Magazine: History & Theory
THE PRODUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS: FOUCAULT, GENDER,
AND THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY
-----------------------------
In Sade there are no shadows.
--Michel Foucault
The sexuality [Foucault] serves us is the rise and deployment of the
desiring subject, sexuality as the life and times of desiring man in
bondage and being disciplined and loving every minute of it, and loving
his struggle to get out of it even more.
--Catharine A. MacKinnon
ABSTRACT
This article addresses Michel Foucault's challenge to historians
by historicizing his work on the history of sexuality. First, it
summarizes recent scholarly literature about sexuality by
historians and literary critics in order to clarify the
theoretical and historical groundwork that has thus far been laid.
It also places interdisciplinary scholarship in a framework
historians will find meaningful. Second, the author argues that
Foucault's work is the product of crises in male subjectivity
originating after the Great War. In so doing, she seeks to
explain the absence of gender as a category of analysis in his own
work, as well as his inability to account for the historical
processes through which sexuality is produced.
What kind of historical experience does the concept of sexuality make
meaningful? This, of course, is precisely the question historians of
modern sexuality are wont to ask of their object of inquiry.[1] Yet
Michel Foucault's powerful role in shaping the field has forced
historians of sexuality perhaps more than other historians to question
their methodological premises in ways that strain the bounds of
historical investigation. In this essay, I want to bypass debates about
whether Foucault is "really" a historian to address precisely what is at
stake for historians of sexuality in the tension Foucault's work
produces between two ways of doing history.[2]
The more conventional historicist model in its various liberal and
Marxist guises explains and accounts for how the modern sexual self is
produced: it interrogates how sexuality (for example, the organization
of heterosexual reproduction, the development ofsexual identities and
desires, and so forth) makes meaning out of specific sociocultural
experiences and changes over time. The other, following Foucault's lead,
insists that the sexual subject has no intrinsic meaning or agency that
might be identified, accounted for, or repressed. The self is no longer
the prediscursive Cartesian cogito but is a fiction constructed in the
interests of what Foucault termed paradoxically the "intentional" and
yet "nonsubjective" power of primarily white upper-class men. However,
Foucault and his followers offer no causal account of how the self is
constructed.[3] More specifically, they historicize sexuality by
describing how sexual subjectivity is created through upper-class men's
efforts to stabilize a putatively unstable self. As Domna Stanton has
suggested in her recent essay on "discourses of sexuality," "the
historicization (and the denaturalization) of sexuality can be viewed as
part and parcel of the deconstruction of an essential subjectivity that
has marked modernity, and more specifically, post-modernity."[4]
As Stanton's essay makes clear in myriad ways, most of the recent
literature on sexuality is indeed characterized by tension between
scholars (mostly historians) who ask properly historical questions about
why and how the modern sexual self was first produced in the eighteenth
century in medical, legal, and popular texts, and scholars (mostly not
historians) who seek to reformulate such questions in new terms. That
is, historians, even those most drawn to interdisciplinary methods,
still ask how, why, and when sexual selves are produced. The vast
interdisciplinary literature now being produced by nonhistorians instead
adopts Foucault's critique of functionalist and structuralist models of
power and causality. Most of the diverse scholars who adhere to this
critique thus reject a theory of history based on the premise that
individuals possess presocial inalienable rights or an authentic essence
(Marx's "species being," for example) and describe instead how
"disciplinary power" constitutes individual subjects. They criticize
the humanistic understanding of "man," and claim that the quest for why
men did what they did (for causality) begs the question of how "man"
(and woman) as a concept was produced in the first place.
Thus many post-Foucauldians (I will refer to them this way for the sake
of simplicity, though they differ greatly among themselves) have taken
up his antihistoricist, antihumanist bent, paradoxically, in the
interests of more rigorously historicizing sexuality.[5] Literary
critics and philosophers such as Jonathan Dollimore, David Halperin, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others have demonstrated, for
example, how historians' reliance on a pre-discursive, rational (usually
male and heterosexual) subject of history often implicitly excludes or
marginalizes women and racial and sexual minorities.[6] Or to put it
more simply, historians use normative frameworks that make their role in
producing the historical subjects whose actions they describe and
interpret invisible. Sedgwick has argued that the assumption of
normative heterosexuality as normative subjectivity has obscured how the
homosexual-heterosexual divide was itself historically constructed.
Judith Butler argues along similar lines that heterosexuality depends
upon (an excluded, unspoken, invisible) homosexuality for its very
meaning. As Sedgwick writes in reference to the presumed universality
of the Western literary canon: "If it is still in important respects the
master-canon it nevertheless cannot now escape naming itself with every
syllable also a particular canon, a canon of mastery, in the case of
men's mastery over, and over against, women. Perhaps never again need
women -- need one hopes, anybody, -- feel greeted by the Norton
Anthology of mostly white men's Literature with the implied insolent
salutation, `I'm nobody. Who are you?'"[7] The point is that the
historical "canon" -- what events, subjects, and people are important --
is particular in spite of its claims to represent universal "man" and
his experiences.[8]
Unlike many historians of women and racial and sexual minorities who
also question such claims to universality within their various
specialties, these scholars are not really interested in why sex has
been particularly subject to normative regulation and its repressive
consequences. Instead, following Foucault's lead, they describe how
sexuality is produced by the practices and exclusions effected by
disciplinary power. They describe the ways in which specific social
practices exclude, marginalize, and even render unthinkable alternative
forms of subjectivity and sexuality with the force and conviction equal
to those historians who denounce them for insufficient attention to
"real" political struggles. Nevertheless, in the process of recovering
and exposing exclusions, many theorists often sacrifice meaning and
agency in favor of sweeping references to "discourse," "culture," "power,
" "disciplinary formations," and "undecidability."
Both humanist and Foucauldian modes of investigating and understanding
the history of sexuality and sexual cultures more generally are equally
important in all recent scholarship on sexuality. There is really not a
field called the "history of sexuality," but only a vast array of
historical interrogations and theoretical questions and critiques
bearing on this tension between older humanist models and newer
paradigms whose intersections have not been fully theorized. That is,
is sexuality a discourse that constitutes experience? Or does it
reflect a dominant ideology which represses sexuality's non-normative
manifestations? Or finally, does sexuality express the experiences of
diverse individuals and social groups?
Of course, most historians and post-Foucauldian theorists recognize that
to reconstruct sexual narratives and to investigate diverse sexual
experiences are inextricable levels of analysis, but that recognition by
no means solves the essentially methodological problem of how to think
these two levels together: of how meaning is always socially
constructed, always contingent and yet never arbitrary, how individuals
are constituted within discursive systems and yet construct meaning
capable of transforming those systems.[9]
The Foucauldian repudiation of conventional historical method helps to
explain why many historians, with some exceptions (for example, Judith
Walkowitz, Thomas Laqueur, Jeffrey Weeks) invoke him without really
grappling with his method.[10] They praise some of his theoretical
contributions and empirical insights, his subtle critique of the Marxist
paradigm, his attention to everyday social practices neglected by
structuralists, while (rightly) scolding him for neglecting agency.
Sometimes (in Estelle Freedman's and John D'Emilio's important synthetic
work on the history of sexuality in America for example) Foucault
warrants an obligatory mention, but has virtually no influence on the
structure or argument of the book.[11] For what is to be done with a
historian who dispenses with the most fundamental of historical
questions, and who is content simply to describe the practices and
procedures of institutions that regulate and produce sexuality without
explaining why they produce sexuality the way they do? How can
historians comprehend a self-professed historian who does not even
bother to use representative, empirically sound data?
Foucault purports to be engaged in extending social justice through
sociohistorical critique. Yet, as Nancy Fraser argues, in spite of all
his "empirical insights" into the everyday workings of sexual oppression,
he provides absolutely no grounds on which we might distinguish the
powerful from the powerless, and he robs individual actors of agency and
hence the power to create meaning.[12] To put it more pointedly, how do
we discard epistemic justifications or normative frameworks without also
discarding an analysis of power, meaning, and agency? Many historians
have already made the argument that if we followed Foucault, we would
describe how a social order produces normative categories of sexual
subjects without being able to say much about these subjects themselves,
without being able, really, to explain why certain social groups and not
others profit from the production of sexuality and its meanings.
Most theorists are currently struggling with this question about how
Foucault's work effaces experience in one way or another. It is an issue
that has been forced on historians by Foucault for quite some time, both
because of the demise of certain Marxist and anthropological paradigms
and mostly, at least with respect to historians of sexuality, because of
Foucault's seminal role in conceptualizing our field of inquiry.
