Presentation Notes: The History of Sexuality, Part IV

Steenalisa Tilcock
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
28 January 2016

Brief intro and review of some past stuff

We seek the truth about sex and look at sex to tell us the truth about ourselves. 77
Sex is seen an essential component of life. 78

Establishing an analytics of power

Power is usually analyzed through the "Juridico-discursive" model, which involves several elements:
- Power and sex have a negative relationship with each other, so power can only restrict and limit sex. 83
- Insistence of the Rule: There are clear rules about what is licit and illicit, and these are established by being articulated. 83
- Cycle of Prohibition: Sex must either renounce itself or be suppressed (do not exist or you will cease to exist). 84
- Logic of Censorship: The jurdico-discursive model of power defines what's not allowed and then doesn't talk about it until it ceases to exist. 84
- Uniformity of the Apparatus: Power operates the same way at all levels-a legislative power opposite an obedient subject. 85
Boiling power down to simple prohibition is important for acceptability-people will be more willing to cooperate with a power that disguises itself as a pure limit set on freedom and keeps its true nature secret. 86
The conflation of power and law dates back to the Middle Ages-in a time of many entangled and conflicting powers, new institutions of power formulated themselves in terms of regulation, demarcation, order, hierarchy, interdiction, and sanction. 87
- The political has thus been inter-tied with the juridical. 88
The 18^th century saw the decline of law-power, as men began to be seen as living bodies. 89
- The new form of power that emerged was based in technique, normalization, and control instead of law.
Power must be analyzed in a way that doesn't rely on the law model. 90

An alternative analytics of power

At its core, power is not an institution, a mode of subjugation in the form of a rule, or the sovereignty of the state, but a chain of force relations (which crystalize into state apparatus). 92
These relations are unequal, thus constantly engender states of power. 93
Power is omnipresent, as it is produced from one moment to the next, and it is everywhere because it comes from everywhere. 93
It is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing. 93
These force relations are often coded as either war or politics. 93
Power is not acquired, seized, or lost, since it's just the interplay of mobile relations. 94
It is the internal condition and effect of the inequalities in other relationships. 94
The force relations in small groups (families, etc.) then form the line of force across social body, which causes rearrangements and convergences in the original force relations. 94
Power is intentional, with aims and objectives, but there is no inventor of those aims. 95
Resistance to power also exists as a shifting, regrouping plurality, with multiple points and no great locus or "soul of revolt." 96

Power relations and sex

In a specific, historical discourse on sex, what were the power relations? How did the discourse and relations support each other? 97
Rules about the discourse of power and sex:
- Immanence: Sexuality can be discussed because power establishes it as an object, and conversely, power can do so because knowledge and discourse are capable of investigating it. 98
- Continual Variations: In examining power and sex, one should seek patterns of modifications in power instead of simply looking at who has power and who doesn't. 99
- Double Conditioning: Local centers and over-all strategies support each other. They are neither discontinuous nor homogenous. 99
- Tactical Polyvalence of Discourses: There isn't one continuous discourse about power and sex, but a multiplicity of discourses. Sometimes they serve power and sometimes they oppose it, and they often do both at the same time. 100
  - For example, discourses on homosexuality both advance social control over it as a sexuality and give it legitimacy. 102

Sexuality

Sexuality is not a "stubborn drive" disobedient to the power trying to control it, but a transfer point or tool for strategies and force relations, including these 4 from the 18^th and 19^th centuries:
- Hysterization of women's bodies: The female body was clinically analyzed, pathologized, and tied to family sphere. 104
- Pedagogization of children's sex: Children were seen as "preliminary sexual beings." Their sexuality was both natural and contrary to nature and was continually monitored. 104
- Socialization of procreative behavior: The sexuality of couples became a matter of social responsibility, and society took interest in their fertility and birth control. 105
- Psychiatrization of perverse pleasure: Anomalies in instinct were clinically analyzed and attempts were made to correct them. 105
- Thus, the four main figures of sexuality: Hysterical Woman, Masturbating Child, Malthusian Couple (couple obligated not to reproduce too much because it would put strain on the economy), and Perverse Adult. 105
These strategies represent the production of sexuality. 105
Deployment of alliance: This is a system of marriage, kinship ties, and exchange of possessions. It is closely tied to the law and statutes, reproduction, and the homeostasis of the social body. 106
Deployment of sexuality: This is concerned with sensations of the body, mobile and polymorphous techniques of power, extension of areas and forms of control, proliferating, innovating, and penetrating bodies in increased detail and comprehensively controlling populations. It is not focused on reproduction. 106
- The deployment of sexuality stems from deployment of alliance, as the practice of confession lead to the detailed examination of pleasure. 107
Sexuality found its home in the family cell, which supported and developed it, through husband/wife and parent/child dimensions. 108
- Due to sexuality's grounding in the family, it was incestuous by nature, and the incest element became central. 109
  - Incest was forbidden to maintain law and functions of alliance and limit the sexualities which functions outside law (it was seen as universally taboo), yet it remained as a "hotbed of constant sexual incitement." 109
Beginning in the 17^th century and moving onward, sexuality was rooted in the realm of conscience and pedagogy with a Christian practice of confession. It then became focused on the family, and the functions of family alliance were intensified. The family drew support from doctors and psychiatrists, and new figures (for example, the frigid wife or the sadistic husband) appeared and were "psychologized." Family cried out for help in reconciling conflicts between sexuality and alliance and was found to be the "germ of all the misfortunes of sex." Constant discussion of every detail of sexuality to "experts" ensued. 110
Medicine assumed responsibility for these sexual ills and removed people from the family sphere in order to diagnose them, which families were reluctant to allow. 112
Psychoanalysis rediscovered the law of alliance and yet reinforced sexuality's connection with it by finding sexuality's root in parent/child relations. 113

A summary of the chronology of sexuality:

There have been two ruptures in the history of sexuality (in terms of repression):
In the 17^th century, sexuality was deployed in the form of adult marital sex, decency, body concealment, and language control. 115
The 20^th saw relative tolerance-taboos were lifted especially, in regard to extramarital sex. 115
Brief chronology: the practice of confession the secularization and involvement of medicine the control of sexuality for purity and morality and to avoid genetic degeneracy; bourgeois repression for healthy, controlled sexuality the extension of these controls to the working classes as means of control the intensifications of repression in the bourgeois classes to set them apart the arrival of psychoanalysis, which aimed to alleviate problems of repression by allowing people to express incestuous nature of sexuality in discourse and challenge taboos.