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Foucault Taboo Analysis

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An important part of the representation of a society is the different social norms and taboos that govern its behaviour. The term “Taboo" is borrowed from the Tongan language and appears in many Polynesian cultures. In those cultures, a taboo often has specific religious associations. The word was brought back by Captain James Cook in 1777 after a long sea voyage to the South Seas and introduced into the English Language. "The word means simply to ‘forbid’ and can be applied to any sort of prohibition. Such prohibitions are present virtually in all societies” (Allan et al. 2). According to Freud, the word taboo has two different meanings. On one hand, it refers to something sacred, holy and on the other hand it means strange, dangerous, forbidden and unclethe truth behind the construction of the sexual identities in the society. Also he states that anyone who violates a taboo himself becomes a taboo as it is feared that he can prompt …show more content…

According to Foucault, sexuality is just a social construct and has been turned into a discourse which in turn is used to exercise control and maintain the power structure. We have to follow these rules laid down by the governing power or else we are considered to be deviants. Tracing back the history of sexuality, Foucault argues that homosexuality was born in 1870's. With this he means that in earlier times homosexuality was taken to be normal and not considered to be a crime. It was considered to be the behaviour of an individual instead of his identity. He further claims that individuals are not stable entities but they are formed through different discursive processes. Foucault further says that bisexuality is present in society from the very early period. It even existed in Greek period where it was not considered to be an offence. In chapter "A Problematic Relationship" of History of Sexuality Foucault brings out this tendency of bisexuality

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Sexuality and gender are often confused in society. Women and men have biological differences; from these differences societal establishments are created within a community, culture, and or race. In the article “Dude, Where’s Your Face?”, Brandon Miller presents a study in which the social networking profiles of male homosexuals represent themselves and how they depict partner preferences. As a result, it brings up the discussion whether this population of people is trying to fit in with societal norms.

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There has been an evaluation of sexual behavior over the past centuries, and it has demonstrated that there were acts that were considered taboo, homosexuality, bestiality and so on. Due to the emergence of most of the cultures, the history of sexual behavior shows an increase in the collective supervision of sexual abuse, moral codes were developed in the process. The sexual activity of some cultures have been “detailed in art, literature, poetry, mythology, and theater”(pg. 24). Even same-sex behavior was actually displayed in visual arts.

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Clearly, homosexuals were not a topic of conversation. Because people ignore this alternate lifestyle, teenagers like Sedaris feel like they must hide their inner longing. In turn, Sedaris tries to distract himself from thinking about being homosexual. He states, “It was my hope to win a contest, cash in the prizes, and use the money to visit a psychiatrist who might cure me of having homosexual thoughts” (48).

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In the book, Fahrenheit 451, books are considered a major taboo. Anyone who has one will be taken in and questioned, and the book will get burnt, and in some cases, the person themselves get burnt. In the event that you have a lot of them, they burn your house that you worked so hard to buy. The main character, Guy Montag has been having a hard time with this law, since he wants in order to know whether it’s considered lawfully right or not. Then comes a 17 year-old girl named Clarisse.

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Therefore, the standard table manners were completely ignored in my misuse of the utensils. In addition to Garfinkel's concept of ethnomethodology, this breaking of a social norm experiment can be analyzed in terms of Erving Goffman’s impression management. Goffman says that people are very much concerned with two types of the presentation of self, verbal and nonverbal communication. Also, people try desperately to manage how they are presented in society in order to control what people think of them and their roles in certain social situations. In regard to my experiment, I tried to give the impression of normal behavior so I would not draw attention to myself.

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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.

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Sedgwick in her Epistemology of the Closet, claims that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole 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).The author 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 of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (1). Sedgwick is aligning with some of the arguments that Butler also addresses in her work, she is tackling the constraints of binaries and the rigidity they imply. Sedgwick abounds in that statement saying that “the appropriate place for the critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomophobic theory” (1). The epistemology of the closet is the: [i]dea that thought itself is structured by homosexual/heterosexual definitions, which damages our ability to think.

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Foucault came up with propositions regarding sexuality. He consistently argued that it is of the essence to comprehend passion in what he defined as power rather than just understanding sexuality regarding the law, countering the repressive hypothesis. In trying to analyze the existing relationship between history, energy, and knowledge, Foucault came up with four rules that were consequently applied in the comprehension of sexuality including the provision of immanence, the state of continual variations, the practice of double conditioning and the rule of tactical polyvalence of the discourses. In analyzing the rules, a question arises; why does Foucault believe that these rules are vital in understanding sexuality?

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Sexuality is one of those feelings that you are born with. Different cultures and religions have their own definition of sexuality. It's not something that you choose, it's a natural physically, emotional, and sexual attraction to male, female, or even both. For centuries it is believe by some cultures that if you weren't heterosexual then you have a mental disease and considered abnormal. Foucault believed that power is persuasive, multi-faced, and is not already planned.

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Though he could not be explicit in his representation of homosexuality or queerness, in the

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