Halperin, David M.

David M. Halperin is a key figure in the history of sexuality, lesbian and gay studies and queer theory; he has also played central roles in the development of these fields. Trained as a classicist, Halperin has also produced comparative studies of aesthetics, subjectivity, cultural forms and love in the ancient world and contemporary gay cultures. He is perhaps best known for Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Throughout his career, Halperin has been consistently critical of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity and sexual essentialism. Halperin has argued that the histories of sexuality and contemporary gay cultures offer alternative models of subjectivity and collective life rooted in gender systems, aesthetic practices and queer modes of self-styling, rather than intrapsychic structures or transhistorical identity categories. No robust account of queer studies could be complete without careful attention to Halperin's enduring influence on the field's methods, underlying assumptions and institutional trajectories.