History of Sexuality

1
History of Sexuality

• Michel Foucault, 1978

2
Power

• Power is not necessarily repressive
• The object is not to determine whether something
  is prohibited or permitted, but why it is talked
  about at all, by whom, and from what positions.
• How is it put into discourse?

3
Permeation

• Power permeates discourse to reach all modes of
  behavior
• Discursive production, techniques of power, will
  to knowledge.
• Not reducible to one mechanism instances of
  discursive production, production of power, and
  propagation of knowledge all constitute a science
  of sexuality.

4
Shift from acts to desires

• Includes thoughts and desires with acts as topics
  of study
• From legal analysis to psychoanalysis.
• Sex is no longer directly named in language, but
  tracked in detail by discourse.
• There is an infinite task of telling that
  transforms desire into discourse. (managed to
  productive ends)

5
Sex in Discourse

• Increasing or decreasing population
• Sex as economic and political behavior
• A public issue.
• New regime of discourse does not say less, but
  says different things to different ends.
• Silence is a part of discourse both what is
  said and what is unsaid are part of strategies of
  discourse.

6
Multiplicity of Discourse

• Multiplication of discourse linked to
  intensification of the interventions of power.
• Institutions of education, medicine, psychiatry,
  criminal justice, and social controls all
  produced discourses on sex.

7

• Series of mechanisms, multiplicity of discourses,
  not one uniform view.
• Each individual set to recount own sex.
• Tensions and conflicts, not only growth of
  discourse but diversification of centers forming
  it.
• Not only qualitative, but various discourses all
  function to make sex productive.

8
Banishing Pleasure

• Banish irregular, unproductive pleasure.
• Define the norm and describe deviation,
  constitute a sexuality that is economically
  useful and politically conservative.
• Reproduce labor capacity and perpetuate the form
  of social relationships

9

• Focus on heterosexual marriage as an internal
  standard.
• Spoken of less but functions as a strict but
  quiet norm.
• Other practices questioned (marked) and examined,
  set apart as unnatural
• Classified and managed (law, medicine, psyche)

10

• Expansion of discourse relies on vice to
  continue, in order for power to penetrate further
  into reality it needs vice to support it.
• Specifics to track and manage multiplication of
  power requires multiplication of vice to control.

11

• New specification of the individual
• Vice is not just an act, but part of the nature
  of the perpetrator.
• Incorporated into all aspects of the individual.

12
Dynamic of power and pleasure

• Feed into each other
• Power creates pleasure in trying to manage it
• Pleasure asserts power in showing off or
  resisting

13
Power not in prohibition, but multiplication

• Society is perverse, not as backlash
• Product of encroachment of power on bodies and
  pleasures, each reinforces other.
• Science of sexuality causes fear, justifies
  prejudices of dominant as truth.
• Will to knowledge, also will to nonknowledge.
• Refusal to see and understand.

14
Truth telling

• The confession, obligation ingrained in us.
• We no longer see it as effect of power that
  constrains us, but as freeing us.
• Inverted image of power confess to authority the
  truth of sex, comes from the subject (below).
• Record keeping and classification form a science
  of confession

15
Law and Punishment

• Extract by force what is hidden even from subject
• Truth interpreted by power, subject divided.
• Power seen as laws, limitations to freedom.
• New power mechanisms in 18th c work by
  normalization and control instead of law and
  punishment.

16
Law 2

• Cant be represented by law
• Need new system to analyze power operations.

17
Multiplication of force relations

• Inequality creates power, but it is always local
  and unstable
• No central source of dominance
• Power is omnipresent because it is produced in
  ever relation, comes from everywhere
• Major dominations are effect of converging
  relations, not starting point.
• Existence of power depends on resistance as
  adversary, target, support.

18
Multiplicity of resistance

• No single locus of refusal, each is individual
• Not just reaction doomed to defeat, but necessary
  opposite forming power network.
• Power and resistance can be integrated to form
  longer state dominance or revolutions.

19
Discourses

• Discourses used to support power relations -
  knowledge linked with power.
• Local power relations function as part of larger
  strategies that they support
• They are not equivalent, only mutually
  influential (family supports state)
• Discourses transmit and produce power, but also
  undermine and expose it.

20
Control and resistance

• Production of sexuality, not repression of sex
• Place ourselves under surveillance.
• Religious sin or medical illness or perversion
• Heredity degenerescence, state eugenics
• Deployed in varying times and levels, 1st on
  bourgeois not poor.
• Self examination not dominance over others,
  intensivication of the body.

21
Longevity and decent of ruling class

• Class sexualities
• Bourgeois sexuality health, continuing
  dominance
• Proletariat sexuality surveillance, subjugation
• Psychoanalysis etc. used w/ different effects and
  tactics
• revolution against repression still w/in
  deployment of sexuality, represents a tactical
  shift.

22
Generative Power

• Power as generative, ordering and growing not
  destroying or making submit.
• Administering life.
• Discipline and regulation of the body
  bio-power
• Essential in development of capitalism.
• Institutions of power maintain production
  relations and techniques of bio-power at all
  levels operate in economic processes, social
  segregation.

23
Generative 2

• Guarantee relations of domination and hegemony
• Entry of life processes into order of knowledge
  and power, political techniques.
• Decreasing domination of death life processes
  more important, power takes charge of life rather
  than threatening death.

24
Normative.

• Growing importance of norm over law
• Continuous regulation, law incorporated into
  regulatory apparatuses.
• Outcome of power centered on life.
• Sex at the center of both disciplining the body
  and regulating populations.
• Target of power organized around management of
  life.

25
Norm 2

• Fromm symbolics of blood (law, death, alliances)
  to analytics of analytics of sexuality (norm,
  life, regulation).
• Overlapping
• Deployment of sexuality permits techniques of
  power to invest life.
• Historical formulation of sexuality gave rise to
  notion of sex.
• Resistance needs to center on bodies and
  pleasures not sex desire course laid out by
  sexuality.