I apologize for the cheesy title. But you knew it was coming.
Maybe it’s because for the past week, I’ve been working on our Theory Carnival that I’ve got Rubin and Althusser on the brain. But while perusing Foucault, I couldn’t help but draw connections to these two. Dragging Rubin into it, I noticed that Foucault wrote this piece in 1976. Why, then, didn’t he so much as mention the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Sexual Revolution? Even then, women’s sexuality has been discussed as a socially misunderstood topic well before these movements. The movement for women’s suffrage, for instance, even though it didn’t overtly deal with women’s sexual choices, revolved around the fact that women, having different sex organs than men, were thus resigned to a world with much fewer choices. If Foucault is so sure that the discourse of sex is a tool for manifesting power, then the Liberation Movement is the perfect example with which to support this. Women were protesting the power a male-dominated society had over their bodies, and over personal decisions like abortion, birth control, and choice of partners.
Foucault mentions the Church’s role in the discourse on sex, and it matches up to Althusser’s observation that for a while, the Church was the dominant Ideological State Apparatus. It used its ideologies, its moral upstanding, to gain for itself the “power on bodies and their pleasure” (1666). “The important point no doubt,” says Foucault on the Church’s requirement that its members confess their sexual sins, “is that this obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good Christian” (1650). The Church wanted sexual acts and yearnings to be transformed into words–this, it claimed, was the only way someone could be absolved. It didn’t make sex right, but at least talking about it would make you a penitent, and morally good, person. Please. Foucault says that the Church’s “carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself” (1651). But I don’t think it’s necessarily the discourse, the conversation, that makes someone “repent.” It’s the shame of being an outsider, a deviant, to an institution that is so widely perceived as an ethical guidepost in society.
April 6, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Hi Kel,
You wrote:
I too find myself frustrated with Foucault’s lack of recognition of the feminine “condition.” His analysis is so in depth and fascinating, in my opinion, so how can he have been so obtuse? For me, the beef lies with his interpretation of the young girl who got mixed up with Jouy. He has little compassion for her when is coerced into playing a game of “curdled milk.” To call it petty is an injustice.
As for your comment on repentance, I don’t think Foucault was making a case for that. His focus centered on the fact that the church was categorizing what was virtuous vs. not virtuous, thus creating a discourse that brought deviancy into the forefront of people’s minds. I find it amusing that the very sex the church attempted to stifle is the same sex it ultimately promoted through discourse.
Foucault goes one step further saying that, to his displeasure, this system of categorization identifies people by a simple act of desire. They are no longer an individual acting on a curiosity, they are unjustly labeled gay or a fetishist, imprisoned by that label, and punished for the social infraction. In this way, desire is driven from the pleasure of the act itself and transferred to the discourse about the act. Foucault’s position against this label system? Now this is something I can support.