STUDENTS' RESPONSES TO FOUCAULT, HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOL. 1
Foucault seems to believe that speech is performative, that it not only describes but also shapes and creates. Until the nineteenth century, there were no homosexuals, only homosexual acts. When sodomy was categorized into separate behaviors with distinct psychological motivations, all of a sudden someone's interior self was different from everyone else's. A man was no longer a man who happened to have sex with other men. He was someone who had internal differences, whose soul had blurred gender boundaries. The creation of the word "homosexual" changed the people it was applied to. (Julie Wroblewski)
I was intrigued by Foucault's reasoning on why it's important to us that we see sex as repressed. Essentially, it makes it easy for us to be rebellious, to claim power, simply by talking about it. All of a sudden, we are ten-year-old boys trying out dirty words and feeling cool because it's forbidden. Is this one reason why gay/bi/lesbian groups often embrace titles that brand them as sexual outlaws? People have reclaimed words like "queer" and "dyke," and often say that those words provide a source of strength and power. This has seemed perfectly logical and even admirable to me, but now I feel that it may be the easy way out. (Julie Wroblewski)
Foucault unequivocally connects sex with power, and he put me to thinking about a book by Andrea Dworkin, called Intercourse, in which she argues that all heterosexual sex is rape because of power inequalities. But there are always power inequalities between two people, no matter what their sex--and neither author addresses what to do once we've considered these ideas. (Julie Wroblewski)
For Marx and Engels, communism is the movement that "abolishes the present state of things" and allows for a universal discourse (German Ideology 257). Foucault, despite his connections to Marx, is not searching for the universal discourse, but rather trying to understand how and why all the different discourses have emerged--from what non-universals they have sprung. Yet-- and this is a big question for me--Foucault is not as dispassionate as all this would suggest. He seems very uneasy with the "intensification of intervention of power" that has led to the multiplication of discourse (311). In short, Foucault seems mad, angry--at whom, it isn't clear--but mad nonetheless. (Steve Rodgers)
With all that we've siad about the relationship between speech and writing, it's ironic to read so many interviews with Foucault. The dialogue of Socrates and Phaedrus resembles an interview, probably with Socrates as the subject, since he does so much of the talking. So . . . how is an interview that has been edited for publication different from a dialogue? Speech and writing certainly become indistinct from one another in the example of published interviews. (Chris Schatz)
I want to know where The History of Sexuality fits into the late- twentieth-century development of heightened queer awareness and theory. I noticed that Foucault described the Victorian opinion of homosexuality in considerable detail; his treatment of present-day attitudes doesn't appear in this essay. Not having read other queer theory from this period, I am wondering where Foucault could be placed on a spectrum of queer theorists. Is he progressive? conservative? moderate? indifferent? all? none? some? how? (That's my own attempt at Derridean flippancy.) (J. P. Mohan)
What next?