French intellectual, sometime communist, died of AIDS. Wrote about madness, sexuality and discipline. Sexuality in ancient times an appetite to be mastered, only became an identity as hierarchies of class and church began to unravel.
Interested in how people are classified, how identities are processes rather than being fixed.  Borrowed the concept of Bentham’s Panopticon (a theoretical prison) to show how people start self regulating even as they gain more freedoms.