Foucault's Analysis on Power, Knowledge, and Sexuality
Foucault delves into the intricate relationship between power, knowledge, and sexuality, exploring how they intersect and influence each other. He discusses the deployment of sexuality, technologies of power, methods of exerting power, discourse as a tool of power and resistance, the concept of reverse discourse, and the mechanisms through which sexuality is used as a tool for control and normalization.
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4. Deployment of Sexuality Knowledge-pleasure Demand for the truth of sex Annex sex to the field of rationality Sex as the explanation for everything (78)
Technologies of power / power as law Negative relation: power can only say no to sex Insistence of the rule: order maintained through language or discourse Cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not Logic of censorship: affirming what is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists Uniformity of the apparatus: the same at all levels (84)
Method / Power Power as a system power is everywhere and comes from everywhere Power is exercised from innumerable points (94) Power relations are immanent in all other relationships Power comes from below Where there is power, there is resistance, but resistance is never exterior to power
In discourse power and knowledge are joined Discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy Discourses on homosexuality in psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature made possible the formation of A REVERSE DISCOURSE: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf Using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified
Reverse Discourse There is not, on one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discrouse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations They can circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. (102)
Sexuality as a tool Mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex 1. hysterization of women s bodies 2. pedagogization of children s sex 3. socialization of procreative behavior 4. psychiatrization of perverse pleasure
1. hysterization of womens bodies Feminine body thoroughly saturated with sexuality Organically connected to social body & life of children The Mother vs. negative image of nervous woman Target for knowledge = hysterical woman
2. pedagogization of children s sex Premature sexuality as both natural and contrary to nature Parents, educators, doctors, psychologists must be alert Dangerous sexual potential must be controlled War against onanism lasting nearly two centuries Target of knowledge = the masturbating child
The war on onanism The Consequences of Masturbation, from R. L. Rozier's The Secret Vice, or Women's Masturbation, 1822
3. socialization of procreative behavior Incitements and restrictions brought to bear on fertility of couples Responsibilization of couples (ever heard of responsible procreation?) Target of knowledge = Malthusian couple
Thomas Robert Malthus 1766-1834 British economist who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), arguing that population tends to increase faster than food supply, with inevitably disastrous results, unless the increase in population is checked by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease.
4. psychiatrization of perverse pleasure Anomalies in sexuality are clinically analyzed All behaviors were normalized or pathologized Corrrective technologies sought for these anomalies Target of knowledge = perverse adult (105)
Exclusive promotion of adult marital sexuality State management of marriages, births, life expectencies Theory of degenerescence: Heredity of various maladies produces sexual pervert Sexual perversion resulted in depletion of one s line of descent Perversion heredity degenerescence (118) All are problematized first for bourgeois families Working classes long escape the deployment of sexuality
Era of bio-power Power over life, the body as a machine Species body biopolitics of the population, vitality of the social body Power whose highest function was no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through birth-rate, longevity, public health, housing, migration (140)
Racism in its modern form State control Purity of the blood, triumph of the race Eugenic ordering of society Exaltation of superior blood Systematic genocide of others
