Sexual Citizenship

The Material Construction of Sexualities

David Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134932221
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This enthralling and provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It argues that all varieties of sexuality under capitalism are materially constructed out of the complex interrelationship between the market and the state. The examples of different sexual rights and lack of rights that it examines include the experience of male homosexuals, bisexuals, transvestites, transsexualists and children. Meticulous, focused and challenging, it will be required reading for anyone interested in modern human sexualities.

1

SEXUALITY AS DISCOURSE AND SCRIPT

It is quite true. Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,

their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

(Bartlett 1988:190)

At the time of his death in 1984 Michel Foucault had completed four of his planned six volumes on the history of sexuality in Western civilisation (Foucault 1981, 1987, 1986, 4th vol. unpub. but see ‘The battle for chastity’ in Kritzman 1988), an exploration of the history of subjection in terms both of the creation of the subject and the internalisation of normative control into the deepest recesses of subjectivity: the sexual. As such it was an exercise which required ‘a reconceptualisation of the logic of history’ (Poster 1984:127) in the particular instance of the sexual, as well as ‘a re-elaboration of a theory of power’ (Foucault 1981:187).

Once past the first volume: La Volonté de savoir or The Will to Know which addressed the modern world, ‘a sort of prelude to explore the keyboard, sketch out the themes…to see how people react’ (Foucault 1985:8),¹ Foucault’s focus on the sexual part of the equation weakened temporally and thematically, being used in the subsequent volumes’ dense examinations of antiquity as the means of exposition rather than the object. It is this first volume therefore which has most influenced analyses of sexuality in the modern world.

Throughout The Will to Know Foucault is at great pains to undermine all notions of power in the formal juridical sense of negative constraints located in laws and legal institutions; as something which excludes, prohibits and punishes. Rather, power is an all pervasive, normative and positive presence, internalised by and thus creating, the subject. Indeed, the subject seems not to exist outside of immanent patterns of normative knowledge derived from language, objects and practices, i.e. discourses. ‘Subjectivity’ in the Foucauldian sense is always discursive, it refers to general subject positions, conceived as empty spaces or functions occupied by particular individuals in the pronouncement of specific statements.² We are what we learn, internalise and reproduce as knowledge and the language through which it is understood. We are subjects of the power immanently installed in that knowledge.

In his earlier The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), Foucault argued that discourses operate through rules of exclusion and classification, which determine discourse content; what is to be excluded, included, privileged, disqualified and why, as well as by rules governing the who, when and where of their use. In The History of Sexuality these rules have become less formally identifiable, discourses and discursive power seemingly altogether less substantial but more insidiously pervasive. However, the same patterns of power/knowledge exclusion, classification and aptness, constructing rather than sanctioning or banning the sexual, may be discerned.

In Madness and Civilisation (1965) Foucault traced the systematic exclusion of the ‘insane’ since the eighteenth century through ever more elaborate classifications of madness, ‘into the realm of the Other, into a space previously occupied by death’ (Lash 1985:5). In Discipline and Punish (1977a) he demonstrated how within the prison system, power is exercised not solely in a prohibitive way, but more importantly imprints identities on categories of non-citizens set apart as ‘criminals’ or ‘delinquents’, and to categorically differentiate between them as ‘sex’, ‘high security’ or ‘political’ prisoners, etc. So too in The Will to Know this growing imperialism of a society seeking to attribute a social status and definition to everything, even the unclassifiable, eventually reaches precisely that, the epitome of the ‘personal’, ‘private’, ‘mysterious’ and natural, that which most naturally resists the cultural: sexuality, the most important source of identity for modern subjects, and therefore the ultimate means of their complete subjection.³

Thus this re-elaboration of a theory of power was simultaneously a demonstration of ‘how the subject is “created” by [the] power-knowledge complexes of history’ (Shiner 1982:387), and in particular how sexual subjects in modern societies are constructed out of their obsessive pursuit of ever greater knowledge about their innermost individual ‘essential’ sexual selves, ironically so, being that aspect of self considered to be the most resistant to explanation through discourse. Thus for Foucault

Sexuality…is not a domain of nature which power tries to subjugate, and which academic disciplines set out to explore. It is merely a name which one may give to a historical artefact— rather a … hybrid mechanism which links together the stimulation of the body, the intensification of pleasures, incitement to discourse, the formation of knowledges and reinforcements of controls and resistances to it.

(Hussain 1981:178)

It is precisely because sexuality is an historical artefact defined as a private ‘essence’ which transcends history and culture, and therefore unregulated by juridical power, which enables it to serve unrecognised as ‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of [immanent] power’ (Bailey 1988:118) in the modern world.

