Foucault Power And Sexuality

Power and Sex: Intertwined
Most people view sexuality as a form of liberation. In other words, when you say “yes” to sex, you’re saying no to power and political liberation can be reached through sexual liberation. Michel Foucault disagrees with this. Foucault rejects the repressive hypothesis, which claims that sex has been consistently repressed. According to Foucault, power and sexuality have a more complex relationship. He believes that the increase of discourse on the topic of sex and sexuality has increased the areas in which power can have an influence on people’s lives and is therefore and instrument of social control.
Foucault explains that the discourse and will to know about sex has intensified since the 1900s and many factors contributed
to this. One factor was the rise in Christianity and the popularization of confession. During confession, people are encouraged to reveal their inner most desire and urges relating to sex. This confessional attitude did not just end in church however; it expended to become a general precedent in regards to our relationships with authority figures such as teachers, parents and doctors. Through people’s confessions, Foucault argues that discourse on sex increased instead of decreased.
Another factor that contributed to the intensification of discourse and will to know about sex was the rise of the bourgeois class who held new focus on the health of the work force.
Sexual habits became a good way to measure demographics and gathering statistics. At this time, the content of the discourse shifted from married couples to discussion on child sexuality, homosexuality, and other “perversions.” This growing group of discourse on sex caused sexuality to become a way to find truth. Foucault compares sexuality in our current age to astrology in past times. Sexuality is used as a medium to explore people’s true identity. Foucault says, “We demand that sex speak the truth [….] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness (Foucault 69).” Another affect of this is that sexuality can be viewed everywhere and became the cause of everything. Not only is there a drive to know more about sex and to increase the discourse, there is a will to discover sex in places where it was previously not thought to exist, such as in the case of child sexuality. Foucault also view sex and sexuality as different concepts, but both as a social construct. To Foucault, sex isn't just the physical action, but also the context that the action holds. He views sex as an instrument for sexuality to be
executed. Foucault disagrees with the common idea that power is one-sided and always repressive.
Foucault views power as both domination and resistance and views power as being everywhere. He also saw power as going through two phases: Sovereign-juridical power and Administrative Normalizing-Regulatory. In Sovereign-juridical power, the king (or sovereign power) had power over their subjects. It was the sovereign’s choice whether the subjects were able to live or were killed. This form of power was more extracting than the latter; the sovereign would take things like rights, life, property and taxes from their subjects. In this phase of power, law was very important and there was a mindset of what the subjects should not do. This phase of power was sustained through the sovereign’s bloodlines and therefore this power was one of blood (Foucault
136).
According to Foucault, the current phase of power is administrative, normalizing and regulatory. This phase of power is more orientated toward life. It is less about killing or letting live and more about making live or letting die. This power does not focus on laws, but instead focuses on norms to regulate the behavior of people. Foucault also calls this power, bio-power and this takes two main forms. The first is a disciple of the body, where humans are treated as productive useful machines. The second is the regulation of population, which focuses on the reproduction of the human body and can be seen in demographics and statics on population. With this new focus on the health of the population i.e., the workforce, power is sustained through reproduction, and therefore this phase is focused on power of sex (Foucault 143).
Foucault views bio-power and the rise of the administrative, normalizing and regulatory power as a factor that caused the rise of capitalism. Human lives came to be seen as important, as every life is a potential worker. How we live our lives became an object of power and knowledge and something that needed to be regulated and controlled.
In this way, the histories of sex and power aren't separate but are intertwined and depend on one another.