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Originally Posted by well named
However, I've been informed by a Superior Justice Warrior that before I read Materialist Feminism that I should read Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1978), the cover of which seems to include a review that begins by calling the text "disconcerting," so that sounds fun. I don't know anything else about it. Details to follow.
So, to be perfectly honest, I skimmed parts of it. This review might be flawed because of that. :P
This book has that useful philosophical quality where the author has clearly developed a fairly nuanced conceptual framework that makes sense to them, but you're never quite sure if you're reproducing it properly in your own mind when you read their somewhat idiosyncratic jargon. There's always a delightful residue of ambiguity. I think this is useful to philosophers in that it allows their work to evoke all sorts of ideas in readers that may go quite far afield from the original material, and yet if those ideas prove fruitful the reader will give some credit to the original author. I'm imagining this sort of thing explains some of why it was suggested to me that I read Foucault before Hennesy's
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse.
Anyway, through the first half of the book I wasn't really sure why Foucault was interested in the "history of sexuality", and he kept mentioning the sexuality of children and it was making me uncomfortable. But, I think I can divine three major goals for this book:
1. To argue against the commonly held idea that the primary goal in the development of Victorian norms about sexuality was the repression of sexuality.
2. To investigate why 19th century westerners thought sex was so fundamentally important to the social order.
3. To use the "history of sexuality" and the development of sexual discourses in western culture to introduce a set of ideas about how processes of "power" work in society, or how "power" as processes of social control expanded away from both political institutions and legal institutions and towards the development and maintenance of normalized discourse.
(3) is of the most general interest and I assume the point most relevant to authors inspired by the book.
A large part of the argument developed in support of all three points hinges on the role of confession as a Christian ritual, and especially a form of confession that originates in early Christian monasticism but which was adopted especially for the confession of sexual sins in the 16th century, as Foucault has it. To boil it down considerably, in the ritual of confession there is the idea that truth is arrived at through speaking, by putting into words the entirety of one's experience and sparing nothing. The revelation of truth requires both the use of language as well as the hearing and interpretation of those same words in a socially sanctioned way. This section beginning on page 68 sums up a large part of the argument:
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Paradoxically, the scientia sexualis that emerged in the nineteenth century kept as its nucleus the singular ritual of obligatory and exhaustive confession, which in the Christian West was the first technique for producing the truth of sex. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this rite gradually detatched itself from the sacrament of penance… and emigrated toward pedagogy, relationships between adults and children, family relations, medicine, and psychiatry…. It is this deployment that enables something called "sexuality" to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures….
The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth. Situated at the point of intersection of a technique of confession and a scientific discursivity, where certain major mechanisms had to be found for adapting them to one another….
The "economy" of discourses — their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit — this, and not a system of representations, is what determines the essential features of what they have to say….
Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The society that emerged in the nineteenth century — bourgeois, capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will — did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.
This sort-of functionalism of discourse (the "economy" of discourses) is I think the most interesting idea, viewed as a means of social control over and against law and political institutions, developed in part as the complexity of social life increases during industrialization.
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...power's hold on sex is managed through language, or rather through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law. It speaks, and that is the rule. (p. 83)
… new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right [as in legal right] but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus. (p. 89)
The salience of this kind of theoretical take on the importance of discourse in politics is obvious in light of the entire debate about "political correctness" and "SJWs" and the like.
So that sets the stage for Rosemary Hennessy's
Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse.
Last edited by well named; 01-10-2017 at 02:46 PM.