Creative and critical reflexivity: queer writing as an ethics of the self

Creative and critical reflexivity: queer writing as an ethics of the self

Michel Foucault advocated an ongoing assembly and disassembly of subjectivity that constituted a kind of self-bricolage; a making and re-making of subjectivity that he saw as an aesthetic struggle towards an artistic ideal. Foucault described this process as an ethics of the self. The purpose of this transformative self-bricolage is to make philosophy a “way of life”.
One of the examples Foucault gave of a technique used in such an ethics of the self— implemented to produce a desired or altered/transformed subject—was reflective writing. To put it simply, for Foucault certain kinds of writing are a practice involved in the production and maintenance of the self. This can be said to be more so when that writing is informed or organised by a philosophy of some kind that is applied as a way of life.
This paper explores the ways that writing informed by Queer Theory can be used as a technique in a Foucauldian ethics of the self. The paper further argues that Creative Writing is an appropriate site for ‘ethical interventions’ into subjectivity and for explorations into how philosophy, in this case Queer Theory, can be applied as a way of life in which new forms of subjectivity are explored and produced.

c. 2011 Australasian Association of Writing Programs.