Sexuality and American Culture

Hi to all of you. Since I won’t be able to return your response papers until a week later than usual, I thought I might provide a few joint comments in the meantime, because this is a good week for you to review and/or catch up with the Foucault reading. Your blog on the Museum of Sexuality should reflect Foucauldian insights in some way. I am going to pick out some main concepts from each paper (some that need to be sharpened, others extended) and invite you to address them here in comments and/or use them in your Museum blog.

 

Naomi’s paper brought up the relationship between knowledge and power in a way that needs some re-alignment. It is often thought that Foucault was saying that the “more knowledge one has the more power she/she has.” Although this is often thought to be the case, it is not what Foucault means by Power/Knowledge. What he means is that power relations actually shape knowledge. That is, our forms of knowledge are produced and defined by disciplinary power relations. We talk about the discipline of history or Biology without thinking about it so literally, but when you take classes in those subjects, you are being trained, disciplined to talk their talk, accept their assumptions, etc. If you do it well, you may major in it and thus get your credentials to reflect the way you have been made knowledgeable by those power relations within the educational system.

 

Fae brought up a question about what Foucault meant about “affirmation of self.” I am not sure exactly where that phrase comes in the text (be sure to put page references in your papers!), but it does prompt me to say something about the process of subjectification, or subjection. Foucault uses the term subject rather than self to indicate that we have been subjected to power relations that shape our bodies and the ways we know (see above). The concept of Self is often used concept in contrast to this because it assumes a unified and prior selfhood that he refutes. We see the concept of Self in the language of Transcendentalism in the 19^th century and in New Age rhetoric in the late 20^th century. 

 

Jaimie pursued this notion of our bodies being subjected to the rules and regulations of sexuality as well as the Law. But at the end of her response, she argued that “We can only ever be liberated in our thoughts. The domain of the mind is the only one that cannot be regulated. For now.”  For Foucault, however, there is not a split between body and mind and the knowledge systems discussed above apply to our ways of believing and thinking. Remember, though, there is resistance where there is power so we are not simply mental robots. And he uses the term “thought” as one that indicates challenges to regimes of belief that are oppressive. The practice of freedom, in these terms, is an act of self-transformation waged by thought. So the mind can indeed be regulated but we can also resist that regulation and transform power relations to make them less homogenized and oppressive.

 

Patrick reflected on notions of gender and how they have changed over time, which we see in the documents and the essay by Godbeer. He draws on a book by Thomas Laqueur called Making Sex to indicate how conceptualizations of body and gender shifted dramatically in the 17^th century. I want all of you to keep an eye out at the Museum for evidence of such shifts between earlier time and ours in this culture, and differences in gender assignments from other cultures compared to American culture. 

 

Marcella brought up the issue of sexual perversions as an hereditary notion. She made several astute comments about Foucault’s argument regarding the “theory of ‘degenerescence’” but one point needs some clarification, having to do with differences between passing down and contaminating. Foucault argues that there is a “new technology of sex” that emerges in the 19^th century, the Victorian era and it involved notions of hereditary perversion. As Marcella pointed out, he commends Freud for rejecting that idea. Keep in mind that this is late 19^th and early 20^th century belief.

 The Puritan era is the earlier point of reference for us, in part because of the contrast to the Victorians. The Puritan use of words like contamination are not the same as heredity. They were worried about disease in their colonies and we can see that anxiety shaping the way they talk about sexual unnaturalness—as impure, contaminating. That is a person to person contact rather than an idea of heredity. For the Puritans, remember, sin infected everyone and the idea of heredity was reflected in their belief that “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All.”  Marcella went on to point out contradictions in gay rights debates these days involving these ideas—and I will leave it to her to extend that point here.

 

Finally, Keshia brought up the differences and overlaps between sex and sexuality as a way to indicate that, even though our society seems more open about issues of sexuality, we are in many respects “more chained down.” She uses Godbeer’s distinction between sex as a “physical act” and sexuality as “the conceptual apparatus that men and women use to give menaing and value to sexual attraction and its enactment.” This is a useful distinction for all of us to keep in mind, but also to keep asking which is actually being referred to at a given moment.