The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.

The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.