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   Source:  Whole Earth Review, Winter 1995 n88 p73(1).
                                                                              
    Title:  The History of Sexuality, vol. 1._(book reviews)
   Author:  Andrew Needham
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Foucault, Michel
Rev Grade:  A
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  82A5104
Electronic Collection:  A17922440
                   RN:  A17922440
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT POINT 1995

(Volume I: Introduction) Michel Foucault. Vintage Books, 1978; 168 pp. ISBN
0-679-72469-9 $10 ($14 postpaid).

In The History of Sexuality (Volume I), Foucault sets out to destroy the
concept of our liberation from Victorian repression. Everyone knows the
Victorians to have been obsessively concerned with not seeing/talking
about/exposing people (especially women) to sex. Then along came Freud, who
allowed society to talk about sex and sexuality and inhibition. Gradually, an
entire culture developed, involved in liberation through recognizing
repression and rejecting it. Great, right? Well, no. Foucault proposes "to
examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its
hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence,
takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces
the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws
that have made it function." Foucault finds that the Victorians talked about
sex quite a bit; they just talked about it in ways that no one had before. The
Victorians constructed an entire scientific discourse around the sex. They
named it (homosexuality), normalized it (het good, homo bad),
institutionalized it (through the study of sexual deviance). The Victorians
"discovered" sexuality, a means of power and control over sex.

Now we get to the payoff. Our societal embrace of sexuality and sexual
identity makes us very much the heirs of the Victorians. The ideas used by the
Victorians to demarcate norms have now become deeply rooted ways to talk about
ourselves. In the major controversial claim of the book, Foucault asserts that
the Victorians invented homosexuality: single-gender sex was not unknown
before the Victorians (remember Socrates), but it was considered just another
pleasure, instead of a deviance and later an identity. The conception of
sexuality, founded in Victorian methods of surveying, quantifying, and
defining sex, is one of the most deeply entrenched power relationships in our
society.

Foucault draws criticism for having a view of absolute, unremitting power that
allows no possibility of political action.

Foucault responded that political resistance to power was necessary; however,
he found that organized politics (whether Liberal or Marxist) merely
stabilized existing power relationships. Sexual and political play challenged
the institutions of power more effectively because of their unpredictability
and their subversion and satire of institutional power. "One must put 'in
play,' show up, transform, and reverse the systems that order us about."

* Does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of the body,
anatomy, the biological, the functional? To this question, I think we can
reply in the negative. In any case, the purpose of the present study is in
fact to show how deployments of power are directly connected to the body -- to
bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far
from the body having to be affaced, what is needed is to make it visible
through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not
consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists,
but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with
the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their
objective. Hence I do not envisage a "history of mentalities" that would take
account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived
and given meaning and value; but a "history of bodies" and the manner in which
what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. --The History
of Sexuality
                                                                              
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