Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
[this is from a while back, and I didn't clean it up really. but still. ]
[summary]
In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Foucault sets out to critique the idea that, he argues, has dominated the understanding of the modern [1700-present] history of sex: the "repressive hypothesis," which holds that sexuality was more or less freely spoken and enacted before a repressive moral regime set in during the 18th century, eventually achieving its height with the Victorian era. The hypothesis further involves the notion that, starting with Freudian psychoanalysis and continuing with progressively more radical sexual revolts throughout the twentieth century, the great repression is finally being lifted, leading society to radical freedom.
Against this notion, Foucault argues that modernity has in fact been accompanied by the proliferation of medical, psychological, legal, confessional, and other discourses of sexuality. Instead of simply restricting and regulating sexuality, Foucault claims, these discourses have in fact produced it, in many new forms: "Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities" (37).The categories of perversion, and so "perversions" themselves, were created in the course of the modern period.
There was never a natural sexuality waiting to be repressed, but only bodies and pleasures, which came to be configured into a regime of sexuality by connecting sex with interiority and truth, i.e. subjectivation.
[task]
For Foucault, the point is not to discover the truth, or the ideological fiction, inherent in the way that sex is spoken about, 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" (11)
[the body]
In describing one of the origins of the discourses of sexuality, the post-Reformation confession manuals, Foucault writes: "Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. 20
I am really intrigued by this formulation. Foucault seems to be saying that sexuality is traced out 'in the flesh' by the operation of the confessional discourse in relation to sins, i.e. mental/subjective conditions/actions. Sin lies in a necessary proximity to the "flesh", which the language of confession exposes as the otherwise silent "unbroken nervure", lines and structures of force underlying the mental-spiritual condition of sin. The concept of sin quilts word and flesh, rendering the latter accessible and malleable.
on a biopolitical scale, "...the deployment of sexuality is linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body—the body that produces and consumes" (107). That is, the interest of government in controlling a productive and consuming population necessitates or is in part located in practices of knowledge and control of sexuality.
Against my own prejudiced understanding, Foucault emphasizes that "the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures..." (151-2). He is pursuing not a "history of mentalities," but a 'history of bodies".
[power-knowledge-pleasure]
"There was undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and a gain of pleasure," Foucault writes (44). Is this similar to the "eroticizing" effects of male dominance in MacKinnon? In any case, for Foucault, power is not a negative force, taking things away, regulating existing bodies and conditions; power is productive, not simply of new categories, but also of subjectivities and pleasures. The pleasure of power itself and the pleasure of evading its operations form "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45). "Resistance" is necessarily immanent to power on a large scale; however, the immanent possibility of a new configuration of power and pleasure generally remains hard to localize, and even harder to voluntarily bring into effect.
Power is "the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable" (93); it is "a complex strategical situation in a particular society" (93). Power is ubiquitous, local, and concrete. It permeates all relations, is immanent to them. On the matter of scale, Foucault suggests that the small social unit (the nuclear family) is neither the pattern for, nor a reproduction of large-scale social structures, but that small and large scale units are subject to "double conditioning". Local actors' tactical decisions align with, conform to, or alter larger strategic movement of power.
[confession]
The place of the individual subjectivity in this dynamic is guaranteed by the omnipresent practice of confession:
"One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is forced to confess" (59)
For F., the "science of sex" developing in the nineteenth century grows from the earlier practice of confession, and not from the larger domain of the natural sciences. Confession necessarily implies the individual's affirmation of the relations of power, his or her reinsription in them: "The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power" (59). One always confesses to being held by power, proclaiming individuality through its relation to power.
[governmentality]
For Foucault, sex enters into the domain of power in part because states, in their transition to modernity, come to act and be understood as the guardians of populations, no longer of peoples and subjects (25). Thus sex, understood as a private activity, simultaneously comes to be permeated with the concern of the state for its survival and prosperity; sex acts become nationalized. Medical sciences, in their advisory role to the state as the caretaker of populations, "ma[ke] a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple" (41). Non-reproductive sex therefore becomes subversive of the state, even as the growing science of sex seeks to both naturalize and treat "perversions".