'Not everyone knows fuck all about Foucault': Will Self's Dorian and post-gay culture

This article examines Will Self's novel, Dorian: An Imitation, as a contribution to a diverse but emergent post-gay culture, not least through the use it makes of Foucaultian anti-essentialism. It discusses the novel in detail in relation to Wilde's original and also suggestively compares Self's authorial persona with that of Wilde, considering the ways in which Self transforms the original, narrative to serve his own ideological purposes. In this respect it focuses especially on his treatment of Aids, his critique of the ideological humanism of Princess Diana and the increasing ' or at least, perceived ' assimilation of gay men to the Blairite Establishment and to late modernity. The article argues that, despite Self's avowed anti-essentialism, the novel stigmatizes gay men as metonymic symbols of a social and ideological totality which is the object of his satire. © 2005 Taylor & Francis.