It is hard to imagine fields like Gender Studies and Queer Studies without Foucault’s shaping influence. The so-called “historical turn” in the humanities, inspired by the New Historicism that Foucault’s dialogues with colleagues at Berkeley helped shape, has informed the expectations placed on graduate students for the past 20 years. Where students in literature departments might once have been asked “What’s your theory?” we are now far more likely to be asked “What’s your archive?” — a shift that bears traces of Foucault’s legacy.
(thanks to Amy DiGennaro)