Michel Foucault
He examined how institutions shape ideas of madness, crime and sexuality, giving later queer thinkers new ways to question what society calls normal.
Paul-Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926. The son of a surgeon, he studied philosophy and psychology in Paris before taking teaching and cultural posts in several countries. From 1970 until his death, he held the chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France.
His books examined how societies draw the boundaries between sanity and madness, health and illness, innocence and criminality. “History of Madness” (1961), “The Birth of the Clinic” (1963) and “Discipline and Punish” (1975) asked how institutions turn knowledge into ways of classifying and governing people.
The first volume of “The History of Sexuality”, published in 1976, challenged the idea that modern society had simply silenced sex. Foucault argued that medicine, law and other institutions had produced new ways of talking about sexuality and new categories of identity. His account of homosexuality as a historically formed category later became influential in queer theory.
Foucault was gay, and the sociologist Daniel Defert was his partner for more than twenty years. They also worked together on prison activism. Foucault died in Paris in June 1984 from an AIDS-related illness. Later that year, Defert founded AIDES to support people affected by HIV and AIDS and to challenge the silence and discrimination surrounding the disease.