"Jason W. Cowling" <BreathingX@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm reading Foucault's _History of Sexuality vol.1_ He mentions a few terms
I cannot find, nor define (because of my poor language background).
mixoscopophiles
presbyophiles
zooerasts
I'm reading Robert Hurley's translation, if any help (p 43).
Jason.
I wrote:
if i remember the passage your talking about, he's just demonstrating the
obscurity of some of the terms that began to be used to describe various kinds
of sexual perversion with the inauguration of sexological and psychoanalytic
discourses on sexuality. You're not supposed to know what those terms mean,
although im sure we could have some fun by guessing what the terms mean.
(mixoscopophiles has something to do with liking to look at something
("phile"=love, "scopos"=look at); presbyophiles are probably sexually
attracted to presbyterians (ha ha); zooerasts are probably people who perform
what we would now call bestiality.) At any rate, he's just demonstrating how
these new discourses cooked up all kinds of new terms to describe sexual
conditions that hadnt had much attention paid to them before. Not only were
these new discourses inventing new names for things which "entomologized" the
pervert (Foucault's wonderful analogy), but they were busy reconceiving these
conditions as results of psychic disturbances, bad childhoods, case histories,
etc. It's kind of like when Foucault remarks famously, "the sodomite had been
a temporary abberration, the homosexual was now a species"; the same kinds of
sexual behaviours had always been around and had always being known about, but
there was a paradigm shift in the way they were described and conceived.
am i making sense?
phil
____________________________________________________________________
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I'm reading Foucault's _History of Sexuality vol.1_ He mentions a few terms
I cannot find, nor define (because of my poor language background).
mixoscopophiles
presbyophiles
zooerasts
I'm reading Robert Hurley's translation, if any help (p 43).
Jason.
I wrote:
if i remember the passage your talking about, he's just demonstrating the
obscurity of some of the terms that began to be used to describe various kinds
of sexual perversion with the inauguration of sexological and psychoanalytic
discourses on sexuality. You're not supposed to know what those terms mean,
although im sure we could have some fun by guessing what the terms mean.
(mixoscopophiles has something to do with liking to look at something
("phile"=love, "scopos"=look at); presbyophiles are probably sexually
attracted to presbyterians (ha ha); zooerasts are probably people who perform
what we would now call bestiality.) At any rate, he's just demonstrating how
these new discourses cooked up all kinds of new terms to describe sexual
conditions that hadnt had much attention paid to them before. Not only were
these new discourses inventing new names for things which "entomologized" the
pervert (Foucault's wonderful analogy), but they were busy reconceiving these
conditions as results of psychic disturbances, bad childhoods, case histories,
etc. It's kind of like when Foucault remarks famously, "the sodomite had been
a temporary abberration, the homosexual was now a species"; the same kinds of
sexual behaviours had always been around and had always being known about, but
there was a paradigm shift in the way they were described and conceived.
am i making sense?
phil
____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1