Foucault The History Of Sexuality Analysis

Body And the Visibility Discourse

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault discusses how identity gets formulated by various discourses. The subject of discourse gets restrained within a certain kind of identity which the discourse heaps upon it. During the nineteenth century, the homosexual but not the heterosexual “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life form, and morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology” (Foucault 1976: 43). This suggests that the modern state with its state apparatus’ had the potential to recognize and had invested in recognizing the homosexual unlike the heterosexual counterpart. Since this kind of sexuality was an aberration, and

Recently, it has been re-appropriated for political purposes to further gay and lesbian rights and movements. But the articulation of “queer” or queerness that these movements and queer theories have come up with has facilitated the inclusion of a wide range of people with a wide range of fetishes and sexual practices. When the discourse of the visibility of queer bodies comes into play through political activism, a previously derogatory term is reclaimed. Because visibility is central to the idea of identification and categorisation as it is to social processes. That is why, in a specific political context, the reclaiming of the word queer came to stand in opposition to not only the hetero-normative but also other ways of defining heterosexual categories. The visibility of queer bodies and the definitions that are described to such visible bodies goes further than simply identifying gay and lesbian bodies. The act of ‘coming out’ shapes the understanding of queer visibility, especially for political and social agendas. Leo Bersani’s work “Is the rectum a grave?” assesses the mode of visibility that the discourse of AIDS utilizes in order to “represent” gay men as vessels of venereal diseases and sexually promiscuous and insatiable beings. This is indicative of the violence of definitions of maleness and homosexuality as they are promulgated in a heterosexist discourse of a phallocentric patriarchal society. What this violence does is that it tries to assimilate homosexual and queer practices to normative rationalities such as the adoption of hetero normative models of monogamy by homosexual partners as the model of positive influence of the discourse around AIDS. The rhetoric used for