Handout: Notes on and Quotes from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
| Welcome to the English Department Knowledge Base at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
|---|
It is really important to figure out exactly what Foucault's project is in the first 51 pages of History. The first few pages of the text are potentially misleading because the reader may think that Foucault is going to demonstrate why and how we are repressed sexually, but he is doing something quite different!!! Remember what Professor Boscagli said in lecture: Foucault wants to question the repressive hypothesis-he does not want the reader to think of sex and power as separate; he does not want the reader to equate sexuality with freedom and nature; he wants the reader to rethink sexual repression and what that means exactly.
[edit] from "We 'Other Victorians' "
p. 10 One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall term the "repressive hypothesis." First doubt: Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact? Is what first comes into view--and consequently permits one to advance an initial hypothesis--really the accentuation or even the establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in the seventeenth century? [...] Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in particular the mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way [...] A third and final doubt: Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it "repression"?
p. 11 The central issue, then [...], is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions. whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact," the way in which sex is "put into discourse."
p. 12 [...] the "putting into discourse of sex," far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constituting--despite many mistakes, of course a science of sexuality.
[edit] from "The Incitement to Discourse"
p. 18 But more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.
What agencies of power/institutions is Foucault speaking about here? What is his primary example?
p. 20 Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer
earned, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
What is Foucault saying about "populations" on page 25?
p. 26 Through the political economy of population there was formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex. There emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct, their determinations and their effects, at the boundary line of the biological and the economic domains. There also appeared those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the traditional means--moral and religious exhortations, fiscal measures--tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic and political behavior.
[edit] from "The Perverse Implantation"
p. 38 The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused this system centered on legitimate alliance to undergo two modifications. First, a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy. Of course, the array of practices and pleasures continued to be referred to it as their internal standard; but it was spoken of less and less, or in any case with a growing moderation. Efforts to find out its secrets were abandoned; nothing further was demanded of it than to define itself from day to day.
Reading the last two quotes (from pages 26 and 38) together: What is Foucault saying about "legitimate alliances," such as marriage?
pp. 38-9 [...] what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it was through a reflux movement, originating in these peripheral sexualities.
p. 40 What does the appearance of all these peripheral sexualities signify? Is the fact that they could appear in broad daylight a sign that the scale had become more lax? Or does the fact that they were given so much attention testify to a stricter regime and to its concern to bring them under close supervision?
p. 45 The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts, all have played this game continually since the nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced amend bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.
What is going on here!?!
p. 48 The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct. And accompanying this encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, became stuck to an age, a place, a type of practice.
p. 49 We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in any age of increased sexual repression.
--MarthineSatris 17:50, 7 September 2007 (PDT)