Because I think theorists have amply used Foucault to attack the grounds
or even the epistemological validity of investigating meaning production,
I want to address, from the point of view of the feminist historian of
sexuality still wedded to questions of meaning, this tension between the
necessity of calling into question normative frames and the need to keep
them.
In this essay I want to begin to historicize Foucault's work in order to
help us move beyond Foucault to other epistemological and historical
questions about the link between sexuality and subjectivity. I cannot
do justice to the vast literature on sexuality. And obviously I cannot
reconcile all the tensions that currently exist between those who
criticize a focus on meaning production and those who insist on its
centrality, but I can try to address them in ways I hope will prove
productive for historians of sexuality.
In order to historicize Foucault's work, I make two points: First, there
is a sadomasochistic logic of desire in Foucault's work (interpreted far
too literally by Catharine MacKinnon in my epigraph) that is not
peculiar to Foucault, sadomasochists, or gay men (as one recent
biography would have it).[13] Instead, it might be conceived as an
allegory of a historically and culturally specific form of sexual
subjectivity that shapes the conceptual and cultural context of
Foucault's work. More specifically, it is this logic of desire that
marks Foucault's difference from more recognizably historical efforts to
account for how sexual subjects are founded on a binary gender division
(what Thomas Laqueur calls the "two-sex model").
Second, Foucault's work presumes a construction of men's, but not
women's, subjectivity. This presumption represents not just an
empirical oversight but grounds his entire antihistoricist method. I
will argue that Foucault's own critique of historicism and its
"nobodies" -- its invisible normative frameworks -- his own insistence
that the sexual subject is a fiction with no essential meaning, in fact
replicates the historicist repression or neutralization of gender as a
point of view. Thus, while feminist critics have long made claims about
Foucault's neglect of the gendering of sexual subjectivity, I want to
move beyond a critique of Foucault on these grounds to demonstrate how
that neglect is central to his ability or inability (and now, our own)
to theorize resistance to dominant cultural forms (and hence his
inability to theorize experience and agency): how the neglect of gender
is as important as his other philosophical allegiances in explaining
certain of his theoretical contributions and, in my view, his most
spectacular failure.[14]
Foucault now stands accused both by his detractors and followers (hence
the term "post-Foucauldian") of providing no real formulation of how
individuals question (or do not question) the socioeconomic, political,
and cultural hegemony he describes so well, mostly because he de-
emphasizes the power of individual agency and of contested meaning; he
does so in favor of monolithic discursive systems that constitute rather
than reflect individuals' desires and intentions. The tension between
the two ways of conceptualizing history I have discussed bears directly
on this question, and it is the central question now confronting all
scholars in this field of sexuality studies. Thus, while historians
have by and large stood on the sidelines of this debate, ignored it, or
borrowed language from other scholars in the field within which to think
through questions about the formation and function of sexual culture(s),
it is essential that we understand and participate in it.
So, briefly, post-Foucauldians of many varieties, for reasons I have
discussed, mostly refuse recourse to historicist frameworks. From their
perspective, those frameworks privilege causes (for example, a
repressive culture), consciousness ("I have and deserve rights too"),
and ideology (such as, "how has my difference and hence oppression been
naturalized?") as a means of explaining why resistance to dominant
sexual systems does or does not occur. Instead, post-Foucauldians have
emphasized rhetoric over ideology, and parody, irony, and pastiche over
consciousness and pronouncements of "identity," because they believe
that to conceptualize resistance requires a more subtle understanding of
subcultural codes. Furthermore, as feminist historians have long noted,
resistance often takes place in geographic and symbolic locations within
and yet hidden from dominant culture. In this vein, Judith Butler,
Teresa de Lauretis, and others use Foucault's antihistoricist bent to
ask how, for example, gay subcultures self-consciously mock dominant
culture, or how dominant culture is influenced by subcultures in ways
that are not simply reducible to theories of negative cooptation.[15]
These are the kinds of questions, in tandem with feminist and "queer
theory," that Foucault helped to raise but not to answer.
How can historians of sexuality contribute to this question about how
individuals, especially marginalized ones, produce and reinscribe
meaning? How has Foucault's work forced us to rethink our own
frameworks, and how might our reconsideration of historicism rely on and
yet lay the ground for a history of modern sexuality beyond Foucault?
In what follows, I hope to explain Foucault's overemphasis on
disciplinary power (and hence his de-emphasis on meaning and agency) in
terms other than his failure to link his work to rationalist (primarily
Marxist) narratives about the unfolding of human history, or to clearly
distance it from irrationalist (for example, Nietzschean) narratives
whose "dangers" are well known.[16]
I hope to demonstrate persuasively how his neglect of the gendering of
subjectivity is central to his neglect of agency, and in so doing, to
force us to ask questions about the construction of female sexual
subjectivity and how it might be historicized, even if there are no
answers yet to those questions.
I begin with Lynn Hunt's recent attempt to historicize Foucault's
production of sexual subjectivity, move on to an analysis of the
interwar discussion about sexual liberation, and finally turn to the
first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality. [17]
I
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that by the eighteenth
century, sexual regulation no longer concerned fostering and preserving
alliances meant to legitimate and extend paternal sovereignty. Now sex
was central to the life and death of nation-states dependent on the
regulation and maintenance of healthy populations. Because of
capitalist demands for healthy and productive workers, lawmakers and
other professionals began to develop medical and statistical norms aimed
at defining ideal sexual subjects. Demography, medicine, and pedagogy
formed "technologies of sex" to discipline, shape, and regulate bodies
in the interest of a "power" Foucault described as a "multiplicity of
force relations" (1:92), as "both intentional and nonsubjective" (1:94),
and as a "moving substrate" (1:93).
Technologies of sex thus represented the expansion of an omnipresent
disciplinary apparatus (of "power") with no clear point of origin or
location such as the state or the law. Most important, technologies of
sex did not repress, domesticate, and regulate the intrinsic sexual
drives of lazy, pleasure-bound, inefficient bodies but produced them in
the interests of the power whose aims they served. The sexual subject
thus has no cause or origin because it is always the regulatory effect
of a "power" that cannot be located; it has no intrinsic, essential
meaning or "drive." As is well known, Foucault thus repudiated a
narrative of origins (an account of why power shapes and transforms the
world the way it does) in favor of a description of how power works, of
how, in this case, technologies of sex produced a new kind of
individual.
In her recent pathbreaking essay on Foucault, Lynn Hunt offers a
suggestive alternative to Foucault's description of how sexual selves
were produced. She seeks to explain in historical rather than purely
theoretical terms why Foucault refused to account for that process of
production, thereby moving beyond a discussion of his method.
First, she reverses his terms. She claims that technologies of sex did
not produce the modern self but emerged as a result of its
invention.[18] As Hunt sees it, in eighteenth-century materialism,
identity became an active process of self-formation in which individuals
were "figured as separate beings with separate selves who are able to
act upon themselves and even transform themselves" (85). Technologies of
sex did not give birth to the modern subject, but developed as a means
to control this new and egotistical self:
The materialist view of the individual was responsible for that
central characteristic of the new technology of sex, which
Foucault defined as the demand that the social body as a whole and
virtually all its individuals place themselves under surveillance.
Surveillance was necessary because the new desiring individual,
imagined as fundamentally egotistical, threatened constantly to
undermine the requirements of the social. (91)
Modern forms of discipline thus arose as an effort to manage a social
world now populated by "like bodies in motion" (91), in which "deference,
birthright, monarchy," and (theoretically speaking) the grounds of
gender inequality "were gone" and in which desiring man was thus the new
and problematic "basis for social relationships" (92). In short, this
implied moral relativism led to the need for new forms of older
mechanisms of social and moral enforcement: the prison, the school, the
family.
Hunt thus argues that Foucault's concept of how power produces the
subject represents a more recent unfolding of the problems inherent in
Enlightenment materialism: the difficulties both in locating and
legitimating lines of social division in a new democratic order
comprised of equal desiring bodies. To make this argument more
forcefully, Hunt links Foucault to Sade, whose work is "a precursor of
Foucault in a way that Foucault himself fails to recognize" (88).[19]
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault distanced himself from the "divine
marquis" whose work he believed manifested an older form of disciplinary
power grounded in paternal sovereignty instead of technologies of sex
(148-149). But Hunt claims to the contrary that Foucault replicates the
problems exposed by Sade in this eighteenth-century figuration of the
sexual subject.