La Volonté de savoir raised its concerns in questioning terms. How have modern men and women come to regard their sexualities as the hidden secret of their beings? Why is sexuality at the centre of their struggle for the control of themselves and others? Why has sexuality become the central bearer of power relations in the second half of the twentieth century? Why do people believe that knowledge of their sexualities will provide them with true knowledge about themselves? What is the relationship between increasing knowledge of the sexual to sexual liberation? Is the history of sexuality a history of progress and if so of what kind? And so on.

That modern societies are increasingly sexualised is accepted, but dominant explanations in terms of the gradual ‘liberation’ of repressed innate instincts and desires, or of the granting by enlightened states of extended rights and freedoms to sexual minorities, are completely rejected; indeed for Foucault they are central to the deception. Possibly in disillusioned reaction to his first-hand experience of the so-called ‘revolution of desire’ (Weeks 1978:9) of Paris in 1968, Foucault argues that, as a social construct of transparent substance and clandestine detail, sexuality has become so ubiquitously part of our mundane everyday lives that to seek or to gain ‘liberation’ is merely to embroil us further in the discursive web rather than to free us from it.

All objects and human beings exist within relations of power even those who resist, who set their faces against what appears to be the norm (homosexuals to take one example) participate in the production of the norm in the very act of opposing it, by allowing the norm to be articulated against its abnormal opposite.

(Haug 1987:196)

Foucault’s frequent references to ‘counter-discourses’, ‘counter affirmations’, ‘reverse discourses’, may suggest forms of resistance but his analysis allows little if any room for them in any literal sense, as he himself acknowledged with some regret in his last writings (1978; O’Higgins 1982–3). ‘Counter-discourses’ exist but apparently as little more than demonstrations by subjects of their successful internalisation of knowledge/power and their ability to police themselves.

This post-eighteenth-century discursive explosion on and around the sexual was not confined to sexuality in the contemporary narrow sense but rather functioned as an instrument of domination in the modern regime of ‘bio-power’ which ^*group[ed] together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures and… [made] use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere’ (Foucault 1981:154).

Pre-capitalist societies were characterised by the ‘deployment of alliance’, their populations integrated through kinship, possessions and wealth in essentially static structures. Modern societies by contrast are characterised by the dynamic ‘deployment of sexuality’ with populations controlled by ever more specific definitions of sensations, needs of the body and qualities of pleasure. Whilst ‘bio-power’ has the narrowly sexual at its core, it opens out to a wider focus on the body as a machine, its ‘disciplining, the optimisation of its capabilities, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls’ (Foucault 1981:139).

Foucault’s unwillingness to do more than credit the emerging bourgeoisie with almost inadvertently ‘discovering’ this bio-political focus due to its interest in wealth, self-preservation and inheritance, is tantalising, but his purpose is clear; all of us, no matter how much we may apparently differ in our tangible and formal powers, are but bit players in the grand march of discursive history.

‘Bio-power’, he argues, emerged simply as health improved and more people lived longer.

Death was gradually ceasing to torment life so directly. … Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life. … For the first time in history no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.

(Foucault 1981:142–3)

While death still tormented the lives of the poor, there emerged amongst the rich the later pervasive belief that it was in the public interest to manage the body, and through the body, the population; its birth rates, marriage rates; its health or proneness to illness and disease, sexual disease in particular; the protection of its children’s innocence; the need to identify manifestations of threat, abnormalities, deviations, etc., not managed in a juridical sense, or solely through ‘expert’ discursive practice, but through normative infusion into everyday knowledge and experience.

Precisely who manages and intervenes and who is thereby managed is not of importance, for Foucault effectively dispenses with the human subject as ‘sovereign’ creator or bearer of historical continuity. Whilst conventional liberal conceptions stress independent individual sovereignty bound by rights in public, and respectfully unregulated by juridical laws in private,⁴ Foucault’s ‘sovereign’ subject is no more than the complex product of colonising discursive knowledge. As sexuality has pervaded modern societies, human subjects’ increased obsession with the sexual has been not as self-determining beings but as beings in sexual subjugation, if not cultural dopes, cultural dupes, culpably passive in the face of this discursive onslaught, unable to escape its consequences.⁵

…the subject is merely a derivative product of a certain contingent, historically specific set of linguistically infused social practices which inscribe power relations on human bodies. Thus there is no foundation for critique oriented around the notions of autonomy, reciprocity, recognition, dignity and human rights.

(Fraser 1983:56)

Foucault reached the construction of sexual subjects as ensnared receptacles by way of his critique of the dominant ‘repressive thesis’ as most prominently promulgated by Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysis (Freud 1905), the Freudo-Marxist syntheses of Reich (1961, 1969), Marcuse (1964, 1969) and by such conventional histories as Marcus’ The Other Victorians (1966). This thesis, which assumes the existence of ‘human nature’, the natural subject and sexuality beyond the constraints of language and culture, proposes that prior to capitalism there had been relative freedom and openness about all manner of sexual forms including the illicit. However, from the transition onwards and with gathering momentum through the nineteenth century especially, sexuality had become increasingly repressed by prohibition, denial and censorship, subordinated to the procreative function within conjugal monogamy where it was addressed in terms of secrecy, silence and euphemism. Sexuality was obliterated from cultural recognition, forced into the collective unconscious.

