Final research paper

The History of Sexuality

Michel Foucault

Main Points

• Repressive Hypothesis • Informs our thinking about sex • Claims that the history of sexuality over the past 300 years has been a history

of repression. • Sex, except for the purposes of reproduction is taboo. • The only way to liberate ourselves from this repression is to be more open

about our sexuality, to talk about sex, and to enjoy it.

Main Points

• Foucault disagrees with the claim that sex has been repressed and silenced.

• Discourse about sex has only intensified and proliferated since the 18th century.

• Priests expected confessions to divulge the smallest temptation or desire, and sexual behavior became an important object of study for demographic and statistical analysis.

• The emphasis moved from married couples to cases of sexual "perversion": child sexuality, homosexuality, etc.

• One's sexuality was also thought to explain a great deal about one's character.

Main Points

• Increasingly, sex became an object of knowledge.

• Other cultures have treated sex as an object of knowledge, as an ars erotica: an art of sensual pleasure.

• Our culture is distinct, however, in treating sex as a scientia sexualis: an object of distanced, scientific investigation.

• Scientific discourse mixed with the form of confession has shaped our discourse on sex. • Subjects were expected to confess, to divulge their darkest secrets, and these

confessions were codified into a quasi-scientific form.

Main Points

• How is it that we have come to see sex as the key to explaining us, as holding the truth about us?

• Power and Knowledge

• “Juridico- discursive" conception of power simply represses and restricts, always taking a law-like form.

• Power • Productive as it is Repressive • Multi-faceted and Omnipresent. • Everywhere and working in all directions.

• Sexuality is a conduit of power.

Four Major Focus Points

• The sexuality of children

• Women

• Married couples

• The sexually "perverse."

• The deployment of sexuality through these four points allows power to spread itself into the family and throughout society. This deployment took place with the rise of the bourgeoisie, who saw sexual deviance as hereditary and dangerous to the continued survival of their class. The controls they placed on sex were thus primarily intended to ensure their own health and longevity.

Sex and Control

• Power is primarily exercised in the interests of fostering and preserving life.

• Tight normalizing controls have been placed on the discipline of the body and the regulation of population.

• Sex and the deployment of sexuality have been essential to this power over life, as we have accorded ourselves with these controls in the interests of a "healthy" sexuality.

• We think of sexuality as our essence, as the thing that makes us what we are, when in fact, it is just a social construct that makes us easier to control.

The Victorians

• We generally read the history of sexuality since the 18th century in terms of the "repressive hypothesis."

• Since the rise of the bourgeoisie, any expenditure of energy on purely pleasurable activities has been frowned upon.

• Sex has been treated as a private, practical affair that only properly takes place between a husband and a wife. • The parent’s bedroom

• Sex outside these confines is prohibited, repressed, unspeakable, and unthinkable

Releasing Repression

• Prostitution

• Psychiatry

• Steven Marcus labels those who turned to psychiatrists or prostitutes in the Victorian era as the "other Victorians."

• These "other Victorians" created their own space for discourse on sexuality that freed them from the confines of conventional morality.

The 20th Century

• Freud may seem to have made open and frank discussions of sexuality possible, but this discourse is still confined to the academic and confessional realm of psychiatry.

• We cannot free ourselves from this repression simply by means of theory: we must learn to be more open about our sexuality, to talk about it, to enjoy it.

• Discourse on sexuality, seen as a revolt against a repressive system, becomes a matter of political liberation rather than intellectual analysis.

The Repressive Hypothesis

• An attempt to give revolutionary importance to discourse on sexuality.

• Makes it seem both defiant and of utmost importance to our personal liberation that we talk openly about sex.

• Our discourse on sexuality, in its promise for a better, freer way of life, is a form of preaching.

The Modern Paradox

• Why do we proclaim so loudly that we are repressed, why do we talk so much about how we can't talk about sex?

• A supporter of the repressive hypothesis might answer that we are so aware of our repression because it is so evident, and liberating ourselves is a long process that can only be advanced by open, frank discussion.

Three Questions

• Is it historically accurate to trace what we think of today as sexual repression to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century?

• Is power in our society really expressed primarily in terms of repression?

• Is our modern- day discourse on sexuality really a break with this older history of repression, or is it part of the same history?

Discursive Fact of Sexuality

• Ultimately, Foucault’s interest is not in sexuality itself, but in our drive for a certain kind of knowledge, a certain perspective, and the kind of power we find in that knowledge.

• Whoever determines what can be known effectively determines how we think and who we are.

• According to Foucault, then, language and knowledge always have a political edge.

Controlling Power

• Power has been exercised to repress discussion of sex.

• The institution of marriage has claimed the discourse on sexuality as its exclusive property.

• The bourgeoisie became rich through work and industriousness. • Sex is none of these things, it is reckless abandon and powerlessness.

• The bourgeois would want to control and confine sex because it is a dangerous opponent to their work ethic.

• The desire to control discourse and knowledge about sex is essentially a desire to control power.

Foucault Attacks this Hypothesis

• Foucault recognizes the repressive hypothesis itself as a form of discourse.

