Deep Friendship at a Sausage Party: A Foucauldian Reading of Friendship, Fractured Masculinities and Their Potential for School Practices

Abstract

In his interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault notes that “The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship” (Ethics: Subjectivity and truth. The New Press, New York, p. 136, 1997). This statement questions suppositions that link homosexual intimacy with the act of sex, for Foucault advocates for the importance of friendship and emotional intimacy between homosexual men. He says, “To want guys [garcons] was to want relations with guys” (p. 136). Although sexual desire may be implied as an integral feature of “relations,” Foucault stresses intimacy between men that is “much more than the sexual act itself” (p. 136). This chapter puts Foucault’s thoughts about friendship between homosexual men into conversation with recent scholarship in masculinities theory to see what can be learned about homosocial male love and intimacy. Much recent scholarly literature in masculinities highlights a need for emotional intimacy among men yet instances of this intimacy are continually policed by heterosexism and homophobia (Buitenbos in Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy/Revue canadienne de counseling et de psychothérapie 46(4): 335–343, 2012; Connell in Masculinities. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005; Kimmel in Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men. Harper, New York, 2008). Moreover, Foucault speaks to the close emotional attachment that soldiers require to endure war, but as he says, the army is a space “where love between men is ceaselessly provoked [appele] and shamed” (1997, p. 137). This chapter borrows Foucault’s assertion that institutions provoke and shame homosocial male love to examine the ways that schools regulate intimacy between boys in spite of contemporary theories of masculinities that correlate a healthy gender identity with same-sex emotional intimacy.