Lust and power: Foucault’s The History of Sexuality at 50
Modern societies, argues Michel Foucault, think and talk about sex far more than their forbears ever did. But this has not been liberating.
In 1976, Michel Foucault released the first installment of his critically acclaimed The History of Sexuality series, The Will to Knowledge. The four-volume work sparked significant discussion and debate about contemporary understandings of sexuality in modern societies. Foucault's analysis revealed the ways modern power functions primarily through surveillance and categorization, often embedded in the very architecture of buildings we live and work in.
This surveillance, he argued, facilitates ongoing monitoring and classification of individuals and their behaviors.
Foucault challenged the notion of societal repression as the main barrier to sexual self-expression, instead asserting that modern societies engage in far more discourse and reflection about sex compared to past generations. He posited that our modern preoccupation with sexuality stems from internalized discourses from various disciplines, including psychology, medicine, and other fields, which claim to provide profound insights into our desires and identities.
According to Foucault, the West has not merely incorporated sex into a realm of reason, but has instead made our bodies, minds, individuality, and history susceptible to a language of desire and concupiscence.
During the 19th century, humanities such as medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and penitentiary systems began to scrutinize various aspects of sexuality, including the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, and criminals. These disciplines introduced new experts, diagnostic tools, and therapeutic practices. As a result, the focus shifted to areas such as child sexuality, madness, and criminality, with biological and reproductive concerns becoming subjects of vital political interest in modern nations.
Foucault introduced the term "biopolitics" to describe how modern institutions seek to exercise control over all facets of human life, or "bios." Unlike earlier forms of power that primarily prohibited aberrant conduct, biopolitics involves societies devoting substantial resources to optimize the productive and reproductive capacities of populations.
These modern institutions employ administrative or medical experts who operate in anonymity within public or private bureaucracies, wielding power that does not necessarily take lives away, but rather "brings life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations."
Foucault's argument in The Will to Knowledge suggests that the modern obsession with sexuality is not liberating, but rather leads to numerous anxieties, diagnoses, forms of objectification, and self-monitoring, which were absent in previous societies. In his later works, particularly the fourth volume, Care of the Self, Foucault argued that our preoccupation with sexuality is rooted in the Christian age, where many forms of sexuality were deemed sinful.
However, Christianity intensified attention on sexual lives through practices like confession and public penance, effectively intensifying scrutiny of individuals' sexual behaviors. The modern preoccupation with sexuality, Foucault contends, is a result of the "analytical and continual verbalization of thoughts carried out in the relation of complete obedience to someone else," a concept originating from Christian confessions.
This shift can be seen as the medicalization and scientization of Christian confessional practices, where father confessors have been replaced by therapeutic professionals, and the Holy Church has been replaced by secular nation states and large tech companies collecting data on the intimate lives of populations.
Written by urgent.news from The Conversation AU's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