In this article and elsewhere, Hunt brilliantly conceives Sade's
pornographic work as a reductio ad absurdum of the problems implicit in
the construction of a new secular political order in which sovereignty
is no longer vested in the king (the "Sovereign Father" of whom Foucault
speaks) but in a social contract between fundamentally equal and
"egotistical" bodies who determine what they desire and whom they desire
to be.[20]
Briefly, Sade offers a parody of the social contract in which all acts
of cruelty are represented as coextensive with rather than in
contradiction to the laws of nature. Our common humanity (our presumed
likeness and equality) does not necessarily bind us together. In a
world in which all have equal desires, every "man" is for himself, and
crime is justified as the natural propensity of every man to get what he
desires. The dissolution of divinely sanctioned inequalities does not
become the basis for increased freedom and equality, but for the
affirmation of inequality, indeed, of tyranny. For in this world there
can no longer be morally grounded defenses of the weak against the
strong, no normative framework within which to distinguish acceptable
from unacceptable conduct: individual desires are conceptually
indistinguishable from socially appropriate ones because each individual
who follows his or her desire adheres to the "rules" of the contract.
Rousseau's world of virtue and harmony thus turns into Sade's nightmare:
democracy turns into the absolute rule of tyranny.
In both Sade and Foucault, then, the absence of a stable metaphysical
and hence moral foundation for social discipline and division transforms
social order into what Foucault, speaking of Sade, calls an "all-
powerful monstrosity" (1:149). In Sade, as we have seen, a new and
presumably freer social order based on equal desiring bodies becomes
indistinguishable from despotism, and in Foucault, the progressive
expansion of educational, work, and other opportunities to which
Enlightenment materialism leads is indistinguishable from power's
absolute regulation and production of sexual subjects. Rousseau's
"moralizing of the individual through the social" (90) does not liberate
"men" but binds them to their chains. In short, power is monstrous
precisely because it can no longer be anchored, located, or contained:
it now infuses, occupies, and produces everything. In other words,
Foucault's refusal to assign a location to power in the state or the law,
to explain why it forms lines of social and gender division and hence
produces new selves, is not merely a methodological refusal or oversight,
but the sign of Foucault's inability to "imagine a self other than the
one newly deployed in the eighteenth century" (87).
The eighteenth century is thus "at once the pivotal moment of
[Foucault's] analysis and the great hole in it" (85) because Foucault
presumed the self whose production he purports to explain. Foucault
could not and does not feel the need to account for the process by which
sexual subjects are produced by technologies of sex because he does not
historicize subjectivity, because his effort to describe the historical
production of selves paradoxically already presumes a specific sort of
subject: "The practices and techniques of the deployment of the self
presumably vary over time, but subjectivity itself does not" (84).
Second, because Foucault does not account for how subjectivity is
gendered, he cannot account for one of the most important social
processes by which individuals "recognize themselves" (93), by which
individuals are constructed as individuals, and hence the ways in which
power makes us who we are. When Foucault speaks of nongendered selves,
Hunt claims, he really assumes a male self, since "upper class adult men
are the only ones who possess selves, but no history is offered of how
this came to be" (85).[21]
Hunt persuasively demonstrates that Foucault presumes a historically
specific form of male subjectivity even though he claims to destabilize
subjectivity itself. She demonstrates how Foucault conflates
subjectivity with the integral, egotistical, desiring male self of
Enlightenment materialism and so how he presumes rather than explains
the historical process by which subjectivity is gendered. Hunt's
analysis provides the framework for my own question about the centrality
of gender in the construction of subjectivity in Foucault's history of
sexuality. But in what follows, I will argue implicitly that in her
formidable critique of Foucault, subjectivity has a history, but male
subjectivity does not. That is, she does not historicize the
relationship between gender and subjectivity and so replicates
Foucault's gendered framework even as she seeks to dismantle it.
I will argue that Foucault's work is in fact very distant from Sade's,
and that distance marks Foucault's historical location, originality, and
above all, explains his neglect of the gendering of subjects. That
distance must be understood in terms of how subjectivity is gendered
differently at different historical moments, and, in this case, in terms
of different historical crises around the question of the male self.
II
As I mentioned earlier, Foucault's work supplements a more recognizable
though hardly conventional historical emphasis on gender -- most
recently discussed in terms of how, in whose interest, and by what means
masculinity and femininity were produced at different times -- with what
I called a "logic of desire."[22] In order to define what I mean by
this, I will discuss Foucault's work in relation to the historical
transformation of sexual subjectivity that crystallized in the early
twentieth century. To cut this discussion down to manageable size, I
address broader historical conditions (the rise of consumer culture,
shifting models of scarcity and abundance, antifeminism, the crisis
around reproduction and the preservation of the French "race") only
insofar as they were expressed in the vocabulary of liberal, early
twentieth-century heirs of the Enlightenment who, like Sade, took the
pedagogical purpose of sex education seriously.[23] These cultural
critics often had diverse agendas. They were primarily British, French,
and German, and included luminaries such as sex reformers Magnus
Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis. Foucault explicitly counts Wilhelm Reich
among them, but they included as well a wide range of progressive
thinkers, medical professionals, journalists, and others. For our
purposes, they articulated one crucial moment in the unfolding of what
Foucault was famously to call the "repressive hypothesis."
In The History of Sexuality Foucault criticized our conventional
assumption that the history of sexuality was the history of increasing
repression from which "liberation" was desirable. That assumption, he
argued, was born of the nineteenth-century middle-class's effort to
nurture and create a specific symbolic "sexual body" in their own image,
and given intellectual and cultural respectability by medical
professionals, social workers, psychoanalysts, and others since then,
especially during the interwar years. Most of Foucault's seminal work
on sexuality is devoted to dismantling this narrative about the so-
called history of sexuality to which he claims we are still beholden.
"This whole `sexual revolution,' this whole `antirepressive' struggle,"
he argued, "represents nothing more but nothing less . . . than a
tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality" (1:131)
. Foucault described it this way:
Around [psychoanalysis] the great requirement of confession that
had taken form so long ago assumed the new meaning of an
injunction to lift psychical repression. The task of truth was
now linked to the challenging of taboos.
This same development, moreover, opened up the possibility of a
substantial shift in tactics, consisting in: reinterpreting the
deployment of sexuality in terms of a generalized repression. . .
. Thus between the two world wars there was formed, around
[Wilhelm] Reich, the historico-political critique of sexual
repression. . . . [B]ut the very possibility of its success was
tied to the fact that it always unfolded within the deployment of
sexuality, and not outside or against it. (1:131)
He goes on to say that "it is . . . apparent why one could not expect
this critique to be the grid for a history of that very deployment. Nor
the basis for a movement to dismantle it."
In other words, Foucault insisted that this concept of sexual liberation
was itself a ruse of power since there is no escape from power, since
power produces all sexual subjects, all sexuality in its "intentional
and nonsubjective" interests. All promises of liberation thus do not
oppose power but extend its grasp. By claiming that the emphasis on
sexual liberation could not "dismantle" the "deployment of sexuality,"
Foucault meant that liberationists conceived sexuality as a natural,
essential drive instead of the product and expression of power itself,
of the normative production and regulation of bodies. In contrast,
Foucault insisted that we, including our sexuality, are never outside of
power and thus can never be liberated from it. Foucault's main,
counterintuitive argument is thus that derepression does not represent
the lifting of taboos but the extension of power, and that any
description of power as well as resistance to it must proceed from the
understanding that "power is everywhere."
Foucault's own counterintuitive logic, and hence his scathing critique
of this discourse on derepression, does have a history. To borrow Hunt's
term, Foucault's logic might be conceived as a reductio ad absurdum of
the so-called progressive discourse of sexual liberation (that first
articulation of the "repressive hypothesis" in the interwar years) and
hence its extension as well as its critique.
In a reversal of the discourse of degeneration prevalent in different
forms through the fin de siecle, many European cultural critics after
the Great War attributed a so-called decline of manhood to overzealous
repression. Indeed, before the war, European politicians and medical
men sought to control perceived threats to social order (among them
political radicals, criminals, prostitutes, and homosexuals) by passing
repressive measures designed to keep them in check. The passage of
tough criminal legislation was facilitated by expert assurances that
criminals of all sorts were beyond help because innately pathological,
and this pathology was most often represented in gendered terms as a
sign of the nation's increasing emasculation. The purported slackening
of social discipline on which feminism, the rise of consumerism, and a
slow birth rate were blamed, signaled the "feminizing" of the nation,
the loss of its vital moral fiber.[24]
But by the mid-1920s (though the discourse was underway before then),
cultural critics demonized the forces of repression because, as one
writer put it, they constrained instinctive currents which made nations
and races great. Rather than acting as a constraint that guaranteed the
freedom of all and hence balancing individual and social needs,
repression in a secular state sapped morale and reduced "man" to nothing
other than a "lowly cog" in a "gigantic machine . . . less and less free
to do what he will with his activity and his body."[25] After all, had
not thousands of men become the disposable material parts of a war
machine whose rationale was proved false? Had they not been seduced by
a "grand illusion" that blinded them to their real spiritual
degradation? Was not the repression of so-called obscene material in the
name of social order and the war effort only a surreptitious means by
which politicians emasculated young men while feeding them delusions of
virility? In short, didn't repression encourage rather than inhibit
moral degeneration, now conceived as the bankruptcy of the political
system, as the hypocrisy and tyranny of established elites?