Proponents’ explanations of this developing ‘repression’ tend to be developed out of the recognition of a simple conjunction:

By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism; it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.

(Foucault 1981:5)

Thus it is argued that capitalism required an efficiently exploitable, reproductive, malleable, undistracted labour-force with non-procreative ‘wasteful’ sexuality repressed, the mode of production dictating a particular mode of reproduction in turn dependent upon a culture of silence about the sexual.

For radical commentators such as Reich and Marcuse, sexual liberation therefore becomes a necessary concomitant to any general revolutionary programme, whilst for liberal critics the twentieth century has witnessed, especially within neatly packaged notorious decades such as the Roaring Twenties and the Permissive Sixties, the progressive relaxation of earlier repressive sexual and moral constraints. Thus, as Poster relates, a conventional view is that during the Roaring Twenties:

popular culture in Europe and the United States shifted away from the pre-war Victorian ethos of respectability and rushed towards a more uninhibited way of life, one that acknowledged openly the pleasures of the flesh. In the context of the Roaring Twenties, psychoanalysis was taken as a support for overturning constraints on sexuality. Freud appeared to demonstrate the validity of the new middle-class ethos; restrictions on sexual activity were harmful mentally and physically.

(Poster 1984:121)

Foucault’s counter-hypothesis not only rejects the history of ‘repression’, but also dismisses ‘liberation’ for, ‘the irony of this deployment of sexuality is in having us believe that our “liberation” is in the balance’ (Foucault 1981:159). Rights language and sentiments merely mystify the processes of social domination, falsely constructing autonomous self-determining subjects.

In particular, Foucault attacks Freudo-Marxist syntheses. As Morris has noted (1982), Reich and the early Marcuse believed not only that a sexual input into radical politics was essential but that it would secure a popularising impact, as indeed was fleetingly suggested during the late 1960s when both attained transitory ‘guru’ status amongst the radical young. The view was that the ‘affirmation of our sexual repression is perhaps the one way left, given the experience of history, to discreetly associate the revolution and happiness, or the revolution and pleasure’ (Morris 1982:267). On the contrary Foucault, ‘nihilistic and despairing’ (Gandel 1986:121), asserts that our visions of freedom, liberation and our pursuit of perpetual spirals of pleasure are inevitably ‘complicit with the powers we would oppose’ (Gandel 1986:121); they manifest ‘a liberationist conceit, a millenarian blindness entangling us all the deeper in the networks to be escaped … [and] … a yearning for transcendence’ (Comay 1986:111).

Foucault’s bleak view, in its implications though not in its rejection of material forms, is akin to the pessimism to be found in Marcuse’s (1964) later presentiments of ‘one-dimensional’ liberation as no more than the manipulated frantic sensualism of ‘repressive desublimation’; having freedom to be immediately gratified (i.e. re-repressed) through the pursuit and consumption of commodified ‘false’ sexual needs and desires. Foucault’s rejection of liberation is more comprehensive and less concrete; ‘to dream of escaping from the system…is to long for a point of transcendental privilege (therefore in complicity with what we oppose); to participate in the system is to reconfirm our complicity once again and so on’ (Comay 1986:112), but it is his rejection of repression which marks his ‘complete re-conceptualisation of the logic of history’ (Poster 1984:127) for ‘what is peculiar to modern societies…is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum while exploiting it as a secret’ (Foucault 1981:35).

Given the all-pervasive nebulousness of these sexual power/ knowledge constellations can it be possible to identify any pattern to this exploitation? Foucault assures us that it is, claiming that four ‘great strategic ensembles or channels’ may be clearly discerned (1981:104–5).

1The hysterisation of women’s bodies, whereby female bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Sexual Citizenship
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 SEXUALITY AS DISCOURSE AND SCRIPT
• 2 SEXUAL RIGHTS AND COMMODITIES: THE MATERIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
• 3 THE 'PERMISSIVE' WATERSHED
• 4 HOMOSEXUAL CITIZENSHIP: ECONOMIC RIGHTS...
• 5 ...AND POLITICAL OBLIGATIONS
• 6 DUAL CITIZENSHIP? BISEXUALITY
• 7 TRANS-CITIZENSHIP: TRANSVESTISM AND TRANSSEXUALISM
• 8 EMBRYONIC SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP: CHILDREN AS SEXUAL OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS
• 9 PUBLIC AND PRIVATE: THE PARAMETERS OF FEMALE SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index