FOUCAULt’s critique of “sexuality”

FOUCAULt’s critique of “sexuality” July 11, 2013

THE STORY SO FAR

The aim of the book • “…to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence” (8) • “to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior” (11) • FOUCAULT’S RESPONSE TO THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS: • Sexual repression is not a historical fact. • Power is not repressive. • The claim of repression is part of the power structure.

The incitement to discourse • Contrary to popular beliefs, there was no censorship of sex but instead a “discursive explosion” in which sexual practices and sexual desires were quite thoroughly discussed (17). • “Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated . . . A similar quality of discourses concerned with sex. It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject . . .” (33) • “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” (35)

The perverse implantation • Sexuality is a strategy: “to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful” (36-37) • Prior to the 19th Century: • Sex was defined in terms of marriage and religion • Adultery is the main category of sexual sin (given the religious order of marriage) • After the 19th Century: • “Heterosexual” monogamy no longer surveilled • New scrutiny concerning children, the insane, criminals, and their respective sexualities • PERVERTS are defined and their sexual practices and desires are thoroughly described, classified, and medicalized.

Scientiasexualis • ARS EROTICA • “truth is drawn from pleasure itself” (57) • Kama Sutra, Tantra, Japanese woodblock prints, etc. • SCIENTIA SEXUALIS • “procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form • of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and • the masterful secret” (58) • Confession is at the heart of scientiasexualis; sex becomes “a • privileged theme of confession” (61)  We must confess our sexual • desires (“come out” and “be proud”) • SEXUALITY (df.): “the correlative of that slowly developed discursive • practice which consitutes the scientiasexualis” (68)

THE DISPOSITIVE OF SEXUALITY (The Arrangement of Power in Sexuality)

Objective • Overcome the juridico-discursive analysis of power relations: • the negative relation • the insistence of the rule • the cycle of prohibition • the logic of censorship • the uniformity of the dispositive • Such a view of power is “poor in resources” and “only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no;” it is “anti-energy” (85) • Power hides its own operations, so this depiction of power is simply its disguise.

Method • “The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (93) • KEY FEATURES OF POWER • “Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared.” • “Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority . . . but are immanent.” • “[T]here is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rules and ruled at the root of power relations.” • “Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective.” • “Where there is power, there is resistance . . . this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.” (94-95)

domain • “Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power . . . [Power is] a linchpin for the most varied strategies.” (103) • NEW DOMAINS FOR SEXUALITY IN THE 19TH CENTURY • the hysterization of women’s bodies • the pedagogization of children’s sex • the socialization of procreative behavior • the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure • BUT! There was no “sexuality” until these domains were created! In the 19th century there was “the very production of sexuality” (105—see bottom paragraph)

PERIODIZATION • Thus we can give a history of sexuality: a history of medicine, sociology, psychology, etc. and how these fields became “interested” in sex around the same period of time. • Foucault connects the rise of sexuality to the rise of the bourgeoisie or the ruling class: “The primary concern was not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that ‘ruled.’ This was the purpose for which the [dispositive] of sexuality was first established, as a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers: it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening . . . a political ordering of life, not through the enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self” (123)

SEXuality AND RACE

Control of life and death • SOVEREIGNTY: “to let live or make die” • BIOPOWER: “to make life and let die” • discipline the body and its “behaviors” • bio-politics the population; the race

Sexuality and race • SEXUALITY and RACE are both phenomena/experiences/dispositifs that are at the intersection of discipline and bio-politics. • worries about degeneracy • worries about normality

The sexuality of racism • The concern about sexuality directly connected to another dispositive: racism. • Like sexuality, there is no such thing as “race” until society became “racist.” • Why did society become racist? • SYMBOLICS OF BLOOD • ANALYTICS OF SEXUALITY

THE RACISM OF SEX • We now treat homosexuals as if they form a race. • What are the symbolics of blood at play there? • What is the analytics of sexuality at play there?

FOUCAULt’s critique of “sexuality”