The Deployment of Sexuality
A couple of classes we go, we had an in depth discussion on the deployment of alliance in contrast to the deployment of sexuality. Where the deployment of alliance had stark binary oppositions, the deployment of sexuality was relational. Where the Deployment of alliance was enforced through law, the deployment of sexuality was through the multiplicity of discourse and various authorities. There were other contrasts as well, but the general difference of the ways in which these deployments is as Foucault states: “the deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostatis of the social body, which it has the function of maintaining…the deployment of sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way” (107).
Rosenberg’s article The Female World of Love and Ritual illustrates how females in Victorian culture was able to form their own kinship ties not through the deployment of alliance, which Foucault described as “to link between partners and definite statuses” (106) but rather ambiguous relationships which “is concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however tenuous or imperceptible these may be” (106). The spectrum of the role of kinship in Victorian women spanned from emotional and psychological comfort to sensual and passionate love—it was through this relational spectrum did Victorian women create ties that were personal and increasingly specific to their own needs and desires. The expansion of the kinship system, which begins before birth through the inheritance of one’s mother’s friends and support, grows throughout a Victorian females life to her ever changing needs.
However, Rosenburg addresses the issue that this kinship formations and subcultures formed by Victorian woman did not solely exist privately and exclusively away from one’s general lifestyle. Instead, Rosenberg believes that these very kinship formations informed greatly the identity of a Victorian woman. Rosenberg states towards the beginning of her essay that: “The female friendship must not be seen in isolation, it must be analyzed as one aspect of women’s overall relations with one another….at all stages of the female life cycle constitute the most suggestive framework for the historian to begin an analysis of intimacy and affection” (202). The expansion of the kinship system to incorporate aspects of one’s overall identity echoes the system of sexuality which attempts to “create and innovate” bodies rather than determining it. The rituals that Victorian women participated prior to Childbirth or marriage both greatly affected the cultural relevance of what these events meant, as well as how these events affected the individual undergoing them. Rosenberg depicts the way these “private spheres” of kinship and affection actually informed everyday life, and that Victorian women “considered such love both socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual marriage. Emotionally and cognitively, their heterosocial and homosocial worlds were complementary” (205).
Ironically, this deployment culminates to create a lack of understanding between two social groups—men and women. Rosenberg explains that the homogenous nature of the kinship groups between women—though fortified through a strong cultural language and value system between those partaking in it, was ill-prepared to communicate with those from other, just as specially oriented kinship groups. Rosenberg states that: “if men and women grew up as they did in relatively homogenous and segregated sexual groups, the marriage represented a major problem in adjustment…we could interpret much of the emotional stiffness and distance that we associate with Victorian marriage is a structural consequence of contemporary sex-role differentiation and gender-role socialization” (213).
March 7th, 2011 at 11:40 am
Richard,
This is a thoughtful discussion of Smith-Rosenberg’s article on friendship among women and strengthened mother-daughter bonds. Let me suggest one avenue for you to think more about in regard to the interplay between the System of Alliance and the Deployment of Sexuality. Remember that Foucault argues that Alliance didn’t disappear but was transformed as it was absorbed into the family emerging within the newer Deployment of Sexuality. Alliance is to be understood within the context of kinship defined in terms of blood and marriage relations. The mother-daughter aspect is thus still within that but is also transformed to the extent that it might interfere with the marriage between a women and a man. The friendship of women is not integral to Alliance’s kinship per se. That it arose in Victorian culture in this way might more aptly be seen as a challenge to kinship arrangements of heterosexual marriage. The article’s emphasis on separate spheres is another variation in the shift from Alliance to Sexuality since in traditional Alliance, women are often made to live in separate quarters, but in this case they elect to do so to some extent. With that clarification in mind, I think you are right to see an “expansion of kinship” as you call it. This continues in the 20th century in other ways that go against the traditions of kinship—increasingly elective marriages across racial and ethnic lines, for example. These are made possible by the element of Scientia Sexualis.