Double-Edged Sword of Womanhood

Regarding the deployment of sexuality, Foucault discusses four strategies that, beginning in the 18th century, were used to distinguish the working relationship of knowledge and power of sex.  The very first, the “hysterization of women’s bodies”, focuses on the woman and how mentally and physically she became a symbol of the scientia sexualis of the time (Foucault, 104).

In medicine, the woman’s body was thoroughly analyzed as a sexual object, but also as the form responsible for giving life. Referring to my previous entry about the WWI “Keeping Fit to Fight” Campaign, women were sometimes seen as the perpetrators of disease and perversion. Part Four of The History of Sexuality also discusses how she was also the symbol of the family. As shown by the other posters against venereal disease, which strongly pushed for its preservation and protection, family held a lot of weight in society.  Hence, the woman was the embodiment of all things good and bad about sex; she could either destroy society with her deviousness, as a carrier of disease or sexual hysteria, or be the backbone of society, “the Mother”, giver of life and protector of our children (104).  Though, as Jeffrey Weeks points out in “The Social Construction of Sexuality”, even family relations were “shaped and re-shaped by economic factors, by rules of inheritance, by state interventions”, scientia sexualis responsible even for intimate relations of kin (Peiss, 7).

The “hysterization of the woman’s body” directly corresponds to the deployment of alliance, where emphasis on relationships within the family is one of the central focal points.  The woman, who Foucault points out had a “biologico-moral responsibility” to attend to her children, was not only seen as an extreme mark of the family, but also as the fullest symbol of sex (104).  Everything feared by society about sex was addressed by a woman’s physicality and gender/societal role (her body–deployment of sexuality; her fertility–deployment of alliance).  The scientia sexualis that society abided by places the woman in a very specific category of sex with very little room for digression. As Weeks asserts, “sexuality pinned [her] down like a butterfly to the table” (Peiss, 9).

Both Foucault and Weeks point out that we, as members of a society run by “laws of sex”, need to think about sexuality as a “historical construct” (Foucault, 105).  This societal fabrication of systemic codes and discourses creates a network of sexual knowledge that give certain groups power.  Because of scientia sexualis, women were compartmentalized to fit certain gender roles and defined by the “bad” and “good” stigmas assigned to them.  Therefore, their knowledge-power relationships seemed to be acutely limited by the discourses of sex that emerged in 18th century Western societies.