ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses a set of rather old-fashioned concepts and issues that author believes remain useful and can be revitalized if they are reconsidered in terms of the politics and theory of lesbian and gay sexualities: oppression, and identity. Knowledge is the unrecognized effect of bodies that, through habits, errors of grammar and cultural imperative, have been somehow misconstrued as conceptual or purely mental. The notion of oppression is clearly linked to power, to the relations, forms, and goals that power may take. Michel Foucault seems to imply that there are certain activities, "inconsequential pleasures", the interchange of bodies and pleasures, which are somehow below the threshold of power's reach: these pleasures are relatively innocent, disinvested, and pedestrian. Bodies are sedimented into fixed and repetitive relations, and it is only beyond modes of repetition that any subversion is considered possible.