Progressive advocates of derepression often made such analogies between
war, pornography, and consumer capitalism and insisted they were
synonymous with the dissolution of masculinity and hence with the
dissolution of the fragile moral fiber that held the social body
together. In regulating men's "genital activity" in the name of the
national interest, the state robbed them of their individuality and
hence of their virility, so that, for example, censorship laws did not
preserve the nation from emasculation (as the authors of such
legislation in France, England and Germany in particular had hoped) but
instead encouraged it. Most critics now stressed the beauty and
naturalness of sexuality, no longer conceived as base and repulsive or
overwrought and undisciplined (feminine) but as an uplifting spiritual
force. In France, one opponent of censorship and a staunch anti-
Catholic argued that "perversion" was born of the repression of
"natural" instincts by a puritanical culture.[26] And Wilhelm Reich
believed that homosexuality and pornography would disappear once
sexuality was freed of constraints.[27]
This rather paradoxical insistence that the liberation of sexuality
would lead to the end of "perversion" meant that sexual liberation was
not really about freeing so-called instincts, but about socializing them
in the name of helping men to remain men. Understood in this way, sexual
liberation did not refer to the dissolution of corporeal boundaries, the
loss of discipline, and hence to the acting out of dangerous longings,
but to the restoration of an expressive, integral male self that had
been commodified and hence reified in pornography, in consumerism, and
in war.[28]
This regenerative impulse becomes especially clear in defensesof so-
called obscene literature: Emile Zola was considered a smutty writer by
conservatives and literary purists, but his defenders, Havelock Ellis
among them, asserted that his work was not the "raw material" of
pornography, but represented the "rawness of truth and indignation."[29]
The French surrealist Robert Desnos claimed that in contrast to
pornography (which was writing confined to the "inferior faculties"),
erotic literature from Baudelaire to Apollinaire was great because it
was both liberated and manly: Baudelaire's work was "male" and "virile";
Apollinaire was too cerebral but did manifest "a liberty of spirit and
especially a masculine quality without which a man cannot produce an
erotic work whatever the form in which he expresses his passion."[30]
Nature and sexuality were thus no longer equated with the female body
and degeneration as they had been around the turn of the century but
with regeneration and hence with masculinity and cultural grandeur.[31]
In short, sexuality was now conceived as continuous with, rather than
distinct from, the phallic, boundaried self that thinkers sought to
recover. In 1914 Havelock Ellis, the influential British sexologist,
argued for a rational approach to sexual matters because, he insisted,
it was only through sex education that young people could be taught a
proper "reverence for the body." Frank talk about adulterous,
homosexual, and other longings would "help to steady the individual and
prove a check against disrespect to his body."[32] Ellis thus equated
the achievement of monogamous, heterosexual, reproductive, that is to
say "healthy," sexuality with a phantasmatic corporeal integrity and
impermeability that guaranteed psychological as well as social
stability. He thus figured the body's sexual drives as necessarily
continuous with the purity, smoothness, and impermeability of its
surfaces.
Derepression in this formulation guaranteed sexual health. As Ellis put
it: "Secrecy and repression" are "against nature."[33] The liberation of
nature served to regulate it, and the abolition of censorship ensured
the preservation of moral order. The state at once retained social
equilibrium (kept men virtuous) and liberated nature (kept men potent).
This paradoxical assertion played itself out in multifaceted and complex
ways in practice because it served in many instances to legitimate the
liberalization of censorship laws, and to encourage programs of sex
education and health reform in England, France, and Germany. In
rhetorical terms it represents an entirely new construction of the
relationship between masculinity and moral order. I cannot possibly
offer a fuller historical account of this complicated shift here.
Rather, my point is to suggest that when critics brought sex out in the
open, they sought, paradoxically, not to tell all but to sanitize or
purify it. When they liberated sex they at the same time insisted that
some pleasures remain in the dark, unspoken and unseen, confined to
realms where cultural conservatives had long sought to banish them.
They assumed those pleasures would disappear entirely, because pleasure
would now only ever express what was in the best interests of social
order. As late as 1964, the British critic Montgomery Hyde wrote that
"obscenity and pornography are ugly phantoms which will disappear in the
morning light when we rehabilitate sex and eroticism."[34] Even Herbert
Marcuse, whose position was quite different from the interwar writers,
defined sexual liberation in terms of a "nonrepressive sublimation" and
a "rationality of gratification." He thus did not advocate
permissiveness, but rather sought to remake integral selves out of the
remains of alienated "man."[35]
In conclusion, when Havelock Ellis announced that today's obscenity is
the future's propriety, he meant that all pleasures must eventually
become permissible: that is, all pleasures must conform to the
requirements of social order. In this vision, pleasure only extended
the aims of reason. Masculinity no longer symbolized the darkness and
secrecy of repression, but the glare of the morning light, the glorious
hardness of reason. It no longer neutralized threats to the social body
by repressing libidinal excess, its diseased and presumably feminized
components. Instead masculinity sustained virtue by sustaining sexual
potency, regulated moral order by removing repressive constraints on
nature. When the morning light bleached pleasure of its impurities, all
sexuality would be "natural" and hence beautiful.
When these critics sought to restore masculinity they sought to
stabilize the meaning of manhood (as phallic, boundaried, and
impermeable). In a reversal of Sade, the history of self-possessed
desiring man was no longer continuous with the unrestrained, tyrannical
desire of omnipotent criminal subjectivity, but with the restraint of
desire. Or rather, the history of desiring man was now the history of
desire fulfilled and restored to its potency when properly socialized.
In other words, the self congratulatory discourse of derepression from
the interwar years through the 1960s does not really pretend that we
have broken "free of a long period of harsh repression, a protracted
Christian asceticism, greedily and fastidiously adapted to the
imperatives of bourgeois economy," as Foucault argued (1:158); it does
not take issue with the so-called virtues of repression, to which it is
committed, but with the anarchic, undesirable consequences of too much
repression.
I want to suggest, then, that Foucault's argument was already implicit
in the critique of sexual repression between the wars (and replicated
later, in a different fashion, in the work of Herbert Marcuse and now
Anthony Giddens), albeit in a different form. In the interwar years,
derepression, as I have argued, did not lead to what Maurice Blanchot,
in reference to Sade, called "the ruin of moral conscience," but to the
intensification of moral restraints.[36] In other words, the explicit
purpose of derepression was not to liberate man from the prison of his
body and the institutions that discipline it, but, paradoxically, to
restore social discipline by restoring manhood. The history of the
sexual subject was continuous with an attempt to socialize the self-
possessed, self-transforming, and expressive individual through an
effort to heal men's wounds, seal their divisions, purge them of
excesses, and restore their moral purity.
While Foucault offered a powerful critique of this process of
socialization, I want to argue that he too was concerned to restore
equality, desire, and wholeness to men's bodies, albeit by rethinking
the image of the integral male body itself. In contrast to Hunt's claim,
Foucault's history of sexual subjectivity is derived from a history of
male lack rather than male potency, and the historicity of Foucault's
work is inextricable from this perception of male lack. His concept of
sexual subjectivity emerged out of the "historico-political critique of
sexual repression" rather than out of the materialist critique of
monarchical despotism.
If this argument is correct, then perhaps Hunt's claim that Foucault
"cannot imagine a self other than the one newly deployed in the
eighteenth century" must yield to another possibility: Foucault's work
emerged in relation to a different logic of desire articulated one
hundred years after Sade's death. Foucault's subject would then not be
founded on the exclusion of women from a social contract based on self-
possessed, self-transforming bodies (and hence on the need to discipline
equal desiring bodies) but on a necessarily futile effort to restore a
male self perceived as lost.
III
In Foucault's account, as I noted earlier, the bourgeoisie constructed
its sexuality as having been repressed in order better to regulate and
hence protect it. Advocates of derepression, for example, conceived
what Foucault calls the modern confessional (talking to psychoanalysts,
psychologists, lawyers, doctors, all variety of "experts") as a means of
bringing sex and its dangers to light. For Foucault, the confessional
exemplified the bourgeoisie's nurturing of their own phantasmatic,
impermeable and smooth "sexual body" -- a "body to be cared for,
protected, cultivated and preserved from many dangers and contacts"
(1:123).
