The history of sexuality: An introduction

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Foucault, M. (1978) The history of sexuality: An introduction, Volume 1. New York: Vintage.

Contents 1 Part One: We "Other Victorians" 1.1 Conventional narrative of sexual history 1.2 Why does it persist? 1.3 Discourse and sex 1.4 Doubts concerning the "repressive hypothesis" 2 Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis; I. The Incitement to Discourse 2.1 Sex is regulated 2.2 Population and sex 2.3 Children and sex 2.4 Expending energey on the quotidian sexuality 2.5 A "multiplicity" of discourses 3 2: The Perverse Implantation 3.1 Who governs sex? 3.2 Shifting focus from heteronormative to "unnatural" activities and desires 3.3 Four functions of power over sexuality 3.4 Sexual variety drawn from / implanted in the body 3.5 Countering the repressive hypothesis

Part One: We "Other Victorians"

Conventional narrative of sexual history

"Discourse on modern sexual repression" (5):

• Sex and sexuality were once frankly discussed and displayed (until ~17th c)
• Then came a Victorian regime which repressed sexuality to a mute, hypocritical, restrained form that persists today (3)
• Also, that there is a "sexual revolution" afoot in the 1970s that seeks to open up sex and sexuality once again

Why does it persist?

• Easy to map against rise of capitalism and all the theory that accompanies it (5)
• Gratifying narrative for any who identify in opposition (6)
• Foucault: not simply those two but that sex serves a religious function:
  • Promising liberation, exhaultation
  • "Chastised hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the real" (8)

Discourse and sex

• Society "speaks verbosely of its own silence" (8)

"Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed?" (8-9)

• Knowing what we know about the operations of power through discourse,
• What is at stake as sex is carried into discourse?
• How has sex and sexuality circulated in various discourses since the 17th c? (11)

Doubts concerning the "repressive hypothesis"

• "Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?" (10)
• "Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies like ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression?" (10)
• "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"?" (10)

Not contesting the fact of sex/uality being regulated, repressed but:

• The various components of the repressive hypothesis, grouped together, play a local, tactical role in a "transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge" that are too big and complex to be simple "repression" (12)

Part Two: The Repressive Hypothesis; I. The Incitement to Discourse

Assumption: discursive repression

• To gain master over sex "in reality", it must be subjugated at the level of language
• Not allowed to circulate freely, to be named, or be spoken of easily (17)
• "Censorship"

Historical analysis counters:

• Some amount of control: when, where, how, producing a "rhetoric of metaphors" (17-18)
• Otherwise "a veritable discursive explosion" (17)
• Institutional incitement: in law, religion, medicine, science, etc. (18)
  • e.g. the langauge of Catholic confession was made "vague" but the content was broadened and specified (19)

Sex is regulated

• Not via taboo
• But via open, frank "useful" and "public" discourses (25)
• Defining what is in and out of bounds, acceptibility
• Eventually norming and naturalizing certain practices (and bodies) over others

Population and sex

• Administrative move from "people" to "population"
• Enables quantification (25)
• How might policy have been concerned with maintaining or increasing the population?
• Might such a concern have drive certain regulations of sex, such that procreative practices were permitted, encouraged? (26)
• Now the sexual lives of a "population" had significant bearing on the state's military might, productivity, etc. (26)

Children and sex

• No more laughter at the stumbling sexuality of children
• Assumption that childish (also, unprocreative) sexuality is a pathological secret to be discovered
  • What was once visible and obvious is made invisible and uncoverable... (42)
• Institutions designed around childhood sexuality, schools, dorms (30)

Expending energey on the quotidian sexuality

• Case of a the "dim-witted" man who is arrested for paying a younger girl for sex
• What was once an everyday, unremarkable event
  • Is now subject to examination and categorization by law, science, medicine, theory (32)

A "multiplicity" of discourses

• Middle Ages sex discourse concerned primarily with "the flesh" (33)
• In recent centuries, this "relative uniformity" is broken up
  • demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, political criticism (33)

Rather than a censorship (34)

• "A regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse"
• Spoke of sex ad infinitum, "while exploiting it as the secret' (35)

2: The Perverse Implantation

Transformation into multiple discourses not a mere increase but

• An effort to dispel and negate non-productive, non-procreative forms of sexuality, pleasure (36)
• To the benefit of a "genitally centered" sexuality
• Ensure population, labor capacity // economically useful, politically conservative (37)

Who governs sex?

Until 18th c.

• Three areas
  • Canonical law
  • Christian pastoral
  • Civil law
• Concerned primarily with matrimonial relations (37)
• No clear distinction between marital violations and other types of deviance (e.g. "sodomy") (37)

Shifting focus from heteronormative to "unnatural" activities and desires

During discursive jumps of the 18th + 19th c,

• Heterosexuality more strongly normed + naturalized (and thereby ignored)
  • So long as couples more or less matched the hetero norm, they were left alone
• Greater attention paid to non-heteronormative peoples (38)
  • Figures "scarcely noticed in the past" now said to be "unnatural" (39)
  • Suddenly sexual variety achieved greater visibility (discursively and otherwise) (40)

Four functions of power over sexuality

• Lines of penetration encircle a subject. Create an object to oppose (e.g. children's onanism) to support a limitless project of decrease or eradication that aims to perpetuate itself rather than to reach a conclusion (41-42)
• Incorporation of perversions, this is the multivalent move from "sodomy" (activity) to "homosexual" (corpus) (43)
• Perpetual spirals of power and pleasure, "Examination and insistent observation", especially viz medicalization (both effect and means) (44). Probing, interrogating, seeking "symptoms" of sexual pathology.
  • Accompanied by a pleasurable exercise of power. Leering, voyeuristic, penetrative (45)
• Devices of sexual saturation, organizations, institutions were organized around the specification of pleasures, bounded and clearly defined

Sexual variety drawn from / implanted in the body

Sexual variety and specificity was not extant and later regulated, repressed

• It had to be drawn out and "solidified" into discourse by "power devices" (48)

Pleasure and power do not "cancel or turn back against one another" (48)

• They "seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another" (48)
• "Linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement" (48)

Countering the repressive hypothesis

"We must therefore abandon the [repressive hypothesis]. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but [...] a deployment quite different from the law[; ] the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities." (49)

• "Never before" has there been such a multitude of power centers, devices, and discourses concerning pleasure embodied and intensified