Foucault: History of Sexuality/ A Reading.

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Foucault: History of Sexuality/ A Reading.

Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex,

not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power.

                                                                    (Foucault, 92)

According to Foucault, power from the 18th century began to be exercised in two dimensions. The first one was formulated by the disciplinary techniques and methods of ‘bio-power’, the power over life which increased the capacities of the human body, and at the same time enhanced its economic utility. The second dimension focuses around the exercise of bio-power over the body and its vitality. Foucault focuses on relations of power and knowledge but his immediate object of analysis was sexuality because it concerns with both, the relations of power of the individual as well as the society. Sex was supposed to be located at the centre of  the two axes of the development of political technology of life. Sexuality in Foucault’s work thus achieved an important means of addressing the question of formation of the subject.

The issue of sexuality emerges at several points in Foucault’s works but it is only approached in a limited and sustained manner in ‘History and Sexuality’. The essays constitute the central theme of the history of sexual conduct and behaviour, and the analysis of philosophical and religious ideas on sexuality so as to reach an understanding of the formation and the development of the experience of sexuality in modern societies. He keeps shifting from keeping a historical focus to more analytical concerns in his work on sexuality. The Introduction of the essay provides an analysis of sex as an historical theory rather than as the most basic innate human element. Foucault compares and analyses sex and sexuality in relations to power and knowledge and extends the study further to dissect the modes of what he calls the ‘objectification’ through which human beings are made into subjects. In the beginning, the historical focus moves from the post-enlightenment period of the 18th and 19th century events to a period encompassing the centuries immediately before and after the death of Christ right up to the middle ages, further onto an analysis of Greek and Christian texts. In the following volumes relations of power, through which individuals form and change themselves through the techniques of the self are focused upon.

Foucault begins by analyzing the popular Victorian concept of sexual experience that sex was used as a means of repression and as a symbol of power. He questions the general belief of ‘repressive hypothesis’ to reach an understanding of the relations between power and sex. As an effect to that  he formulated a set of questions like, why has sexuality been so widely discussed?, what are the links between these discussions and the pleasures and power effects that were caused by them? Etc.

This hypothesis describes the history of western societies after the 17th century as a period in which a series of prohibitions laid down on the individuals and their physical behaviour. By the coming of the Victorian age, sexuality was confined and controlled to home and marriage, except for the licensed access to sex in markets and brothels. This prohibition of sexuality is seen by Foucault as having some  similarity to the general repression due to capitalism and its class related problems. Foucault argues that another sexual tendancy is also evident in the increase of discourses concerned with sex. There emerged a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex. From this point onwards, sex became an object of administration, management and the government. He argues that a proof that sex was implicitly present as an object of inquiry was the government’s focus on population. Population became an object of government and administration with the realization that it had its own limitations. The governments became more aware and concerned of the economic, moral, health and political problems of their populations. This in turn lead to a study and a minute analysis of various influences on population like birthrate, legitimacy of births, age of marriage, frequency of sexual relations, fertility etc. Therefore as on one hand, sex became confined to home and the licensed married couple, on the other hand, it also became a governmental matter between the state and the individual. Sex became a public issue open to discourses, analysis and a matter of gaining knowledge in.  This resulted in the emergence of the 18th and 19th century discourses on sexuality through the fields of medicine, psychiatry, criminology and social work. Foucault comments that the past three centuries reveal a vast accumulation of endless discourses on sex and sexuality. We can thus say that modern western societies were distinct not for their repression and censor of sex, but rather for their simultaneous subjection of sexuality to never ending discussions and their curiosity for exploring of the secrets of life and birth. We may then conclude that all different legal, medical and moral discussions had in the end, cultivated a reproduction of labour capacity and the preservation of the prevailing form of social relations. Foucault argues that if the increase in these discussions was governed by the intention of eliminating fruitless pleasures, then they had failed as the 19th century saw a bifurcation of sexualities into many perversions. Foucault suggests that power did not prohibit or eradicate extra-conjugal, non-monogamous sexualities, on the contrary they were multiplied. The form of power to which sex was subjected did not set boundaries for sexuality. It extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of uncertain analysis. It did not exclude sexuality, but rather included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did not seek to avoid it but attracted its varieties by means of complex gyre like structures in which pleasure and power reinforced one another. Thus the manifold sexualities, sexualities of different ages and those  fixated on particular tastes, all formed equations of power.

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Perverse forms of sexuality are then seen as the effects or the products of the exercise of a type of power over bodies. This extension of power over bodies, conduct and sex, does not produce repression, but an incitement of unorthodox and perverse sexualities. Thus Foucault’s argument that we need to abandon the hypothesis of increased sexual repression associated with the development of modern industrial societies. Power in its exercise has not taken the form of law, it has been positive and productive rather than negative, and has ensured an increase of pleasures and a multiplication of sexual perversions.

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