He argued that at the end of the eighteenth century a new discourse was
thus constructed around bourgeois sexuality
which said: "Our sexuality, unlike that of others, is subjected to
a regime of repression so intense as to present a constant danger;
not only is sex a formidable secret . . . not only must we search
it out for the truth it conceals, but if it carries with it so
many dangers, this is because . . . we have too long reduced it to
silence." Henceforth social differentiation would be affirmed,
not by the "sexual" quality of the body, but by the intensity of
its repression. (1:128-129)
The pleasure of confession serves not to liberate sex from repression
but to subject it to increasing restraint. The confession does not
release tension and ease guilt, but produces the so-called truths it
reveals:
The pleasure that comes from exercising a power that questions,
monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light;
and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to
evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The
power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing;
and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing
off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and seduction,
confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents and children,
adults and adolescents, educator and students, doctors and
patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and his perverts, all
have played this game continually since the nineteenth century.
These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have
traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed,
but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure. (1:45)
Sex is thus not something repressed and so something that might also be
liberated. The production of sexual subjectivity is not therefore a
"boundary-crossing" (the transgression of or submission to cultural
customs and taboos) but a circular incitement in which power must
endlessly produce new pleasures in order to guarantee its own expansion,
in order to justify its own existence. The confession in this sense is
an allegory for the production of a sexual subject at once revealed
(brought into the light) and perpetually in formation, never fully
itself (always partially in the dark). As Foucault conceived it, after
all, power is "the hidden and yet generative principle of meaning" that
defines our intelligibility (1:155). It permeates all discourse, but
its origins cannot be ferreted out. "Power is tolerable only on
condition it masks a substantial part of itself" (1:85). Or: "Its
success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms" (1:86)
.[37] In short, power is hidden; in contrast to Sade's ostentatious
displays of mastery, it doesn't show itself off.
Thus if the subject were to move fully into the light, if power were to
cease its endless pursuit of pleasure and reveal the mysteries of its
ways, the self would become transparent. According to Foucault, and in
marked contrast to Hunt's own assertions, this is precisely what happens
in Sade and what marks the distance between the two men. In Foucault's
reading, the Sadean self's form and desires are singular, transparent,
and self-evident. For in Sade, as Foucault put it, "there are no
shadows."[38] There is only "total night" or "absolute day." In Sade,
he went on, the so-called light of reason, grounded in our natural
propensity for goodness, is finally indistinguishable from the "total
night" of tyranny. Similarly, Sade's fictional sisters, the virtuous
Justine and the immoral Juliette, are no longer opposed visions of
social order but represent the singular, logical unfolding of reason:
"The lightning flash which nature drew from herself in order to strike
Justine [who is struck by lightning at the end of the book named after
her] was identical with the long [and dark] existence of Juliette."
Nature herself becomes "criminal subjectivity."[39]
In Sade, then, totalitarianism is continuous with freedom, night with
day, Sade's tyrants with the preachers of virtue (Sade's most cunning
criminals almost always occupy the most prestigious and influential
social positions: they are judges, lawyers, politicians, priests,
bishops, even the Pope). This sovereign reign of subjectivity
constitutes the "unique and naked sovereignty" of which Foucault spoke
with reference to Sade in The History of Sexuality, a law which casts no
shadows because it is self-same, because it "knows no other law than its
own," because transgression (vice) is conceptually inseparable from the
(presumably virtuous) law.
According to Foucault, in Sade's work the self could not be other than
what those in power claim it has always been. The self is not the site
of meaning production, where "other" pleasures might be imagined, but
symbolizes the end of disputes about meaning, the establishment of
meaning once and for all. In short, the Sadean self represents the end
of history, or rather, the restoration of history "as it has always
been."
Foucault's theory of power, on the other hand, is quite distant from all
theories of subjectivity that cast no shadows. We can never know how
technologies of sex produce sexual subjects because their motives are at
once hidden and yet immanent in all discourses. Foucault argued that
"the logic [of power] is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet
it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few
who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of
the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the
loquacious tactics whose 'inventors' or decisionmakers are often without
hypocrisy" (1:95). So the logic of power is clear, but there is no one
who can make sense of it; the logic of power is decipherable and yet it
is exercised by no one who can be identified. This is the kind of
reasoning that drives historians crazy: For how can the aims of power
be clear if no one understands why it works the way it does? How can
power exercised by no one extend its own reach? How can power be
absolutely hidden and yet absolutely everywhere?
But this logic does, as it were, have a reason. In Foucault the self is
always a regulatory effect whose cause (whose desire) can never be
identified except in terms of the cultural norms that give it form. His
history is thus one of a sexual subject that can never be revealed, of a
self-possession that is simultaneously a self-loss. It is a history
that can never get to the bottom of things, one in which a crucial part
of the story must always remain beyond the historian's grasp. Sade's
libertine casts no shadows because the world is merely an extension of
himself. Foucault's subject is instead anxiety-ridden, guilty, knowing
without knowing he can never fully be himself. In Sade's parody the
individual becomes the social because his desire is at one with the law
that governs all people; that is, the authoritarian rule of the powerful
is founded on the "right" to fulfill one's desires. Thus whereas in
Sade the end of deference, birthright, and monarchy consolidates and
legitimates the laws of despots, in Foucault the simultaneous revelation
and inaccessibility of the self (it is both in light and shadows)
wrenches the social world from its moorings, since the origin of power
can never finally be traced. In Foucault's world, everyone can be
anything (as Hunt claims of Sade's libertines), not because they are
free, self-possessed, and self-transforming, but because at the core of
our being there is nothing identifiable, nothing solid or immutable,
nothing that can be known for sure (1:93).
In this reductio ad absurdum of sexual liberation theory, desiring man
is no longer transparent, but is never what he appears to be. In a
reversal of that discourse, Foucault does not rescue man by restoring
his manhood but restores manhood by eroding the traditional foundations
of masculinity. That is, sexual liberationists sought to repress men
through derepression. Foucault unraveled this paradox by demonstrating
how derepression does not effect the restoration of traditional manhood
but the dissolution of a knowable truth on which manhood is purportedly
founded. He demonstrated how derepression does not necessarily restore
history as it has always been but reveals that manhood has a "history,"
that there is nothing transcendent, immutable, or unchanging about
masculinity.
But Foucault, as I have already noted, did not simply have satirical
intentions (if he had them at all). He sought to rewrite history. So
how exactly does this reductio ad absurdum of sexual liberation theory
represent the restructuring of sexual subjectivity? In other words, how
exactly does derepression reveal the history of masculinity (if we
follow Foucault) it is meant to repress?
IV
It has been objected that Foucault exaggerated the tyranny of power
precisely because he left it in the shadows, unknowable except in its
manifestations and hence impervious, ultimately, to change. In this
view, which I think is Hunt's, Foucault's work, like Sade's, leads to
the legitimation of a tyrannical law. Because if power's origins can
never be known, what is to prevent anyone from claiming that tyranny is
just as valid as democracy, and more efficient too?
This insistence on leaving power's origins in shadows also, as Hunt
notes, marks Foucault's lack of interest in questions of gender and his
insensitivity to the differential effects of power on women and men.
Furthermore, it helps place his work in the poststructuralist (anti-)
canon, with its effort to find shadows in every text, its suspicion of
all clarity, knowledge, all "light," and its consequent refusal to
accord authority to what people say they experience, feel, or "are,"
regardless of the position from which they speak.
Of course, Foucault did theorize resistance and, by implication, change,
in his now-famous notion of "reverse discourse," whereby power produces
terms to label threats that are then appropriated to challenge power
itself (for example, the construction of the homosexual becomes the
grounds for demanding homosexual rights). But in the end, it is not a
very satisfying concept, since, as I implied earlier and many critics
have pointed out, it too weds resistance entirely to dominant cultural
formations.
Notwithstanding the possibility that Foucault's concept of power
functions as a transcendental principle, as a "bottom line," it
nonetheless engenders a formulation of resistance that is far more
nuanced and troubled than most critics have allowed. In spite of
Foucault's political work for prisoner's rights, among other activities,
he does not advocate "openness" (grand declarations of who you are and
what rights must therefore accrue to you). In Foucault's work, the "old
mole" (Karl Marx characterized revolution as an "old mole" that works
away in the dark) never comes to the surface but continues its efforts
underground.[40] Perhaps Foucault sees power everywhere (though it does
not "embrace everything") in order to increase the significance of what
shadow is left, to increase the importance of hiding places that become
the unseen, inaccessible repositories of history, of what makes us who
we are. Perhaps Foucault is a truth seeker, albeit of an entirely other
order than Marx: he is a man bound by a truth he knows he will never
know, bound to write never knowing what it will amount to, driven as it
were, not by the confidence of eventual discovery, but by the trauma
produced by a crisis of confidence.
