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Making of the Modern World Sexuality Sexual historians look at: • • • • • • • • 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.