Michel Foucault and The History of Sexuality
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Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, can definitely be considered a feminist, if one sees feminism as a search for truth about human nature, relationships, and the role and function of power in defining one's identity (including one's sexuality). Foucault argues that since the eighteenth century Western civilization has increasingly become obsessed with talking and thinking about sex as a subject, rather than partaking of "bodies and pleasures" (157). Feminism certainly posits that a woman to be authentically alive must overcome alienation from her body, whether that alienation is imposed upon her by an individual male or by "power" as it is exercised by the entire structure of society. This generalized sense of power is what Foucault posits as the controlling force behind the history of sexuality and the accompanying increase in public discourse about sex. This "deployment of sexuality" (157), says Foucault, has hypnotized people, as a function of power, into believing that they were once repressed sexually but have now achieved a state of sexual liberation. Foucault's analysis of power (whether social, economic, political, or all three) relates that power to this "deployment of sexuality" and argues that "we must abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression" (49). Foucault asks why, if people are no longer repressed, the public discourse on sex continues to focus on this repression. His answer is that peo
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he relations of power which historically not only favor males but keep women alienated from power and from their own sexuality and selves, then Foucault is a strong ally of feminists.
Foucault's book is meant to be a wake-up call to any individual who would believe that the deployment of or discourse about sex has anything to do with sexual or any other variety of "liberation" (159). At length at the end of the book, he imagines a future generation looking back at the present generation and "wondering" what it was thinking as it boasted about having been the first generation truly liberated from sexual repression. Foucault's entire argument seems to be that the relationship between power (social, political, economic), the drive to acquire knowledge about what sex is, and sexuality itself is one which conspires to drive the life out of the actual body and its actual pleasures. What is so ironic to Foucault is that the people see this obsessive discourse as liberating when in fact it is enslaving and alienating. In that respect, he can be seen as issuing a challenge to feminists who imagine that they have won more than they have in the realm of sexual liberation. Obsessively talking about overcoming sexual repression, in other wo
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Approximate Word count = 1350
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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