For this week’s blog I
have been wading through Foucault’s ‘The Deployment of Sexuality: Domain’, from
his ‘History of Sexuality’, and Riki Wilchins’ exegesis of Foucault’s chapter.
Both these readings
relate to our lecture on how sex and gender operate in discourse.
Foucault writes in the
introduction to his book that the central issue of his thesis is to discover
the “way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’ ”; how it is spoken about and by
whom, the position they inhabit and the institution they are prompted by.
(Wilchins, p. 59)
Wilchins describes
this kind of discourse as a “social dialogue” (Wilchins, p.59), in which
society engages in a set of practices that make meaning and ‘rules’ by which
its citizens live by. Sexual discourse in this context is not the physicality
of sex, but the way in which the physicality is understood.
Foucault determines
sexuality to be a “dense transfer point for relations of power” (Foucault, p.
103). He believes there to be four central points or ‘strategies’ in the structure
of knowledge and power relating to sex.
1-
“a hysterization
of women’s bodies” (p. 104)
relating to the
analysis of the feminine body and concluding that it is ‘saturated’ with
sexuality, thus “integrating it into the sphere of medical practice” by virtue
of a specific pathologizing of women’s (only) role in society as Mother, never as
sexual being
2-
“a
pedagogization of children’s sex” (p. 104)
that children are
‘preliminary sexual beings’, which is both ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, thus
requiring strict direction and control by a series of authoritative
facilitators, such as parents, teachers, doctors etc
3-
“a
socialization of procreative behaviour” (p. 104-5)
economic ‘incitements
and restrictions’, political ‘responsibilitization’ and fiscal fertility as social arbiters of (married) couples
birth-control practices
4-
“a
psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” (p. 105)
sexual instinct
isolated as separate from biological instinct, and assigned ‘normal’ and
‘anomalous’ traits
Foucault states these
four sites of knowledge emerged in the nineteenth century as both ‘targets and
anchorage points’ for privileged sexual knowledge. Wilchins states these points
maintained credence as they were articulated in social spheres with the
authorative voice of Truth, as evinced by Science and Logic (Wilchins, p. 61).
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Within the
‘socialization of procreative behaviour’ structure, we can see an example of established
‘norms’ being challenged with the rise in support of same sex couple access to
IVF technologies. The IVF Australia website gives a commonplace illustration of
how a lesbian couple could physically utilise the IVF program. The language
used is not hysterical, or in any way leads the reader to believe this example
is unusual. Here, not only are same sex couples viewed as legally legitimate
potential parents, but socially they are viewed as having the same right as
normative binary gendered couples seeking reproductive assistance in order to
start a family.
Conversely, only
Western Australia, New South Wales and the ACT allow same sex couples to adopt
a child in Australia. As of 2010 NSW is the only state that explicitly states
this in a parliamentary Act.
References
Foucault, M c1976,
‘The Deployment of Sexuality: Domain’, in The
History of Sexuality, R. Hurley trans., Penguin 1998 edn London, pp.
103-114.
Wilchins, R 2004,
“Foucault and the Disciplinary Society’, in Queer
Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, Alyson Books, Los Angeles, pp.
59-82.
