What the Foucault?

Austin Clarke

* A Barbadian novelist, essayist, and short story writer who was based in Toronto

* Major figure in Black diasporic/Canadian literary community

THREE CENTRAL POINTS

1. Foucault's critique of "THE REPRESSIVE HYPOTHESIS"

What is the nature of the relation between sex and power?

What does knowledge have to do with it?

2. The historical production or emergence of queer sexualities

How did "homosexuality" become an identity rather than a sexual act?

3. The Pleasure/Power NEXUS or relation

How are pleasure (sex) and power (discourse) then related?

Discourse: Bodies of knowledge that produce an account of truth about an object or concept.

Discourse produces truth claims surrounding the meaning of sex and its relation to power

1. The Repressive Hypothesis

What is the relation between sex and power?

How would we tell the history of sexuality?

"For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime..." (3).

History of sexuality

= the repression of sex and sexuality

This is what Foucault calls "The Repressive Hypothesis" and this is what he is critiquing in these chapters

Problem

repression

law

silence

prudishness

Solution

liberation

transgression

visibility /speech

Sex!

Free yourself!

Power says, NO!

Our response, SAY YES TO SEX!

"...when one looks back over these last three centuries ...things appear in a very different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable discursive explosion" (17).

"the nearly infinite task of telling -- telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex" (20).

"the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself"

The Confession Box

Psychiatry / Psychoanalysis

Education

The Media

2. The emergence of queer sexualities

But isn't the point of this about pathologizing non-normative sexualities to eradicate and get rid of them?

As Foucault puts it, "to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction" (36).

ECHOES OF FREUD

The goal is to reign in sexuality towards the AIM of reproduction

ECHOES OF FEDERICI

Capitalism demands that women be disciplined into normative reproductive subjects so that the labor force can be reproduced

Foucault argues, in contrast to Freud and Federici, that the "explosion of discourses" about sexuality has not resulted in reduction

INSTEAD, our age since the 19th century can be characterized as an "age of multiplication, a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms" (37)

From "acts" to "identities"

"a general unlawfulness" (38)

until the end of the 18th C -> "Breaking the rules of marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal measure of condemnation."

adultery, rape, spiritual or carnal incest, sodomy

After the discursive explosion

"... what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals, the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex" (38)

"It was time for all those figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak" (39)

Identities

the homosexual

the zoophile

the child

Acts

adultery

sodomy

bestiality

incest

"As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. 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" (43)

"the homosexual was now a species" (43)

FOUCAULT'S POLEMIC:

There were no homo- (or hetero-) sexuals before 1870

Homosexuality is produced as a psychological, psychiatric, and medical category -> he/she becomes a knowable identity

To speak and be spoken about is to be open to regulation

To become visible is to be surveilled

3. The Pleasure/Power Nexus

Power appears to say NO!

But actually, power says YES!

"MODERN SOCIETY IS PERVERSE, NOT IN SPITE OF ITS PURITANISM OR AS IF FROM A BACKLASH PROVOKED BY ITS HYPOCRISY; IT IS IN ACTUAL FACT, AND DIRECTLY, PERVERSE" (47).

"Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by... devices of excitation and incitement" (48).

What does this mean for some of the key political strategies of gay liberation?

Visibility! Coming out! speaking out! Sex in public!

John Rechy, "The Sexual Outlaw" (1977)

1. What is Rechy's aim in writing this text? What claim does it make about the power of gay sex?

2. How would you place this into conversation with Foucault's arguments?