1 Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume I
The Will to Knowledge
Key Ideas and Terms to Know:
- Discourse
- The Repressive Hypothesis
- Pedagogy
- Power
- Pleasure
- The Homosexual/Homosexuality
- Silence
Summary
In Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge, he explores how modern definitions of the homosexual and homosexuality came to be. He challenges the long-held belief that the modern era is characterized by “repression” of discussion surrounding sexuality, arguing instead that there has never been more conversation around sex. He analyzes various discourses that have focused on sexuality, including medical, legal, pedagogical, and more, and how they construct and interrogate their subject. He claims that these discourses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the concept of homosexuality. Through these discourses, institutions exert power over the pleasures of sexuality, attempting to make known, codify, and control them.
Main Point 1: Discourse
In Volume I of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (The Will to Knowledge), Foucault constructs a theoretical framework for an analysis of the history of sexuality based on the ideas of discourse, power, and pleasure. Foucault addresses the issue of power and pleasure extensively in his work, but he never directly defines discourse, despite its importance to his work. Rachel Adams usefully defines discourse in her summary and description of what Foucault’s understanding of discourse is:
“Foucault adopted the term ‘discourse’ to denote a historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. He notes that discourse is distinctly material in effect, producing what he calls ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’.”
This definition comes from Adams’ reading of Foucault’s “Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,” published prior to the History of Sexuality. Within the History of Sexuality, no definitive definition of discourse emerges, but it’s likely that Foucault is relying on the same definition he used in his previous work.
In the context of the history of sexuality and sex, Foucault notes that there is not one sole discourse, but a “multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions” (33). Different discursive fields, such as medical, legal, biological, ethical, and political discourses, developed in the eighteenth century that produced an “incitement to discourse” (34). Foucault uses this “discursive growth” evident in the proliferation of new, emergent fields talking about sex in the eighteenth century to disprove the “Repressive Hypothesis” (34). Foucault understands the Repressive Hypothesis as a widely held belief that the Enlightenment ushered in a massive wave of censorship surrounding the subject of sex (17). However, Foucault argues that, since the eighteenth century, there has never been more discourse around sex and sexuality (34). That discourse has largely been intended to interrogate, regulate, and suppress sexualities that were not the “norm” of heterosexual monogamy (38-39).
Main Point 2: Power and Pleasure
Pleasure acts as the counter-balance to power, its other half. For Foucault, discourse revolves around a constant attempt for power to domesticate and make known hidden pleasure, which in turn consistently strives to avoid and evade power (45). Power, in this context, may operate differently than how Foucault previously chose to define power. As a force of knowledge, control, and codification, power acts as a “mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered.” (45) Foucault ironically notes that as power attempts to exercise control over pleasure, it produces its own sense of acute pleasure at the very act of that control. What arises from this, Foucault calls “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (45). Through this endless, tactful dance between pleasure and power, the two come to rely on one another:
“Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another.” (48)
Main Point 3: The Homosexual/Homosexuality
Foucault revolutionized the field of the history of sexuality with his definition of the homosexual/homosexuality. In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault pointedly notes that a concrete definition of who a homosexual is and what homosexuality is only emerged beginning in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this period, a proliferation of discourse surrounding the homosexual body began to move past a previous (Christian) focus on same-sex sexual activity as an act toward a ontological restructuring of individuals who experienced same-sex attraction:
“The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology” (43).
This newly made “homosexual” was innately different, their very being infused with their sexuality. Discourses crafted and defined homosexuality too not based on the act of same-sex sex or attraction, but on the perverse, aberrant nature of the homosexual:
“Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” (43).
In Foucault’s analysis, the invention of the homosexual as a category of humanity was unique to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before this period, Foucault claims that no society (or at least none of the ones he discusses) had formalized definitions of the homosexual or homosexuality: instead, the practice of same-sex sex was treated as an act, and sexuality was not strictly delineated between straight and gay.
Main Point 4: Silence
Silence—while not a central theme in Foucault’s study—serves as a useful tool for understanding how discourses have historically operated and how modern individuals might understand the insidious nature of modern discourses better. To Foucault, silence is:
“the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—[it] is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.” (27)
In this sense, silence surrounding particular subjects related to the history of sexuality serves only to reinforce existing discourses, either by normalizing those subjects or by ignoring them as a subject of interest. In his analysis of the role of heterosexuality in the creation of homosexuality and the normalization of heterosexual coupling and sex, Foucault rightly notes that silence helped to reinforce the legitimacy of heterosexuality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a “centrifugal movement” displaced heterosexual monogamy as the center of discourse:
“Of course, the array of practices and pleasures [related to heterosexual monogamy] continued to be referred to it [sic] as their internal standard; but it was spoken of less and less, or in any case with a growing moderation. Efforts to find out its secrets were abandoned; nothing further was demanded of it than to define itself from day to day. The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter.” (38)
As discourse left behind heterosexual monogamy for a more intense scrutiny of homosexuality and other “perverse” sexualities or the sexualities of marginalized groups, heterosexuality became normative. Through silence, discourse reinforces the status quo.
Discourse colloquially describes written or spoken communication between individuals on a particular subject matter. In the field of sociology, discourse takes on additional meaning, describing the processes through which individual actors create knowledge or meaning from reality, creating real objects “imbued” with meaning. In the context of the history of sexuality, Michel Foucault’s definition of discourse revolves around concepts of power and knowledge. Foucault relies upon sociological, linguistic, or structuralist definitions of discourse as a network of communication creating meaning around a particular discursive object. However, for Foucault, discourse also defines what can and can’t be said about a certain subject, thereby defining who has the power to speak and suppress others in discourse and who has the ability to construct the knowledge around a given object in discourse.
by Clementine
Pleasure is “the feeling when ones wishes are met” and it is “a particular desire or inclination”.
