Download Making of the Modern World

Making of the Modern World
Sexuality
Sexual historians look at:
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Sexual identities and non-identities
Fertility, reproduction, birth control, abortion
Celibacy, masturbation, fantasy, pornography and purity
Transactional sex work
Marriage, singleness, partnerships etc
Organization and cultures of families
Boundaries of private and public life
Sexual health and sexual ill-health Relationship between
sexuality and gender, race, class, age, religion, and with
geographies
• Histories of sexual cultures, movements and campaigns
• History of ‘sexuality’ itself
• … and more…
Weeks, What is Sexual History? (2016), pp.3-4.
• The linking of ‘sexuality’ with sexual identity is a
modern phenomenon, which has emerged only
in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries in
Europe.
• That is not to say that people did not engage in
sexual activities before modernity. Rather, the
way in which people made sense of their erotic
experiences was radically different from
contemporary understandings of sexuality.
• It was only in the 1890s, when sexual and
psychological science were emerging, that the
word ‘sexuality’ took on its key modern meaning.
• In 18th century, the term sexuality was used in a
scientific sense to refer to the reproductive
capacity of an organism, especially of plants.
Essentialist vs Constructionist
• Modern essentialism consists of a belief that certain phenomena are
natural, inevitable, and biologically determined. Argues there is a core
of natural sexuality (varying in incidence and power as a result of
historical factors) that is basically unchanging in biological and
psychological essence.
• Social constructionism rests on the belief that reality is socially
constructed and emphasizes language as an important means by
which we interpret experience. Assumes that the body and its desires
do alter in profound ways according to the social and moral rules
which seek to govern them.
Queer Theory:
Queer theory is a set of ideas based around the idea that identities are not
fixed and do not determine who we are.
It suggests two things:
• That we reject the apparent self-evidence of modern sexual categories and
identities, and that we pay attention to the specific ways in which each
society creates rules about sex and the body.
• It says that these moral rules should not be assumed to correspond in any
way with modern categories or identities. Many past experiences and
attitudes lie far outside such familiar categories and are therefore strange
to us, or ‘queer’ in a real sense.
Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, The Routledge History
of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present (2011):
• Historians’ reactions to Foucault’s various writings
relevant to the history of sexuality have been
ambivalent.
• His lack of attention to historical specifics has irked
empirically focused historians.
• His suggestions that the history of sexuality is only a
story of power have also been difficult to accept.
• Nonetheless it is almost impossible to exaggerate
the influence of Foucault in establishing the
framework for debate in almost all areas of the
historical investigation of sex and sexuality.
• His work remains an important and challenging
point of engagement with sex in the past.
• Michel Foucault was a French
philosopher, historian of ideas,
social theorist, philologist and
literary critic.
• Born: October 15, 1926, Poitiers,
France
• Died: June 25, 1984, Paris, France
Selected Works of Foucault
Foucault’s Ideas: 1
• He rejected the positivist tenet that the methods of the pure or natural sciences
provided an exclusive standard for arriving at genuine or legitimate knowledge.
• His critique concentrated instead upon the fundamental point of reference that
had grounded and guided inquiry in the human sciences: the concept of “man.”
• On one hand, man was an object, like any other object in the natural world,
obedient to the indiscriminate dictates of physical laws. On the other hand, man
was a subject, an agent uniquely capable of comprehending and altering his
worldly condition in order to become more fully, more essentially, himself.
• Foucault reviewed the historical record for evidence that such a creature actually
had ever existed, but found only a plurality of subjects whose features varied
dramatically with shifts of place and time.
• Foucault suggested that a creature somehow fully determined and fully free was
little short of a paradox, a contradiction in terms. Not only had it never existed in
fact, it could not exist, even in principle.
Foucault’s Ideas: 2
• Foucault emphasized that in the emerging nation-states of 17th- and 18thcentury Europe, “man” was a conceptual prerequisite for the creation of social
institutions and practices that were then necessary to maintain an optimally
productive citizenry.
• With the advent of “man,” the notion that human character and experience were
immutable gradually gave way to the notion that both body and soul could be
manipulated and reformed. The latter notion lent the technologies of modern
policing their enduring rationale.
• The epitome of the institutions of “discipline”—a mode of domination that
sought to render each instance of “deviance” utterly visible, whether in the name
of prevention or rehabilitation—was the Panopticon, a circular prison designed in
1787 by the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, which laid each
inmate open to the scrutiny of the dark eye of a central watchtower. Among
contemporary instruments of discipline, the surveillance camera must be counted
one of the most representative.
Foucault’s Ideas: 3
• The prevailing sensibility of the champions of discipline was medical: they
scrutinized everything from sexual behaviour to social organization for relative
pathology or health.
