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According to Google Scholar, these are the 10 most cited researchers:
The man who tops the list tells us a lot about modern progressive movement and the ideas they have come to embrace.
All that talk about gender identity comes from people like this man.
The man who tops the list tells us a lot about modern progressive movement and the ideas they have come to embrace.
Foucault is often considered a forefather of postmodern identity politics and social constructionism.
For Foucault, innate identities got in the way of his ideal of polymorphous perversity.
Sexual torture was Foucault’s favorite pastime. He was a homosexual sadomasochism fetishist who habituated the bathhouses of San Francisco and thus died of AIDS in 1984. How many men he killed by infecting them with the HIV virus is unknown.
Foucault devoted himself [to] liberating children to have sex with grown men. In France, the age of consent in 1977 was only 15 years old, but Foucault nevertheless signed a petition, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Derrida, to decriminalize pedophilia.
One political issue close to Foucault’s heart was American sociologist Erving Goffman’s successful crusade to shut down insane asylums, which liberated the poor lunatics to be homeless and sleep on the sidewalks. (Erving’s daughter Alice Goffman is now a leading crusader against “mass incarceration,” so you know that will turn out equally well.)
When Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, talks about people who believe they are white doing violence on black bodies via FDR’s redlining, he’s artlessly piling up a number of vaguely recalled affectations of Foucault’s. (Coates confesses, “I loved Foucault but didn’t finish.”)
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