Foucault Discourse Of Sex

Mika Foster
Sociology 102
Professor Prager/Paul Martinez
Discussion 2L
March 10, 2017
2nd Essay
“Let us put forward a general working hypothesis…a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends.” (69)

Before the nineteenth century, there existed a repression of sex. With the rise of a capitalist society however, after the nineteenth century, the need to control society’s sexualities led to an emergence of a discourse of sex that have shaped the population’s views and experiences of it. The above passage highlights the main points of Foucault’s argument in The Introduction to the History of Sexuality, that sex was transformed into a discourse intended to exercise greater disciplinary power over human

“Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explicit codes governed sexual practices, canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law” (37). These laws determined what was licit and illicit and established the foundational base for the perverse. The sexuality of children, criminals, those who liked the same sex, sodomists, people who had peculiar desires, etc., came under scrutiny, especially those who committed homosexual acts. Before the nineteenth century, a person could commit a sexual act without having a label, but with the discourse of sex came a persecution of sexualities and, “the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a type of life, a life form…nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality” (43). Homosexuality was their identity, a reality they must live in everyday. As soon as you performed a sexual act, you were defined as homosexual. Homosexuals were regarded as perverse, or abnormal, in need of clinical treatment and it is in this way that Foucault introduces the emergence of the discourse of science and medicine. Sex as an object of knowledge was a focus of discourses in medicine and the need to understand and research made sex an object of

The passage states that “sex gradually became an object of great suspicion,” (69) but suspicion in this context just means that sex became the object of interest, something that needed understanding in order to gain control over it. Medical examinations were a form of power that demanded attention and surveillance through constant observation and questions that demanded answers. “The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family reports…function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power” (45). This mechanism of power and pleasure can be described as the listener exercising power in examining and drawing out his subject’s sexual pleasures. This power gives him pleasure. This constant process is what defines what Foucault calls “the perpetual spirals of power and pleasure,” (45) another mechanism of power that comes from the discourse of sex. Bringing to light someone’s pleasures is revealing their secrets, thus exercising power from a truth about their