender identities as enactments or simulacra, but one could also point to queer per-
formance artists such as comedian Eddie Izzard. Proliferation of identities is one avenue for displaying
accepted or “normal” identities as historically constructed. Historical accounts of the construction of and
political investments in various normalized identities are given in a variety of queer contexts. Jennifer
Terry’s “Theorizing Deviant Historiography,” in the Summer, 1991, issue of Differences: A Journal of Femi-
nist Cultural Studies, which was devoted to Queer Theory (Vol. 3, no. 2, 55-74), disrupts standard sexual
identities in this way. Martha Vicinius’ work, particularly her article in Routledge’s The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader entitled “’They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong’: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian
Identity,” has similar effects, as does Jonathan Goldberg’s study of European responses to Native
American sexual practices in “Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New” in Michael

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Now, however, if disciplinary normalization is receding where it is in tension with

expanding regimes of security wherein circulation (of money, commodities, information,
human bodies, etc.), not development, is paramount, how are queer theory and politics
situated? If “queer” resists the forces that would contain us in normalized identities, can
“queer” also resist the forces that would transform us into utility maximizers operating as
entrepreneurial firms? Or is it more likely just to render us all more open to marketing
across what used to be our normalized identity boundaries?
The question is pressing because, on some fronts at least, it looks like queering iden-
tities facilitates the expansion and multiplication of markets. To attract a desired mate, a
straight man might need to invest in his human capital by learning from—and then by pur-
chasing the same products as—men with fashionable “queer eyes,” as depicted on an early
twenty-first century reality TV show, “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” Straight mas-
culinity needs to be softened or refined; hence, a little queerness is good for everybody. In
some queer youth cultures, boundary breaking and gender-bending strategies rely very
heavily on deploying purchased products; one announces one’s challenges to identification
through clothes, jewelry, hair styles, tattoos, personal electronics, and similar accoutrements
and often through relatively rapid changes in these modes of personal stylization. After all,
in a neoliberal world, what does refusing to be contained in an identity mean other than re-
fusing to make consistent consumer choices?
It will be argued that this popular culture appropriation of “queer” has little or
nothing to do with the queer politics of the 1970s and 1980s or with the queer theory and
politics of the 1990s. And there is merit in that argument. My point is not that the work
done in those decades was misguided, only that, with the changes in notions of identity that
have occurred with the advance of neoliberalism over the last four decades, that sort of
work now will inevitably be appropriated and, to use a very old word, co-opted. It does
not challenge neoliberal subjectivities directly enough not to be; its focus was disciplinary
normalization. But can we turn queering into resisting neoliberalism? I believe so, and I
believe we should.
First, why should we? I will not make a comprehensive argument here. Instead,
like Foucault in the first lecture of the 1977-1978 series, I will assert a “conditional im-
perative”52: If we want to resist domination, if we want to resist the current political ten-
dency to lock people down in a single grid of intelligibility and mode of living (and surely
that is essentially what queer politics and queer theory have aimed to oppose all along),
then in addition to resisting what remains of normalized disciplinary identities, we must
resist and challenge the neoliberal reduction of people to calculating, self-interested entre-
preneurs of themselves. This is the way of thinking and approaching life that we all are
being pressed into within neoliberal regimes of power. For those few who actually succeed

Warner’s anthology Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press,
1993). Scores, if not hundreds, of other books, articles, performers, and political actions could be listed
here as well. This note is far from exhaustive.
52 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3.

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Foucault Studies, No. 14, pp. 61-78.

in turning themselves into self-entrepreneurs, viewing every aspect of their existence in

terms of competition, investment, and profitable exchange, such a life is likely to be im-
poverished in every way except financial. And for those who fail—which is likely to be a
large majority of people on our planet, including a majority of North Americans and
Europeans—the material, if not also the psychological, results are little short of terrifying.
What we must queer now, I believe, is not so much normalized identity but neoliberal sub-
jectivity. If neoliberalism is able to impose its conception of human being fully, the world
will be a much worse place, in my view, than it is now. Relationships, including communal
and civic relationships, will be devalued to the breaking point, and material scarcity in the
absence of those relationships will drive people to desperation.
So, how can we queer neoliberal subjectivity? Queering, like queer “itself,” never
appears in unity. There will be many approaches and possibilities, and they will not obey
common distinctions between theory and practice. With that word of caution, I will con-
clude this essay by discussing three closely related courses of action. The first begins with a
policing of our language. Let us pause and consider each time we find ourselves about to
describe an action as an “investment.” This, I think, would be the first step in resisting the
neoliberal financialization of lives and selves. Sometimes people do invest, such as when
they allocate some of their incomes to 401(k)s. But why think of taking classes as “invest-
ing”? Why think of maintaining one’s home as “an investment”? Why think of getting to
know colleagues at conferences as “investments”? There are other ways to describe these
activities. In fact, all these things usually involve some pleasure in the moment and have
many desirable effects besides increasing one’s net worth in the marketplace. Interrogating
the use of financial language in everyday life is crucial for identifying the ways in which
neoliberal discourses and values are shaping us and our relationships. I suspect, further-
more, that a sustained resistance to financial language might also lead us eventually to
undertake a critique of neoliberal temporality with its multiple postponements into an ap-
parently unending futurity of projected returns.53
A second, probably closely related practice of resistance to neoliberal domination
might begin with simply taking note of desires and pleasures that are neither market-based
nor market-valued. Non-(re)productive sexuality might be a prime example, as might
friendship and communal relationships outside the kinship systems that are taken to be the
fundamental units of capitalist consumption. To be sure, there are ways of construing such
things in market terms if we choose to, as Gary Becker’s work makes clear, but if we pay
close attention to what really brings us joy in those activities and relationships and find
ways of expressing that joy or pleasure or desire in non-financial and non-market terms,

53For a preliminary discussion of the possibilities of queering contemporary economic temporality, see
Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), particularly the
end of chapter 4 and chapter 5. Furthermore, for potential resources for a complete rethinking of tem-
porality, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).

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collectively we may generate a basis upon which to live in resistance to neoliberal domina-
tion.
Finally, in addition to examining the ways we speak of our own actions in everyday
life and the ways we understand and live in relation to others, we might actually take a
more activist stand against gay and lesbian market identities. By this I mean something
more than simply challenging stereotypes, which has been done for decades. I mean, also,
challenging the gay and lesbian organizations that promote our communities as markets
and that buy into the idea that what justice for all amounts to is assimilation into the
dominate market economy. Let me quickly add that I am not advocating a withdrawal
from market economies (I believe that would be impossible), nor am I suggesting that we
relinquish the gains made against discrimination in employment. Instead, I am suggesting,
in a Foucauldian vein, that we problematize those goals and do what we can to render them
questionable. As David Harvey wrote recently, “We are, often without knowing it, all neo-
liberals now.”54 We have already been re-shaped to a great extent, and alternatives to neo-
liberal language and concepts are no longer readily available. But they can emerge if the
radical contingency of our own ways of being make themselves felt in our questioning. In
other words, alternatives can form and domination can be opposed through an anti-
neoliberal practice of queer.

Ladelle McWhorter
Department of Philosophy
University of Richmond
28 Westhampton Way
Richmond, Virginia
USA
[email protected]

54David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010).

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