Sunday, February 5th, 2012

In the time periods explored by Foucault in Parts 1-3 of The History of Sexuality, what was constituted as socially acceptable sexual discourse was anything that would hit close to the bullseye, but not directly on it. It had become an art of verbal communication, and maybe even a gender competition about who could tickle the senses more without being too subjectively obvious.

In the eighteenth century, the seeds of this trend were planted in secondary schools. Foucault explains that architects and school administrators would design campuses with the goal of diverting students’ attention of anything sexual. Whether it was making sure curtains weren’t in the dorms, or that the shape of the tables didn’t incite any sexual desires, it seems that those responsible wouldn’t have minded if students’ hormone levels were suppressed completely during their time at school.

This view of sexual suppression still lives in a number of educators today. Catholic high school education today aims to cleanse its pupils of sexual activity by mixing the ideas of sin with disrespect and loss of dignity. But it was different three hundred years ago. There were much lower thresholds for what could qualify as ‘sexual.’ Language was less vulgar. Sexuality wasn’t as blatant and upfront as it is today in the media and entertainment.

So the children of the past few centuries have received an education in an environment like these secondary schools, sexual discourse contains that subliminally tinged, intentionally ambiguous context. “Discourse, there, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul…” (pg. 20)

This would be classified as the opposite of the Victorian Era, as described by Foucault: Bloodhound Gang – “The Bad Touch”.

As a result, whatever comes out of one’s mouth would be a naive attempt to imply this, no matter how elegant, chivalrous, and classy the words stringed together would feel intrinsically. And quite honestly, it reminds me of my failed adolescent attempts in trying to be suave. But after all, secondary school in these time periods, Foucault explains, neglected to be straight-forward about sexuality. And this double entendre of a sexual discourse was the by product.

Tags: Adolescence, Ambiguity, Discourse, Foucault, Naivety, Respect, Subliminal, The History of Sexuality, Victorian Era

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 1:43 am and is filed under February 7, Peter Panousopoulos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.