Pleasure and desire can become interchangeable in distinct settings. However, they actually refer to two different points in the “feeling” experience: “desire is creative tension, while pleasure is the release of that tension” (from the Stillpoint Magazine) It is the difference between the wanting and the having. In the Symposium, it is hypothesized that Eros (as the god), does not experience pleasure for he is the god of desire. Pleasure is the good humans and gods desire.
L.D. Katz does an inclusive dive into different definitions of pleasure:“awareness of processes of fulfilling very diverse needs, systematically accounting for both pleasure’s unity and diversity” and “Perhaps pleasure expresses the unimpeded functioning (Aristotle) of our Natural anxiety-free and pain-free State (Epicurus) by which we are able to reach outward from our hedonic core to engage with more representational brain processes – and through these, with love, to all the world”
by Kevin
Homosexual, as an adjective or noun, characterizes an individual as someone who is attracted to individuals of the same gender or sex or qualifies an act/behavior as one involving sexual activity between individuals of the same gender or sex. Derived from homosexuality, homosexual has come to describe individuals’ sexual identity since the nineteenth century.
Similarly to homosexuality, homosexual often does not accurately describe the complex historical experiences of individuals who may have exhibited same-sex or same-gender attraction or behavior.
by Kevin
Homosexuality often refers to sexual attraction or sexual behavior between individuals of the same gender or sex. Generally speaking, homosexuality is considered heterosexuality’s opposite, and both are perceived to exist on a binary spectrum of sexuality, with heterosexuality at one end and homosexuality at the other. The term “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were first created in the 1860s to describe what were considered morally incorrect forms of attraction, with heterosexuality too referring to attraction to sexual acts performed with the opposite gender without explicit procreative ends. Eventually, heterosexuality became normalized around 1930, while homosexuality continued to be considered abnormal and dangerous. Homosexuality has come to encompass a broader range of meaning than just attraction and general sexual behavior, and has often been associated with “deviant” forms of sexual attraction. Additionally, homosexuality and heterosexuality’s polar opposition has presented challenges as the nature of sexual attraction has been challenged, as the binary spectrum of sexuality cannot accurately portray the complexities of human attraction. In recent years, homosexuality has been increasingly used in medical and scientific fields rather than in humanities oriented fields. As a modern term, homosexuality often does not accurately describe the complex historical experiences of individuals who may have exhibited same-sex attraction or behavior.
Paul-Michel Foucault (1926-1984) may or may not have been a good person, but he did write a lot of theory. The History of Sexuality (1976) is his last work, and may or may not be useful for the study of the history of sexuality. He spent his life discoursing before he unfortunately died from HIV/AIDS.
Durba Mitra writes that “sexuality is a term used to describe the state of being sexual and sexual activity as an expression of sexual interest, especially when seen as excessive.” Sexuality can be used to express one’s specific desires, preferences, or orientation. Mitra expands this definition beyond what is deemed “biological” or “natural” by some and describes how the interdisciplinary field of knowledge that studies sexuality can push beyond white and heteronormative spaces, instead providing outlets for liberation and critique. Our class is called History of Sexuality because we set out to study this phenomenon, feeling, and term through classic Greek texts.
See Angela Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Gloria Anzaldúa, for examples of works that discuss colonialism (see colonialism definition), exploitation, and history as they relate to feminist scholarship.
See core questions of our course on the welcome page: Is sexuality a modern construct that didn’t exist in the premodern past? Why does ancient Greece occupy center stage in so many artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific explorations of sexuality? How might the study of sexuality in the ancient Greek world enable us to better understand our own experiences?
by Tristen
(using Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies)
Sex itself is an all encompassing term that relates to “gender, subjectivity, sexuality, pleasure, privacy, race, colonialism, and the erotic” (200). Sex inherently relates to power in conversations of both sex as freedom and liberation and in the restrictive sense of who is allowed to discuss sex, who can have it and what is permissible sexually.
Foucault argued, in reference to power, that since the 19th century, sex can reveal “the most essential part of each person” (200). Sexuality is intrinsically tied to self actualization. Historically, male pleasure in sex and sexuality has been prioritized as a result of gender and queer oppression.
Moreover, sex can be used to gain power through the use of coercion. While we might normally associate sex with pleasure alone, sex can be used to force reproduction as a war tactic, or, conversely sex can be prohibited to contribute to annihilation of a group for another group to gain dominance.
There is also an obvious tension between the public and private domains involving sex. While sex occurs privately, usually within a domestic space, the public continuously tries to limit and control sexual practices through law, public discourse, etc. (201).
Recently, there have been more conversations about what “sex” is really. Heteronormative, and colonial, conceptions of sex, assume penetration with a penis as being the classic way of engaging in sexual activity. However, with regard to the queer community, and also ideas of decolonization, sex has become more of a broad term of understanding “the erotic” experience.
(summarized from Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies)
“Heterosexual” as an adjective describes sexual or romantic partnerships as being between men and women.
Although heterosexual behavior is evidently older than history, the identity of “heterosexual,” or of experiencing a normative sexuality by attraction to a member of the opposite sex, is only as old as the identity of “homosexual.” The first usage of these terms was by white European cis male physicians in the late nineteenth century. They argued that normative sexuality comes from the human drive to reproduce, and all sex beyond heterosexual sex resulting in conception was extraneous and amoral.
Heterosexuality as an identity was weaponized institutionally and culturally as a method by which women were forced into submission in marriage and sexually, by which white supremacy was enforced and spread, and by which queer people, people of color and of other marginalized people were dehumanized.
by Ellen J.