Of course, Foucault worked very much in the light: at Berkeley and the
College de France at the end of his career. And as his biographers have
told us, he spent a lot of time in leather bars and bathhouses. This
opposition between the famous bourgeois professor and the gay leatherman
already points to a problem with such oppositions between light and
dark: Foucault was most "out" (as a gay man) when (at least
metaphorically speaking) in the dark, and most concealed in the light of
the lecture hall. He was most in when out and most out when in. (As
Eve Sedgwick has demonstrated, the "closet" is not a place but
represents a structural relation that marks and upholds binary divisions
between being "in" and "out").[41]
It is precisely this kind of ultimately untenable opposition between
light and dark, out and in, that the logic of desire in Foucault's
History repudiates. The sexual subject is not formed when he is
subjected to the law, not when he crosses forbidden borders. There is
no inside or outside to legality. Instead, the sexual subject is
perpetually in formation, because power is perpetually unsatisfied,
forever in search of more pleasures to regulate. Power is thus never
fully in control, never totalitarian, and it is in the pleasure of
always being one step ahead of power that Foucault locates resistance:
in the invisible but felt, tangible relation of power and pleasure.
Because in his world, like Freud's, everyone's thoughts are revealed
even as they hide them, the subject is at once in the light and
inaccessible.
However, Foucault warns us not to interpret this relation as an
opposition between a true self (that is, the unconscious, or the "real,"
self) and another false one. He urges us instead to turn that conflict
between truth and falsehood (say, gay reality, straight appearance)
itself into an identity and hence to turn identity into an exhilarating
"game."[42] Foucault used the game-playing implicit in sadomasochistic
desire to describe the structure of the subject: "[In sadomasochistic
practice] this mixture of rules and openness has the effect of
intensifying sexual relations by introducing a perpetual novelty, a
perpetual tension which the simple consummation of the act lacks."[43]
It is in this sense that sadomasochistic desire allegorizes the
structure of the Foucauldian subject: subjectivity is never
"consummated," as it were, never closed. It is never the expression of
a deep, expressive inner core but the performance of a perpetually
shifting, mobile self: "Relations of knowledge are not static forms of
distribution, they are `matrices of transformation'" (1:99).
This essentially poststructuralist alternative to humanism is often
criticized: the fragmented, performative, lacking subject merely
replicates the status historians and others have always attributed to
racial and sexual minorities and women through neglect and distortion.
Henry Louis Gates, for example, has argued that poststructuralist
arguments are not particularly radical or helpful when analyzing the
diverse experience of African-Americans, whose subjectivity has always
been defined as somehow "lacking." Many feminists have made the same
point.[44] In short, for this kind of "game" to empower rather than
disempower individuals, they have to have something to draw on, some
socially valued qualities that can be put into play. One must already
have been endowed with an integral subjectivity, with a universally
recognized tradition, culture, and canon.
This criticism, however valid, nevertheless reduces the complexity of
Foucault's position, not only as a gay man, but in relation to the
history of masculinity itself. For Foucault, like Sade in his own time,
demonstrates the problems implicit in a new identity formation: here,
not newly self-contained, reasonable and desiring individuals who always
say what they mean, but men who must learn to mean what they say, whose
self-confidence and vigor must be restored. This image of the male
subject, the one assumed by interwar cultural critics, thus already
presumes a self rooted not in masculinity, but in its erosion, not in
reason, but in its disruption. Remember interwar critics rejected the
constant vigilance assured by repression in favor of a vigilance
paradoxically maintained through the removal of repressive restraints;
they conceived manhood as so sapped of egotistical, self-preserving
instincts, so shorn of rational decision-making power, that repression
could no longer be an effective deterrent.
Foucault insisted that sexual liberationists accounted for and
legitimated that restoration of manhood only by covering up the power
that produced it; that is, he argued that the "antirepressive struggle"
was merely a "tactical shift" in the deployment of sexuality and hence
in the deployment of power. He did not believe that derepression
represented the natural expression of manhood, but the production and
regulation of manhood in the interest of power. Although Foucault
insists that interwar critics naturalized the history of manhood and so
covered it up, he offers no theory of power within which to frame an
investigation. Renegade historian, Foucault's testimonial leaves the
trace of a crime (here, a cover-up) that can never be detected.
In so doing, he simply made explicit the history of manhood implicit in
interwar critics' very effort to restore a traditional male self, one
that had presumably always been. He defined "real" (that is, changing,
mutable, foundationless) manhood as the "trace" that forever eludes the
historian (the would-be detective). Foucault is both the product and
producer of a new normative sexual subjectivity anchored not by
reference to an integral male self but by reference to a male subject at
once self-possessed and (unspeakably) fragmented. As I have argued,
Foucault's work on sexuality, in which the sexual self is produced
paradoxically through a self-loss, constitutes a recent effort to
shatter the reified, instrumental structures of (now late) capitalist
culture by recourse to what Foucault called "bodies and pleasures": that
is, by recourse to a self-loss that might be experienced as an
exhilarating self-renewal, an exhilarating "game" that would never end.
(Isn't this, to some extent, how Western cultures now conceive the very
experience and purpose of sexuality: as a loss of boundaries that
enables relationships in which the "true," most intimate self struggling
in an atomized instrumental culture is finally revealed, restored,
renewed only to be lost again? In which plenitude is necessarily
illusory? Has there not been a shift, replicated and effected by
Foucault, from a self whose individuality is defined in terms of its
sexuality or sexual identity to a self for whom sexuality represents the
dissolution of individuality, the effort to lose the self?)
My central argument thus links Foucault specifically to a historical
context in order to explore his limitations. Following Foucault, what
we now consider natural does not just represent "sexual modernism," to
paraphrase Paul Robinson (an increasing respect for sexuality and
tolerance of sexual diversity), but a new ideological context in which
men's bodies and psyches had to be reconstructed in the interests of the
dominant social order.[45] Simply put, what was "perverted" in the
nineteenth century became "natural" by the early twentieth as elites
reconfigured masculinity in the hopes of sustaining its normative
qualities.
Though Foucault shows how the discourse of sexual liberation is really a
discourse of sexual discipline (hence his reductio ad absurdum of
liberation theory), he already presumes the disciplined (because lost,
eroded) male self that "technologies of sex" are supposed to produce.
Foucault's concept of power in this way presumes and extends the
paradoxical logic sexual liberationists used in their effort to liberate
male desire from mechanization and atomization by disciplining it in new
ways. He presumed that the most rigid kind of discipline and
masculinity were perfectly and perhaps necessarily inextricable so that
individuals inevitably mimicked the very power they resisted. In so
doing, he conceived sexual subjectivity, indeed subjectivity and agency
in general, in terms of the mimicry of power, in terms of an
unrepresentable location within power itself.[46] He thus moved beyond
Sade's parody of Enlightenment reason, for he does not simply
demonstrate the dark underbelly of its optimism but sought, through
mimicry, to conceive subjectivity itself in new terms.
Foucault's love of shadows marks his attempt not to undermine but to
restore the male self in entirely new terms, to give unspeakable selves
power by theorizing power as a "game" in which self-loss is always a
means of self-renewal, in which one must lose one's self in order to
possess one. I have claimed that Foucault locates resistance in the
unspeakable but exhilarating pleasures of bodies formed, paradoxically,
through self-loss (repressed through derepression); his reductio ad
absurdum of the discourse of derepression shows how the self is at once
possessed and lost, shaped in the image of a perpetually unsatisfied
power always in search of what it lacks. Foucault calls the self
entirely into question in order to provide it with an (albeit
unrepresentable) reason to go on living, to persevere in what must
always be an unsatisfied quest for its "truth." He implicitly turns the
discourse of wounded manliness, of emasculation, hidden weakness, and of
secret, unspeakable thoughts, into the equally unspeakable power of men.
This structuring of the subject as an oscillation between light and dark
(as structurally undecidable) describes the subjectivity of the
"passing" gay man and turns his identity into a joke on dominant
culture.[47]
But under what conditions can self-loss function as the grounds of
agency; under what conditions can participating in power's ruse give one
power? How, in other words, does mimicry become empowering, how does
self-loss understood as an a priori condition of selfhood renew rather
than simply reiterate the self's emptiness? How does self-loss finally
guarantee an albeit always compromised self-possession? How, finally,
does this construction of male desire also account for female desire,
for women's sexual agency?
