Re: Foucault Chapters 1-3 (David Li)
Re: Foucault parts 1-3
In the labyrinth of Foucault’s analysis of sexual identities in western culture, I think there is an important idea regarding the cognitive process of a society being conversed. It is the idea of thinking with labels. Before being branded with a technical term, homosexuality was just another form of sexual conduct; after it was absorbed into the abyss of etymology, homosexuality was identified as a form of sexual conduct in a litany of sexual behaviors. In relation to this, Foucault writes “The nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.”
Labeling chips away at the homogeneity of a society (and at sexuality as a whole), creates division, and places more emphasis on the existence of an individual and different factions within a society and how they interact sexually. Also, identification through distinct labels opens the floodgates to one’s development or adoption of preconceived notions of a certain individual or faction within a certain sexual category; through these notions, tension may sprout and rivalries between factions may arise.
Foucault talks about these new sexualities—which have stemmed from the oppression of other sexualities and the limits of the space between the licit and illicit—and how they were organized by cultural elites such as Kraft-Ebing and Rohleder. These sexual sub-divisions were important because this was a time when people first began to identify themselves with specific labels of sexuality.
The idea of division was something that ran around my head as I was reading the first three segments of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. I suppose that sexual segregation—disallowing gays from religious agendas for example—can be a vehicle for segregation in general. Someone who engages in bestiality may be disallowed from barns and someone who is in favor of pederasty may(no, definitely) be disallowed from children’s parks.
