Spring Fever PANIC! Reading: Sexuality and Resistance as Living Literature Our philosophical and historical discussion of sexuality in American culture has been informed by renowned and canonized fiction, as well as scientific contexts and personal documents. This PANIC! reading project is a blend of theories, realities, fictions, and confessions in a theatrical, real-time, literary […]
Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction. The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in […]
The way Sula’s community reacts to both her life and death is an interesting realization of Foucault’s idea that where there is power there is resistance. Sula lives her life with a sense of power. She sleeps with whomever she wants, refuses to marry, allows her mother to be placed in a home, and lives […]
Victorian Discourse in Volumes In the Puritan world, the hand of God or the temptation of the devil were to be found anywhere and everywhere. For the Victorians, the readings for this week seem to point less to an obsession with sin than to an obsession with words and language.
Power and Resistance Part four of Foucault’s History of Sexuality begins with a discussion and definition of power. Foucault argues that through most of Western history since the medieval period, power has been equivalent to what has been codified into law. In political thought and analysis, he argues, we still have not “cut the head […]