Because Foucault uses his unraveling of the paradoxical refiguration of
"healthy" masculinity after the Great War as the normative model within
which to figure all sexual subjectivity, self-loss is always
simultaneously a self-possession. As we have seen, Foucault turns
performance (here meant as "passing") into a game rather than into a
painful site of powerlessness, of physical and psychic trauma and
immobility; he turns performance into an exhilarating joke on power
rather than into a strategy by which powerless people learn to survive.
In defining self-loss as the condition of self-possession, he makes all
kinds of agency meaningful, especially those which cannot pronounce
their intentions loudly. But the structural oscillation between pain
and pleasure, light and dark, professorships and bathhouses, that
defines male subjectivity can also be understood as a new, historically
specific normative construction of sexual subjectivity that can only
conceive female subjects in terms of that "trace" of "real" manhood
which always remains unarticulated. Like sexual liberationists and, as
I've noted, as many feminist critics of Foucault have long pointed out,
Foucault ends up assimilating women's desire to men's desire, although
in a new way.[48] Insofar as self-loss is a condition of self-
possession, Foucault replicates a normative and recent framework of male
subjectivity within which a female subject's agency is limited to a
choice between reiterating women's absence (since self-loss really does
not describe a radical or deviant cultural condition for women) or
theorizing women's presence as the unsymbolizable rift in patriarchal
cultural formations, as the unarticulated presupposition that stabilizes
even as it destabilizes male subjectivity, as an (often unconscious)
signifier of anxiety.[49] These alternatives have again been replicated
in recent scholarship: either we use Foucault to help understand more
effectively how women's sexuality was constructed, regulated, or even
rendered unthinkable; or we use him to demonstrate the real instability
of patriarchal and heterosexual meaning systems.
But if we take the historical framework within which Foucault
conceptualized the power that defines modern sexual subjectivity and
refigured it for women the way he does for men, why would we necessarily
only have these options? Rather than reject or defend Foucault's
position for feminist analysis, I have sought to understand how and why
he constructs the paradoxical claim that self-loss is essential to
having a subject position, or to put it differently, that self-
possession is not essential to having one. As Ian Hacking aptly noted,
"Foucault said the concept of Man is a fraud, not that you and I are
nothing."[50] If "man" is a fraud, and yet something is there, it may
be possible to get at what might be there by doing what Foucault did to
sexual liberationists: to deconstruct the way in which his work is and
is not beholden to the culturally and historically specific premises he
challenged.
I can only speculate here about how to begin imagining other historical
possibilities, other methods, which would not assume a prediscursive
concept of the subject.[51] This is the challenge now before most
theorists and historians of sexuality compelled by Foucault's
demonstration of the way humanism replicates dominant cultural norms. I
have sought to begin such speculation by understanding not just the
theoretical but the historical limitations of Foucault's work, and to
emphasize from a historical point of view why Foucault's concept of
power is perhaps less monolithic and subject to more diverse uses than
many historians have imagined. By considering how Foucault was the
product of a historically specific link between modern subjectivity and
sexuality, we might begin to analyze how that cultural formation both
constrains and opens new possibilities for scholarship and, presumably,
how it shapes and produces sexuality as well.
Brown University
I would like to thank the participants of the History Workshop and
the Graduate Women's American History workshop at Brown University
for their helpful comments. I am especially indebted to Mary
Gluck, Martin Jay, Naomi Lamoreaux, Amy Remensnyder, Michael Roth,
and Elizabeth Weed. Lynn Hunt read and criticized this as acutely
as she has read and criticized nearly everything I have asked her
to since I was her student now several years ago. For this reason,
and others too numerous to mention, I dedicate this to her.
1. I limit this discussion to the analysis of works dealing with the
history of modern sexuality, that is, sexuality since the eighteenth
century. There is, of course, much literature in the early modern
period, especially on family history, but it does not engage Foucault
specifically.
2. On this debate, see especially Patricia O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's
History of Culture," in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt
(Berkeley, 1989), 25-46. O'Brien provides ample references for those
interested in pursuing the nature of this debate among historians.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction,
transl. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 94. All further references will
be cited within the text. I distinguish this volume from the two other
volumes of Foucault's history which deal primarily with the ancient
world by indicating number 1 before each page reference. Since I am
focusing on scholarship on modern sexuality, and since Foucault's later
work on Greece and Rome complicates the analysis beyond what I can cover
here, I have chosen to exclude this work from my discussion. I do not
think this choice changes the argument I make here in any substantial
manner.
4. Discourses of Sexuality from Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), 4. This is perhaps the first real effort to
assess the state of "sexuality studies" since Martha Vicinus wrote her
review essay "Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the
History of Sexuality" in Feminist Studies 8 (1982), 134-156, and B.
Ruby Rich published her review "Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s,"
Feminist Studies 12 (1986), 525-561. These two essays reflect struggles
within academic feminism as well as the relationship between work on
sexuality within the academy and political fights within feminism itself
about issues concerning sexuality. Stanton's essay not only
demonstrates to what extent those struggles are still alive in different
ways but how much academic work has proliferated because of them. My
focus here is on that by now vast body of work, of which my account will
be necessarily reductive.
5. I thus use the term "post-Foucauldian" to refer to a wide variety of
scholars who have in one way or another taken up Foucault's antihumanist
premises. They fall under a number of different categories, including
new historicists (often referred to as post-Foucauldian historicists),
and queer theorists. Since the term "poststructuralist" is a contested
one with many different adherents (including post-Foucauldians), I have
preferred to call these theorists post-Foucauldians, since all are
engaged with Foucault's ideas and more specifically are engaged in
rethinking history as a concept and a discipline in the aftermath of
Foucault's work. However, many of them might even refuse such an
appellation, so I use this term for the sake of coherence only. I
cannot possibly cover all the different camps and the debates between
them, any more than I can clarify the still-contested meaning of the
various terms they employ. I have sought merely to provide a synthetic
survey of what they do have in common as a means of evaluating the
history of sexuality as it is now practiced.
6. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (New York, 1990); David Halperin, One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990); Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990); Jonathan
Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault
(Oxford, 1991). There is now a vast literature addressing these
questions. I cite only some of the most influential works.
7. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 50. Sedgwick is quoting the
inimitable wit of Emily Dickinson. For an interesting critique of
historicism in this vein (but one that does not engage with historians
themselves) see Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History:
Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, 1992).
Finally, Robert Nye has recently noted how historians have often taken
sexual science at face value even while doubting the field's
objectivity: Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France
(Oxford, 1993), 103.
8. One of the few historians to address historical work specifically
from this point of view is Joan Scott, most recently in her "The
Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), 773-797. Martin
Jay examines the poststructuralist critique of experience in the context
of Foucault's work in "The Limits of Limit-Experience: Bataille and
Foucault," Working Paper 3.11 (Center for German and European Studies at
the University of California at Berkeley, October 1993).
9. One historian who has sought to integrate both approaches is Judith
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in
Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).
10. Ibid.; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks
to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); and Jeffrey Weeks's pioneering, Sex,
Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London,
1981), among his other works. See also the essays by John Boswell,
David Halperin, Robert Padgug, George Chauncey, and Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,
ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York, 1989)
; and essays by Jennifer Terry, "Theorizing Deviant Historiography,"
Differences 3 (1991), 54-74; and Lisa Duggan, "The Trials of Alice
Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-
the-Century America," forthcoming in Signs. Of course there are many
other works that mention Foucault, but few of them directly address his
method except to take issue with his neglect of agency. I don't want to
suggest the above works solve the problems presented by Foucault, but
they do engage him in more than a superficial manner.
11. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: The History of
Sexuality in America (New York, 1988), xiii. This is one prominent
example.
12. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in
Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, 1989), 17-34. As feminists have
noted again and again, many poststructuralists and more generally
postmodernists, who turn everyone into a creator-actor and privilege no
point of view, often replicate patriarchal structures of domination in
their own work and so in fact do privilege a point of view, in spite of
their claims to the contrary.
13. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993).
Though this biography has met with acclaim from all sorts of people (the
blurbs on the book are from Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Roger Shattuck,
and Edmund White) very few have taken on Miller's replication of
pernicious cultural associations between AIDS, sadomasochism, sexual
promiscuity, and homosexuality (Foucault was a gay man, a sadomasochist,
and died of AIDS in 1984). The lack of critical attention to this issue
is especially troubling since Miller purports to stand above such
prejudice while encouraging and subtly confirming it. Lisa Duggan's
review in the Village Voice (May 4, 1993) does an excellent job of
exposing Miller's presumptions: she points out, for example, that
Miller writes the biography with the intention of getting to the bottom
of rumors about how Foucault eagerly sought "suicide by sex" in gay
bathhouses in San Francisco rather than to examine why such rumors would
circulate in the first place. She also points out that Foucault was
probably infected with HIV many years before anyone had heard of AIDS,
and remarks that Miller's description of gay male bathhouses as "suicide
orgies" may reflect Miller's own fantasy (itself replicating cultural
associations between male homosexuality, sadomasochism, disease, and
pitiful manliness) rather than the reality of gay bathhouses. Martin
Jay notes that Miller's desperate effort to be tolerant in the best
tradition of liberal politics makes sadomasochism "almost as
untransgressive as stamp-collecting" (Jay, Limits of Limit-Experience,
15, n29). See also the various perspectives on Miller's book in
Salmagundi 97 (1993).
