Befriending Foucault as a Way of Life (original) (raw)

This chapter utilizes Foucault's interview, "Friendship as a Way of Life" to make an argument for the value of schooling as a site for building fleeting, visiting friendships. The idea is not to lion-ize friendship, as such, but to suggest that the malleability present in the learning-of-friendship that can happen in schooled spaces, might be of value in a rethinking of relationality not only between students and teachers, but also how students access or are taught implicitly and explicitly about relationships. Can homosexuality as it tends toward friendship offer models of relationality that extend beyond the normalized models of relationality, notably marriage or celibacy, taught in schools? And if we can, what exactly might that mean for the educational project as it creates opportunities for becoming a subject? It is Foucault's curious interest in friendship that helps us think through this changing twenty-first century school landscape, a landscape and institutional space that still grapples with the problems experienced by LGBTQ youth and the problems LGBTQ youth raise for schools. If we're to reconsider the ways in which schools might become sites of resistance, persistence, and reinvention in becoming a sexual subject, then we'd do well to reconsider the possibility of friendship as a concept open among students and teachers to malleably become a self amidst others.