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Gender roles then and now
The history of sexuality michel foucault analysis
The history of sexuality michel foucault analysis
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Turley explains, “heterosexual desire occupies a dominant place in an emergent middle-class society. This is a society that classifies men and women into separate and interlocking spheres of economic subjectivity”. Moreover, the anonymous author of the work titled Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy explained that men who engage in sodomy could not separate their sexual identity through this “non-human action, and asks the question, “Since he does not act like a man, and he is not a woman, how can he be human?... to the author of Plain Reasons, the sodomite is closer to an “Ape” or a
However, she also mentions how this was primarily the “white women’s movement” for sexuality and how it convinced her that lesbian sexuality was naturally different than heterosexual sexuality (Moraga, 393). This white women’s movement was problematic in that it excluded non-white, non-middle class women. Another relation between political activism and eroticism was between radical feminism and lesbianism. Moraga mentions how “radical feminism” viewed lesbianism as a political response to male sexual aggression (Moraga, 395). The Civil Rights Movement was a key moment that exemplifies the link between political activism and spirituality.
In Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Collins also operates in a grey area. In her text, Collins defines sexual politics “as a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame all men and women’s treatment of one another” (6). Similar to Morgan, Collins also examines the interaction between men and women and how they treat each other. Both of these scholars seek a narrative that is not one-sided. Instead, they advocated ideas and beliefs that the actions of both men and women into account.
In her award-winning first book, Margot Canaday insists that historians of homosexuality should bring the state back into their work by paying more attention to the role of federal policies in shaping homosexual identities—and that political historians should recognize the degree to which sexual identity, no less than race or gender, has shaped governmental policies and the boundaries of citizenship. Her searching examination of citizenship and sexuality points to important new directions for work in these fields of study. The “state”—in the form of vice squads, municipal courts, and liquor boards—has hardly been absent from community histories of urban gay life, but few studies have shared Canaday's singular focus on the national administrative state and none has engaged as extensively with recent theories of citizenship. From the
The representation of the power dynamics between male and POC characters creates the notion of the ‘Other’. In bell hooks’ “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, she speaks of how “eating the other” can be in the context of how members of ancient cultures practice ripping a person’s heart to become the embodiment of their unique characteristics and spirit. In a metaphorical sense, “eating the other” emphasizes power and privilege. In hooks’ article, she mentions how the “Other” is exploited by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (367). Exploitation is perpetuated through the deep rooted white supremacist ideals of the sexual desire and pleasure to challenge racial domination (367).
Even if Foucault was not a scholar who worked within the history of economic thoughts, his insights in the revolution that led to the emergence of neoliberalism seem to be persuasive. In this chapter, Foucault’s analysis is to be seen as a starting point, or, otherwise as other authors and other strains of contemporary critical theory will be considered to achieve a deeper comprehension of neoliberalism or, better, in order to posit neoliberalism as a research object that can be defined and grasped in its autonomy and self-consistency. Nevertheless, before the offer of an outline of what Foucault understands with neoliberalism, it is important to pay attention to the reasons that led him to shift his research to this subject. The difference
Within Oceania, the Party strives for sexual puritanism in order to eradicate true humanity and demonize sex. Actual sexual acts are portrayed as filthy deeds to the citizens of Oceania since young childhood. Organizations such as the Anti-Sex League work to exalt individuals who choose to remain chaste rather than to partake in sex. According to Gorman Beauchamp in his essay “Of Man’s Last Disobedience: Zamiatin’s We and Orwell’s 1984,” these societies are comparable to “medieval monks and nuns” who demonstrate “their superior love for and loyalty to their God” and are in turn treated with a greater degree of respect and are given a higher position in their society (11). The Anti-Sex League functions similarly, but instead of growing in faith or
As mentioned in my introduction, the paper will be focused on the theory of Panopticism under the light of Michael Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (first published in 1975; first translated in 1977 by Alan Sheridan). I will especially investigate how in both the novels Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) the Panoptic theory influence their characters. In Discipline and Punish Foucault demonstrates that how the experience of being seen affects our human behavior. Foucault has used Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to explain this principle and it’s also important to heed that Panopticon doesn’t come to us directly from Bentham but mediated to us through the work of Michel Foucault.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet claims that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture are structures—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” (Sedgwick 2008, 1). Sedgwick argues that it is a crisis “indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century” (1). This is an interesting point since the male perspective is the pillar, of the Western Patriarchal model of gender role’s construction—and for our purpose sexual identity constraint. The author, in her book, says that “virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis
Although the bourgeois and capitalist society regarded sexuality to be taboo because it was not economically productive, sexuality was being studied in order to categorize sexual behaviors and label individuals, since “homosexual was now a species.” (“History of Sexuality” 43) With the medicalization of sexuality, the “machinery,” society’s social institutions produced discourses to constitute a controlled knowledge which affected the thoughts and behaviors about it in different contexts. However, the “true discourses” Foucault mentions, are not actually real or true as it would imply these discourses would stay constant even in different
Both Feminist Theory and Queer Theory are critical analyses to better understanding the formation of the social Self and sociopolitical Subject. How the individual and/or their community profiles are constructed through understandings of Gender and Sexuality reveals a richly woven tapestry of interpersonally and institutionally-constitutive relations. Because these associations are relational (and often dichotomous), interactive, and emerge from intersections of oppressive social indexes such as gender, race and class, they carry (and are carried by) significant political freight. The mapping of such networks exposes discursive flows of power and the societal scaffolding they reciprocally shape and are shaped by.
MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, philologist and social theorist. He made discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge and about how they are utilized as a form of social control through social establishments. This essay talks about Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality. He put forward his theory of the history of sexuality.
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality(1976), indicate that the history of sexuality is the history of oppression .The relationship of sex oppression always as power, knowledge and sex. Sex becomes an object to be oppress because it is unproductive in a capitalism society. The bourgeoisie not allow the workers use energy on sex, since workers’ energy is for production.
It’s a cultural production that represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse. Sex has no history but sexuality does. French Philosopher Michel Foucault thought that sexuality was, “a set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment.” Sexuality for a person can be narrowed down to what a person is attracted to, their desires, and pleasures. In the article, “Is There a History of Sexuality?”
Based on Stuart Hall’s (2006) discussion of Foucault’s theory of discourse, a discourse is generally consisting of a group of statements that together offer a way of talking about a par-ticular knowledge on a certain topic. Many individuals can produce it together, in different institutional settings. The discourse thereby enables the construction of a topic in a specific way which at the same time limits other constructions of the same topic. A discourse is made up not only from one but a multiplicity of statements that all share the same style to talk about the same topic. However, it is not a closed off system, it draws statements from and into other discourses.
