Reading Response 9/26

This week’s (and last week’s) readings enhanced my understanding of Michel Foucault’s theories, especially his work in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. The first chapter of Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture utilized the framework Foucault set up in The History of Sexuality. Somerville focuses on the emerging scientia sexualis discourses in the 19^th century. Like Foucault, Somerville framed her analysis on the shift from crime/ prohibition to perversion/ abnormality. Unlike Foucault, Somerville fills in more historic details with the introduction of discourses about race and to some extent about gender to the discourse of sexuality. However, Foucault’s “domains” of the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” and the “hysterization of women’s bodies” is still relevant and present in Somerville’s analysis (Foucault, 1978, p. 104-105). Somerville points out similarities and the somewhat tautological relationship between medical discourses involving race and (homo)sexuality, which was her argument for the chapter (and presumably the book). Following Foucault’s framework, Somerville also provided some examples of the reverse discourses by critics of the hegemonic discourse about homosexuality and sexual inversion such as writers like Edward Carpenter and Edward Stevenson/ Xavier Mayne drawing from their contemporaries’ discourses of race and evolution to advocate for homosexual rights (Somerville, 2000, p. 20, 32).

Somerville also seems to hint on a racialized domain of the hysterization of women’s bodies in this chapter with the samples of detailed comparative anatomy accounts of the sexual anatomy of women as well as the numerous amount of medical scrutiny the sexual anatomy of African women received at that time. It is implied that this amount of quantification of women’s bodies is a form of control in both Somerville’s and Foucault’s analysis, but I wish this concept was elaborated. Like how these historic discourses about homosexuality continued to influence present day discourses (it was only until 1973/ 1974 that homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), these discourses about the sexuality of women of color echo in many contemporary controlling images of the sexualities of women of color. Perhaps, further along this course, we will discuss/ read about this in detail. This critique or want for more discussion brings up de Lauretis’ critique of Foucault and the distinction between Foucault’s “technology of sex” and de Lauretis’ “technology of gender.” De Lauretis points out that Foucault fails to take in account of gendered “form[s]” of sexualities (1987, p. 14). Combined with Somerville’s discussion, racialized forms are missing as well (though, I would argue that Foucault does address class). However in the larger scope of Foucault’s framework of normalizing power as opposed to prohibiting power, the unspoken norm is white, middle-class/ bourgeois, and male.

This leads to Butler’s discussion on the limitations of discourses such as how “coming out” discourses and labeling leaves much to be desired (pun not intended) in discussing sexuality and identity. Butler also brings up an interesting distinction that seems to fall out the cracks of Foucault’s framework. Butler distinguishes two types of oppression: “overt prohibition” and covert “unviable (un)subjects…who are neither named nor prohibited” (Butler, 1991, p. 20). “Overt prohibition” fits in the Foucauldian framework as it allows for reverse discourse as a point of resistance, but the “abjects” that are simply not present at all do not have this strategy. In short, the readings bring up the frustrations of the absence of varieties of genders, races/ ethnicities, sexualities, and bodies in everyday discourses.