What Happened to the Insurrection?: The Muting of Foucault's Antiscience Genealogy in Stryker's Introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader

This article revisits Susan Stryker's 2006 introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader to show how her overview of Foucault's “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in this field-inaugurating text mutes the radical potential of Foucault's genealogical approach to history. Through a close reading of Foucault's original presentation of this concept in his 1976 lecture, the fuller sense of his “antiscience” genealogy becomes clear. The article concludes by proposing a way scholars might redeploy Foucault's insurrectionary method within the field of trans* studies today.