Sanguine to Sex: Blood and Bio-power
“A society of blood… where power spoke through blood; the honor of war, the fear of famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword, executioners and tortures; blood was a reality with a symbolic function. We, on the other hand, are in a society of sex…the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body” (pg 147)
In Part Five Foucault speaks about the shift from a society that derives its power from the ability to kill to a society that feels it has a “right to life” and becomes concerned with propagation, health, longevity and bloodline. One reason for controlling sex through a set of institutions is an awareness of the importance of keeping bloodlines and genetics “pure”. There are many reasons for this, ranging from the unwholesome classist attitude adopted by the Nazis to the more practical methods of having healthy children.
Is eugenics natural or forced? Psychologists have taken this idea of Darwinism and tell us that it is our duty as a species to have the healthiest children with the best “mate”. But just how true is this? And just how much are our sexual impulses controlled by this so-called need? It seems clear to me that the bourgeoisie were pre-occupied with the effort to use sex as a means to fortify their own class and there was much inbreeding in the royal families that led to serious health problems for the sake of keeping the bloodline “pure”. We can’t really know for sure if our idea of an attractive mate is not our own but dictated by our culture of forced images that tell us what is attractive. These days it seems a thin body is what is considered sexy to a large amount of Americans and yet none of those skinny bodies could hope to bear children with any ease. It’s hard for me not to refer to scientific ideas of sexuality when referring to the philosophy of this text but I do think they are very intertwined. No matter how hard we may try and pinpoint our reasons for desire and our sexual impulses they are always subjective. It interacts with the culture and environment and history and collective motive which is ever evolving.
Foucault’s philosophy leads us to even more questions. This discourse of sexuality really relates to all aspects of our lives. We cannot compartmentalize it because it affects our very being. Yet we cannot look it directly in the face. Foucault analyzes sexuality not directly but through how it has changed and affected or been affected by culture.
P.S. Just a side note: how will the game change when we can pick and choose genes even more effectively?
