class blog posts #1

Disciplining Sex

Foucault is one of the foundationalists in discussing sex and sexuality and queer theory. His poststructuralist notions of sexuality combined with his theories of power underscore the idea that there are no essentialialisms, no fixed ideas about bodies, and in theory, no fixed identities. This is taken up often in the form of queer studies by theorists such as Judith Butler who assert that there is no congruency between sex/gender/and sexual desire. His theories have had profound impact on my own work as a feminist and queer scholar. As Foucault writes:

“We, on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex’ or rather, a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used…I am looking for the reasons for which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused”(269).

In context this quotation comes from a chapter of Foucault’s history of sexuality a provocative essay, which, asserts that, in a sense a genealogy of ideas or which have disciplined bodies into asexualized and yet overtly sexual beings. Beginning with the idea of “Biopower” Foucault theorizes about the shifts in ways to control and discipline bodies, through the “right to take life or let live” (259), continuing to ideas about sexuality and the concern with sexuality as a “micropower concerned with the body.”(267). Sexuality organizes society through disciplinary tactics, which, occur through the stigma of homosex, of reproductive rights, and eugenics. The right to sexuality is the right to take life or let live. The right to determine sexual norms are created and reinforced by those in power and the repetition of disciplinary practices instituted by such people.

Situated within Foucault’s earlier notions of power and discipline of bodies where Foucault asserts, “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in disintegration”(83). What we can begin to see as a product of Foucault’s earlier arguments integrated with his more updated ones in The History of Sexuality that bodies are constructed and organized-not based around essences but around language, experience, and modes of power, which discipline bodies into conformity. Bodies are disciplined through practices of sexuality and sexuality is a destabilized discipline and not necessarily built around biological or essentialized phenomenons. As the first quotation illustrates, sexuality is a echanism of power of control of determining what sexual practices are normalized and which ones stigmatized, or even outlawed. If sexuality is a mechanism of power, and not fixed or biological, then this power has the potential to be subverted by reinventing new notions of sex and sexuality. This has proved invaluable for work being done which, centers around bodies and sexuality—mainly through the denaturalization of sex/gender/and sexuality.

In this sense we do begin to see the roots of queer theory and with that critiques of that very theory. While queer theory allows us to see the ways that bodies are disciplined, especially in terms of heterosexual and gender normativity, it also allows for the possibility of agency for those very bodies. If we have the potential to be a culture that is built around the disintegration of the body and at the same time be most concerned with sexuality than we may be able to rewrite the body to free it from constraining notions of heteronormativity.

With this however, comes the very real and very valid critique of post-structuralist and queer theories. Scholars have posed the question that if bodies are only constituted by disciplinary practices such as language and discourse than how do we account for marginalization of those bodies based on their materiality? Bodies face real material consequences through practices of racializing, gendering, classing, and sexualization. And thus, I see the problematic issues surrounding the ideas of Foucault and other thinkers following in his same vein. Bodies may be a product of history, language, and experience, but bodies are still based on their materiality or the way that they look. Whie these judgements may be based on social/political/historical/and cultural constructs they do prove to have real consequences for bodies which, are othered and often devalued.

While I believe there is no conclusion to this conundrum, as I do believe that Foucault’s knife is actually quite blunt so as to not cut off the possibilities for multiple endings, I do think that it may suffice to say that bodies are a hybridization of materiality and disciplinary practice and that it is possible to view bodies as material without essentializing them. And I do not necessarily see Foucault as disagreeing with this, I think instead he challenges us to be open to the possibility that bodies like identities are not fixed, and are instead contingent on historical/cultural/political/and social factors. In this way they have the possibility to be rewritten into new volumes once the previous ones have disintegrated.