Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with how a distinctive conceptualization of politics and political practice has historically come into being. Why politics is important in our time, and what political theorizing entails, is explained in the Introduction. The central argument of the dissertation begins with an analysis of power relations and a history of power's present exercise, which I call, following Michel Foucault, biopower. I then explain how a contemporary social movement, the lesbian and gay movement, has tried to change those power relations and how it distinguishes itself from other contemporary movements by politicizing sexuality. This has been accomplished, I argue, through the formation of a collective identity and the establishment of institutions that work to change power relations in the larger society through the assertion of gay rights. The conception of rights whose philosophical underpinnings I elaborate, is not based upon a right to privacy but rather on a right to have the relationships that arise from one's sexual choices culturally and legally recognized and supported, since it is through such relationships that lesbians and gay men constitute themselves as ethical subjects. ;Thus, the collective identity and institutions created through the movement engender a conceptualization of politics that understands as political what had not been understood as such before--the exercise of power through sexuality, which has become at once a point of access to individual subjectivity for the exercise of power as well as a means through which power relations are being transformed. Finally, I discuss the consequences of this politicization of sexuality in the creation of an ethos--the juncture of individual ethical self-creation and membership in a community--and how this is related in important ways to the processes through which knowledge is produced in modernity