Main themes for tomorrow’s class
Hi everyone,
Your posts are off to a great start, giving us lots of directions to pursue for class tomorrow. Two of them are not identified by name, so be sure to include that for future posts. I’m going to write a collective response this time, rather than comments on individual posts, because I want to tie together the key themes that you have highlighted: power relations, identity, scientia sexualis and ars erotica, transgression, and tone and nature of discourses on sex.
I’m always pleased when someone actually likes Foucault’s writing style, as Whitney reports that she does—but it’s not a course requirement and it’s not everyone’s response by a long shot. The key point I want to underscore in her insightful post is how Foucault challenges the “repressive hypothesis” insofar as that hypothesis claims that we avoid talking about sex. He posits instead that we talk about it incessantly through a proliferation of discourses on sexuality, many of which are about how sex is repressed. That has no doubt changed over the past few decades.
The main issue at stake, as she indicates, is that he asks us to think about sexuality as a discourse emerging out of and immersed in power relations. This yields a more abstract discussion—as Colby points out—but it also makes more concrete the ways in which our bodies, our fantasies, and out actions are themselves the effects of these power formations. And that is what propels us to examine the formations of power that have constituted us as sexualized subjects. This is what Tal is directing us toward in her perceptive points about identity. In the “interesting” page that Tal mentions, Foucault gives homosexuality as a prime example of what has occurred through the shift from soul to unconscious and from religious confession to scientific examinations (and eventually to therapy culture). There are other examples, so be thinking of some of them.
One of the unsigned posts takes up the distinctions between scientia sexualis and ars erotica and helps clarify how the pleasure of the latter has been turned increasingly toward the practice of the former in the west. This is a conceptualization that is initially too starkly divided on Foucault’s part, as he admitted, so the way that he notes an overlap is important.
Peter’s post and the unsigned one that focuses on transgression link up with Colby’s discussion of discursive tone and detail, not only in ways of talking and writing about sex but also in Foucault’s own style of analysis. The issue of transgression has become increasingly complicated though digital communication and blurred lines of pornography, art, and fashion. Is it possible to be seemingly transgressive while actually being rather normative in what one shows, says, and does?