14. See, in particular, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance,
ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston, 1988); and Jana Sawicki,
Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York, 1991).
Sawicki makes an admirable effort to put Foucault in the service of
feminism, to demonstrate how Foucauldian insights are indeed compatible
with theorizing female sexual subjectivity. I agree generally with this
argument, but want to address it historically rather than theoretically.
15. See Butler, Gender Trouble, and Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of
Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1987).
16. The list of works on Foucault in this vein is virtually endless.
See, among others, Jean Baudrillard, Oublier Foucault (Paris, 1977);
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982); Alan Megill, Prophets of
Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, 1987);
John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of
Ethics (New York, 1991). For other interesting readings, see Hayden
White, "Michel Foucault," in Structuralism and Since: From Levi-Strauss
to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford, 1979), 81-115; and Geoffrey Galt
Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago, 1987),
esp. 231.
17. Lynn Hunt, "Foucault's Subject in the History of Sexuality" in
Stanton, ed., Discourses of Sexuality, 78-93. All further references
will be cited in the text.
18. Since here the invention of modern subjectivity is coextensive with
sexual subjectivity, when I refer to the self or subjectivity I am
always referring to a sexual subject. Occasionally, I will use the word
"sexual" for emphasis.
19. The way in which Hunt forges this link between Sade and Foucault is
original, but the link itself is not. Because Sade was a relentless
critic of humanist presumptions, he was a privileged figure in
Foucault's corpus, an emblem of human tragedy whose extreme fantasies
relentlessly strip humanity of all the illusions it has about itself
(its integrity, its reason, its moral laws, in short, its humanism).
Other French intellectuals also privileged Sade for this reason.
20. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley,
1992), 124-150.
21. Hunt points out that even Sade, the man who so radically inverted
and challenged gender norms, assumed the male body as normative (Hunt,
"Foucault's Subject," 92).
22. I am referring to Thomas Laqueur's book Making Sex, which has
inspired wide commentary. Robert Nye has recently written a rich book
on the production of masculinity in modern France. In different ways,
such work takes up Joan Scott's insistence that historians must
demonstrate how gender roles were historically produced rather than
focusing on how women were or were not included in already gendered
frameworks. See Laqueur, Making Sex; Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of
Honor; Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1989);
Joan Landes, The Public Sphere and the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1990); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988), among
others. The relationship of femininity and masculinity to sexuality is
of course a complex question that historians have only begun to
consider.
23. On shifting models of scarcity and abundance and their relationship
to sexology, see Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and
the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988).
Birken makes an interesting argument about the transition away from
sexual difference but does not analyze to what extent sexual sameness
takes male sexuality as normative.
24. The following few pages are a condensed version of one section in
Carolyn Dean, "Pornography, Literature, and Virility in France, 1880-
1930" Differences 5 (1993), 62-91.
25. Paul Lapeire, Essai juridique et historique sur l'outrage aux bonnes
moeurs par le livre, l'ecrit, et l'imprime (Lille, 1931), 23.
26. Armand Charpentier cited in Lionel d'Autrec, L'Outrage aux moeurs
(Paris, 1923), 247.
27. See Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love
and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, 1992), 163.
28.On this point in particular, see Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and
Dugald Williamson, On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity
Law (New York, 1993), especially the chapter "Literary Erotics," 92-134.
29. Henry Marchand, Sex Life in France (New York, 1933), 265-267.
30. Robert Desnos, De l'erotisme considere dans ses manifestations
ecrites et du point de vue de l'esprit moderne [1923] (Paris, 1952), 67,
76, 112.
31. I should note that many of the texts I use discuss sexual liberation
in non-gendered terms. Nevertheless, the language they use almost
always indicates that they are speaking about male sexuality. Almost
all the sexual purity campaigns of the mid- to late-nineteenth century
sought to regulate prostitutes and male homosexuals, indicating that the
danger to social order came from uncontrolled male lust (for which women
were often assumed responsible). This is very confusing because
uncontrolled male lust was most often gendered feminine and conceived as
emasculating and hence dangerous. I want to argue that by the early
twentieth century, sexuality could be celebrated because conditions
existed in which its so-called excesses could now be gendered masculine;
that is, they could be expressed and contained at once.
32. Havelock Ellis, The Task of Social Hygiene (New York, 1914), 212-216,
254-257.
33. Ellis, More Essays of Love and Virtue (London, 1931), 124, 137.
34. Montgomery Hyde, A History of Pornography (New York, 1964), 204.
35. See Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 164-168.
36. Maurice Blanchot, "Sade," preface to Justine, Philosophy in the
Bedroom, Eugenie de Franval, and Other Writings (New York, 1965), 52.
37. In the most famous example from Discipline and Punish, Bentham's
Panopticon maps space so that disciplinary power sees without being
seen; power is itself in shadow (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
[New York, 1975]).
38. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason (New York, 1965), 285.
39. Ibid., 284-285.
40. This is also a reference to George Bataille's critique of surrealism
using the same term. See Georges Bataille, "The `Old Mole' and the
Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist," Visions of
Excess, ed. and transl. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis, 1985), 32-44.
41. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
42. On social formations and identities as games, see Pierre Bourdieu,
The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), especially 66-68. I thank Elisa
Glick for reminding me of Bourdieu's work.
43. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live (New York, 1989), 226.
44. Henry Louis Gates, "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the
African-American Tradition," The Politics of Liberal Education, ed.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith and David Gless (Durham, N.C., 1992), 111. For
some feminist discussions around this issue, see Louise Newman,
"Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's at Stake in
Deconstructing Women's History" Journal of Women's History 3 (1991), 58-
68; and the exchange between Joan Scott and Linda Gordon in Signs 4
(1990), 348-360.
45. Paul Robinson, The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred
Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989). In a
way I have been following up Robinson's sense that Foucault treats
discourses of sexuality as "Olympian abstraction[s]" (xi) hardly
connected to the way "most of us experience our sexuality." For
Foucault, as his biographers make clear, his sexuality was not at all an
abstraction, but a site of both tremendous social pain as well as
pleasure. In this paper I am trying on one level to connect that
experience to the "Olympian abstractions" of his work.
46. Judith Butler has pointed out how even Foucault could not sustain
this notion of resistance as mimicry: she demonstrates how he celebrated
a prediscursive, utopian notion of "bodies and pleasures" in spite of
himself (Butler, Gender Trouble, 91-106).
47. Interestingly enough, as Robert Nye has shown, in 1898 a book by
Ludovic Dugas on timidity defined the absence of manliness this way:
"`Timid individuals are naturally shameful [honteuse].' They lead lives
of `complicated dissimulation, full of subtleties and detours,' which
are lacking in `cordiality, spontaneity, and frankness'" (Nye,
Masculinity and Male Codes of HOnor, 223).
48. Both Paul Robinson and Janice Irvine have pointed out how
sexologists assumed men and women were sexual equals but defined
sexuality itself in terms of male desire (Robinson, The Modernization of
Sex, especially 17-18; Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sex and
Gender in Modern American Sexology [Philadelphia, 1990], 87).
49. Even those theorists (for example Judith Butler) who theorize gender
roles as sites of instability theorize female subjectivity as the lack
it has always been assumed to be, although they do provide a critique of
normative femininity because they demonstrate that it is always
constructed rather than natural.
50. Ian Hacking quoted in Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, 63.
51. Imagining female self-loss in a way that is not paralyzed by fear of
replicating dominant cultural norms whereby woman's integrity is defined
paradoxically in terms of self-denial might be a place to start. The
challenge here would be to imagine it while sustaining some concept of
agency in self-loss that is not unrepresentable (as in masochism). This
would require trying to reconceptualize the relationship of gender and
sexuality in ways that both disrupt the normative continuity between the
two (as Butler and others such as Gayle Rubin do) and keep the power
relations that maintain that continuity in constant focus.
~~~~~~~~
By CAROLYN J. DEAN
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Source: History & Theory, 1994, Vol. 33 Issue 3, p271, 26p.
Item Number: 9411303290
