RE: Conner and Jeff's debate (which was too long to return with this post)
In HoS, Foucault warns that "sex" as a category is a "fictitious
unity...[and] causal principle" and it is this artificial combination of
the anatomical components, biological functions, and psychic and physical
pleasures under one heading (sex) that reverses the cause/effect relationship
so that we come to understand "sex" as the cause of the meaning of desire.
Foucault regards the "body" as being sexed only in the sense that
discourse about it has invested it with this "idea" of it's essential sex-iness.
The body is both an instrument and effect of power in Foucault and has
meaning only in the context of power relations. Sexuality, itself, is
seen as a specific organization of "power, discourse, bodies and
affectivity" and an organization with a history. So only in that sensse
does sexuality serve to extend and disguise the power relations responsible
for its conceptualization.
Foucault talks about repression in HoS and how it produces the
object that it seems to deny so that the "apparent" repression of sexuality,
for example, created the idea of "sex" and made it a subject of discourse that
increased its power over the meaning of desire. Isn't his agenda to make
clear this contradictory nature of repression--prohibitive and generative
at the same time? It is that contradiction that makes "liberation" of
the female body a difficult enterprise--that contradiction AND the
conviction that "sex" is a "natural" "force" instead of a construction of
the paternal law.
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~engds/index.html
University of Missouri, Columbia (English)
*****************************************************************************
A designer knows she has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to
add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery
******************************************************************************
In HoS, Foucault warns that "sex" as a category is a "fictitious
unity...[and] causal principle" and it is this artificial combination of
the anatomical components, biological functions, and psychic and physical
pleasures under one heading (sex) that reverses the cause/effect relationship
so that we come to understand "sex" as the cause of the meaning of desire.
Foucault regards the "body" as being sexed only in the sense that
discourse about it has invested it with this "idea" of it's essential sex-iness.
The body is both an instrument and effect of power in Foucault and has
meaning only in the context of power relations. Sexuality, itself, is
seen as a specific organization of "power, discourse, bodies and
affectivity" and an organization with a history. So only in that sensse
does sexuality serve to extend and disguise the power relations responsible
for its conceptualization.
Foucault talks about repression in HoS and how it produces the
object that it seems to deny so that the "apparent" repression of sexuality,
for example, created the idea of "sex" and made it a subject of discourse that
increased its power over the meaning of desire. Isn't his agenda to make
clear this contradictory nature of repression--prohibitive and generative
at the same time? It is that contradiction that makes "liberation" of
the female body a difficult enterprise--that contradiction AND the
conviction that "sex" is a "natural" "force" instead of a construction of
the paternal law.
Darlene Sybert
http://www.missouri.edu/~engds/index.html
University of Missouri, Columbia (English)
*****************************************************************************
A designer knows she has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to
add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery
******************************************************************************