To go along with my previous blog about power as a simulacrum, I want to delve deeper into Foucault's claim that sex is nothing more than an imagined construct. Sex is simply a term used to discuss the discourses on sexuality. Centuries ago, sexual intercourse was nothing more than an activity done in everyday life. There was nothing that needed to be assessed or fixed. Now, sex is an act that requires its own knowledge.
People who stray from the normal sexual tendencies must be studied and their risk to society must be determined. A person's sexuality is now used to define him or her as an identity. However, society has placed much more significance on the homosexual and "pervert" than the heterosexual. It is believed that one's homosexuality is what defines him not only as a sexual being, but a citizen. If a person is describing a homosexual, he is much more likely to bring up this person's sexuality than if he was referring to a straight person. If one strays from society's sexual norms, his sexual tendencies will become what defines him. I know understand why this book served as a launching point for queer theory. Foucault claims that if people truly seek liberation, they must stop allowing thier sexuality to define them. We have allowed sexuality to be a platorm for which power can be executed. As noted before, sex is nothing but a word, but we have let it become something we seek in order to free ourselves.
I do have one concern with Foucault's conclusion. Throughout the book, he continually writes that power is ubiquitious and cannot be escaped. And yet in the final chapter, Foucault seems to be urging his readers to rid themselves of their constructed concepts of sex and not allow themselves to be defined by their sexuality. He wants us to abandon our traditional concepts of sex that power has infiltrated us with and yet, he earlier said that the resistance of power is impossible. Thoughts?
Sexuality as Identity
By snaggle - Posted on 28 October 2007 - 11:46pm.
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In reponse to both this post and the previous one, I would say that Foucault, in fact, does not go far enough in his analysis of resistance being always-already reinscribed in systems of power. We'll see this explicitly in Zizek, but there is an immense, if hopelessly paradoxical, power that comes along with the realization that no extra-ideological zone of social life (or space beyond the bouds of Foucauldian disciplinary power) exists - and furthermore, that illusory narratives of escape are actually the sine qua non of ideology. Perhaps it is only by realizing the impossibility of abandoning traditional systems of sexual (and other) categorization that we can hope to develop practices for overcoming their disciplinary effects? It's like the prisoner who comprehends her material confinement and, as such, is able to stop it from encroaching on her cognitive/existential liberty (or "soul," as F might say). I think F would be comfortable applying the "prisoner" label, in some sense, to all of us in the disciplinary landscape of (post)modern capital.
I read this same sense of hope/possibility of change in Foucault. At the end of the chapter "Objective" he concludes, "We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king" (91). Although he spends the majority of the book outlining how difficult this task has become, it remains a possibility. I agree with 3NT that this freedom consists exclusively of mental recognition of the current situation. So, not taking the power struggle as meaningful frees you from its trap. Do you find this type of freedom satisfactory? Do other choices exist?