Foucault, M. (1990/1978/1976). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, an introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life (pp. 135-159) (continued)
Foucault describes four “great lines of attack along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries” (p. 146) resulting in “a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” (p. 147): the sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, birth controls, and the psychiatrization of perversions. The blood relation was sacrosanct in the era of sovereignty; now, it is sex or sexuality that not only reproduces the species but the power to dominate.
The new procedures of power that were devised during the classical age and employed in the nineteenth century were what caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regulations. (p. 148)
Questions:
1. Does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional? (p. 151)
In other words, do we leave out the body or leave out sex in this analysis? No. In fact, Foucault seems to be saying that the power invested in bodies becomes a “history of bodies” (p. 152).
2. Is the power that is exercised through sexuality not directed specifically at sex?
Foucault claims that the idea of sex took place or developed within the different strategies of power (p. 152).
As sexuality was deployed, sex took on different meanings: for instance, in hysterization of women, sex was defined as common to men and women, as belonging solely to men, and as an agitation to women by producing constant pregnancy. In the sexualization of childhood, sex was present (as in the anatomy of the body), but absent (since the body was immature) but it was also present in that children engaged in sexual activity (masturbation), but deficient (in that there was no reproduction). These four types of “sex” were existent alongside the idea that childhood sexual activity would lead to pathological repercussions later in life (p. 153). Foucault sums up his account of the deployment of sexuality in the following way:
It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of teh various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures. (p. 157)
Tags: analytics of sexuality, hysterization, psychiatrization