• We have developed a whole framework in which to talk about the ways in which bourgeois society represses our sexual impulses.

• We have developed a way of talking about how we are prevented from talking about sex.

• We have come to talk about our need to break free from this repression, to talk freely about sex and to enjoy sex, as a part of a larger political rebellion against bourgeois society.

More Important than the Hypothesis

• More important to Foucault than whether or not the repressive hypothesis is true is how the repressive hypothesis is formulated and why.

• Why is it so important to us to talk about sex, why do we have to insist that we are rebelling in doing so, and why do we insist on seeing that rebellion as part of a larger, political rebellion?

• Foucault sees this discourse as just a surface manifestation of a deeper will, a will to a certain kind of knowledge and a certain kind of power. His investigation wants to dig beneath the hypothesis itself and find what motivates it.

The Secrecy of Sex

• This notion of secrecy is itself a part of the discourse on sex: our talking about it as if it were a secret, as something hidden, is what drives us to uncover it, to learn about it.

• Repressive Hypothesis states that we want to keep sex under wraps

• Foucault argues that power has been exercised to bring sex increasingly into discourse, into wider and more analytic focus.

Foucault Agrees

• There has been a stronger effort to control sex and that sex has become increasingly something to be ashamed of.

• Free and easy attitude toward sex in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where there was less shame in thinking of sex as an object of pleasure.

• This free and easy attitude was suppressed, and that it was a result of the controlling power of the rising bourgeoisie.

Foucault Disagrees

• The repressive hypothesis sees only the silencing of an earlier form of discourse.

• Foucault sees this silencing as being a necessary result of a growing "will to knowledge" regarding sex. • That is, as it has become more important to know about sex, the ways we can speak about

sex have become more tightly controlled.

• Instead of being prohibited, talk about sex has only increased since the 17th century. • 17th – Raucous humor and explicit confessions • 18th – Analytical studies and controlled awareness

• The word "sex" has taken on an entirely different meaning in the past three centuries.

Desexualization of Sex

• Sex ceases to be something we can laugh about and pursue with reckless passion and becomes something we must approach with calm and control.

• It ceases to be the domain of the simple-minded and the passionate, and becomes the domain of the social scientist and jurist.

Studying Sex

• As sex becomes increasingly an object of knowledge, the people who control this knowledge become increasingly important.

• It was not that such sexual acts were not to be talked about—it was that they were only to be talked about in a certain, sanctioned manner.

• The will to knowledge that drives the rationalization of sex cannot be reduced to economic causes.

The Proliferation of Sexual Perversion • What is made to seem like a boundary—excluding children from the

realm of sexuality—is essentially a means to expand the study of sexuality to a number of different realms.

• "Homosexuality" ceased to be associated with certain acts, and became associated with a person's identity, with his soul. One's sexuality became a key to interpreting one's personality and one's behavior.

• Within the “medicalization of sexuality” both observer and observed find power and pleasure intermingled in this intimate game of examination.

• Rather than set up boundaries to contain sexuality, this scrutiny has made us see everything in terms of sex.

Power and Repression

• If we understood repression as also having power, we might understand that we are never free of the confines of power

• Desire only exists because there also exists a repressive power that keeps us from realizing our impulses. Power, according to this model, is not something that holds our desires down; it is responsible for creating our desires in the first place.

• Power does not only repress, it creates.

Five Propositions of Power

• First, power is not a "thing" that one can have or not have; rather, it is always being exercised from all points in any relation.

• Second, power is not simply applied externally to relationships of economics, knowledge, or sex. Rather, it is inside these relationships and determines their internal structure.

• Third, power does not simply come down from above, and not all power relationships are formed according to a ruler/ruled model. Rather, power relationships pop up at all levels of society independent of the ruling powers.

• Fourth, though it is possible to identify designs and strategies in power relationships, there are no individual subjects exercising this power. There is a rationality and logic behind power relationships.

• Fifth, resistance is a part of a power relationship, and is not external to it. Furthermore, resistance does not usually manifest itself in a solid, steady form. Rather, pockets of resistance pop up in different places and move about as dynamics of power change.

There is no such thing as Sex

• It is a figment of our imagination.

• It is a word we have developed to help us talk about the various deployments of sexuality.

• The deployment of sexuality links the human body and physical sensations to all sorts of epistemological and political considerations like education, population growth, public health, scientific knowledge, and so on.

• The word "sex" has become the cornerstone of a new kind of discourse that has appeared in the past three centuries.

“Sex Life”

• Sexual intercourse used to be something people just did; now it is an important aspect of a realm that has its own kind of specialized knowledge.

• Calling something or someone sexy generally says more about power and influence than physical attractiveness.

• The concept of "sexy," like the concept of "sex," could only exist in an age where the physical sensations of sexual intercourse are conceptually linked to notions of power and knowledge.

Freedom

• There is no "thing" to discover, liberate, or enjoy.

• If we truly want liberation, we should stop thinking of our body and of physical pleasure as a part of a "sexuality" that explains who we are.

• That way we can break the hold that the deployment of sexuality has on us and appreciate physical sensations for what they are.