• This ‘biopolitics’ of the reformers, according to Foucault, contained the basic
principles of the modern welfare state. He called for an appreciation of the ways
in which knowledge and power are always entangled with each other in
historically specific circumstances, forming complex dynamics of what he termed
pouvoir-savoir, or ‘power-knowledge.’
• Domination was not the only outcome of these dynamics. Another was
‘subjectivation,’ the historically specific classification and shaping of individual
human beings into ‘subjects’ of various kinds—including heroic and ordinary,
‘normal’ and ‘deviant.’
James Faubion, ‘Foucault, (Paul) Michel’, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2002 S.Ed. (2001)
Influence of Foucault:
Citations of Foucault’s
works on google scholar
(five most commonly
cited since 2016).
The History of Sexuality
History of Sexuality Volume 1:
• Foucault challenges the accepted idea that sex – and, through sex,
society more generally – has been repressed and must be ‘liberated’.
This is the ‘repressive hypothesis’.
• He argues the last two centuries have seen an explosion of discourses
about sex, discourses that have increasingly been brought under
techniques of control and discipline, specifying individuals and
regulating their conduct.
• He directly challenges psychoanalysis and other contemporary
political theories.
Foucault’s Definition of Sexuality: 1
‘It is this deployment that enables something called “sexuality”
to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures. “Sexuality”: the
correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which
constitutes the scientia sexualis, or regime of sexuality. The essential
features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that
is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused
by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirements of a
discourse that must produce its truth.’
(Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1, p.68)
Foucault’s Definition of Sexuality: 2
‘Sexuality must not be defined as a stubborn drive, by nature alien
and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to
subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an
especially dense transfer point for relations of power ... Sexuality is not the
most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those
endowed with the greatest instrumentality.’
‘Sexuality ... is the name that can be given to a historical construct ... a
great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formulation of special
knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.’
(Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1, p.103 and pp.105-6)
Power Relations
‘… sexuality is the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and
social relations by a certain deployment deriving from a complex political
technology’.
(Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1, p.127)
For Foucault sexuality is a function of the complex interplay of truth and
power, or what he calls ‘power/knowledge’.
Richard Lynch, ‘Reading The History of Sexuality, Volume 1’, in C. Falzon, T.
O'Leary and J. Sawicki (eds), A Companion to Foucault (2013).
Positive Responses to Foucault
• Nancy Fraser: ‘Foucault’s most valuable accomplishment consists of a rich
empirical account of the early stages in the emergence of some distinctively
modern modalities of power. This account yields important insights into the
nature of modern power, and these insights, in turn, bear political significance.’
Fraser, Unruly Practices (1989), pp.17-18.
• Leo Bersani: ‘It is the original thesis of his History [History of Sexuality Volume 1]
that power in our societies functions primarily not by repressing spontaneous
sexual drives but by producing multiple sexualities, and that through the
classification, distribution, and moral rating of those sexualities the individuals
practicing them can be approved, treated, marginalized, sequestered, disciplined,
or normalized.’ Bersani, Homos (1995), p. 81.
• Harry Cocks: ‘Foucault was pioneering in attempting to provide an explanation
for our modern idea of what ‘sexuality’ is. He also attempted to show how it
developed not simply by vague reference to the rise of individualism, but as a
consequence of specific developments like biopower and sexual science. Finally,
he tried to show that this regime of knowledge has had specific effects on
personal identity.’ Cocks in Toulalan and Fisher, Routledge History of Sex and the
Body (2011), p. 45.
Criticisms of Foucault
• Critics have challenged Foucault’s assumption that the writings of elite
theorists influenced the way ordinary people lived their lives.
• They have challenged his assumption that the ‘regime of sexuality’ or
‘scientia sexualis’ is defined by the delineation of types, arguing that some
people thought of sexuality and sexual orientation as a sort of primary
identity long before the nineteenth century.
• They have also challenged the idea that ancient or medieval societies
mainly organized sexuality around good and bad acts while modern ones
do so on the basis of identities.
• Research has undermined the idea that coherent systems or models of
sexual behaviour and identity succeed each other chronological sequence.
Conclusions:
• The belief that sexuality is a fundamentally social, and therefore historical
structure lies at the heart of sexual history.
• It challenges the traditional view that the erotic is a natural phenomenon to
which society has to react.
• Historians have increasingly come to emphasize the ways in which what has been
seen as a biological truth is shaped by culture into a complex unity of plural and
diverse identities, subjectivities, beliefs, behaviour, ideologies and erotic
practices. It is a historical not a natural unity.
• While debates remain between the essentialist and the constructionist views of
sexuality, and new challenges from queer theory, social constructionist
scholarship on human sexuality has provided the intellectual foundation for the
history of sexuality
• The work of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality Volume 1 was
key in developing this new approach.