In this final chapter, I shall explore some of the afterlives of Foucault's work, in particular by charting and evaluating the influence of his ideas about the body, pleasure, power and discourse for academic theory and political praxis, in the forms of feminism, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies and queer theory.

Foucault and feminism

Foucault's work has a contentious and problematic status for feminist theorists, and the reception of his work in this context has been very mixed. Few feminists working within the French philosophical tradition over the past twenty years have used his work to any extent, as the disciplinary bent of influential French thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva is largely psychoanalytic. Moreover, while both these feminist theorists have critiqued discourse, they have tended to assume that Western discourse is univocally masculine and phallocentric, in contradistinction to Foucault's view of discourse – and the power which attaches to it – as ambiguous, elastic and plurivocal, capable of being used against dominant trends, of offering counterattack.