Post two - Foucault and discourse.

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).

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.