Sorry for the late post! After reading through some of your posts, I was glad to see that my recognition of the presence of the juridico-discursive model was shared…hopefully this means applying Foucault to our readings won’t be as impossible as I had imagined. I was particularly interested in the Custom-House section of this reading. […]
This week’s selections of readings played off each really well. From the historical excerpt of Massachusetts’s colony’s laws on sexual offenses, the overarching message is death is result of any sexual deviances away from heterosexual and martial sex in colonial America. However, that is not always the case (or even rarely the case) as evident […]
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality became much clearer after reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne’s tale is the perfect lens through which to view juridico-discursiveness in action. I also enjoyed the added richness of the Foucauldian lens because I was reading The Scarlet Letter for the second time. This time around it was […]
After taking some time to digest all of the Foucault that we’ve taken in over the past few weeks (I must admit I’m still working on a lot of it) I’m particularly interested in the final section: Right of Death and Power Over Life. I am most interested in the way that this section helps […]
This week’s reading was definitely heavy with concepts. I keep on restarting this posting and then chucking it because I decide to change what to focus on… Strangely enough, I found the second part of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality easier to digest (probably due to the way he was structuring the text). A […]
After tackling the second half of Foucault and reading through Weeks’ and Norton’s essays, I feel convinced only that there are multiple approaches to the study of sexuality. There seems to be a general agreement that understanding the history/development of the social understanding of sexuality is key, but when the subject slips into biology and […]
I enjoyed the introduction of new material this week, and especially the way Jeffery Weeks’ “The Social Construction of Sexuality” went along nicely with Michel Foucault’s section, “The Deployment of Sexuality.” Whereas Foucault focuses on power constructing sexuality, Weeks goes at from a societal perspective. I found Weeks easier to understand most likely because he […]
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 […]
I am familiar with Foucault’s writings on post-colonialism, but this is my first introduction to his ideas about sexuality, and I find them to be fascinating. Foucault successfully identifies a shift in sexuality during the Victorian era, where sex was relegated to a reproductive function and pleasure in any form was disapproved of.
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 […]
