 as well. So there is a handout. There is one over there. There's a pile over there, and there's a pile over on top here. And I'm going to be referring to that a bit, so you will need to get one. The problem is I have really long quotes, and I can't fit them all onto one of these slides. So I put a lot of the quotes on the handout, as well as a kind of outline of the way I'm approaching Foucault's text. So one of the things that I'm trying to do for you today is to give you what I think his overall argument is, and that's because this is a really complicated text. And if you don't get what Foucault's saying in terms of his argument, then it's really hard to really discuss it well. And it's not the easiest text to get his argument out of, let's just say. And it's a bit of a convoluted argument too. So I want to make sure we avoid some of the common mistakes that people tend to have and look at what he does seem to be really saying, and hopefully that'll set you up for some good discussions in seminars this week. So that's the plan, and that's why I have a handout because the outline of his argument that's on the top, those boxes, that's basically the second half of my lecture, but I'm going to try to explain it in more detail. But that way you have it all in one place. Here's part of what he's responding to. Here's his response. Here's another part of what he's responding to. Here's his response, et cetera. And when all this stuff goes online, I'll also ask John to post a copy of this handout as well, so it's available for anyone there. Okay. So to begin, I want to look on the handout at a couple of quotes from Foucault and Freud. Now, you'll notice that's not an actual photograph of Foucault. There's a reason for that. Since these lectures are being video recorded and posted on YouTube, I have to be very careful about not using copyrighted images. Well, this is a copyrighted image, but it's under a license that allows me to reuse it. I could find no photographs of Foucault that were allowed to be used in this sort of public forum posted onto the web. This is a painting that someone did from a photograph of Foucault who kindly allowed it to be used in situations such as this. But later, I took some pictures of my own books of Foucault that have pictures of him, and hopefully that's allowed because it's my own picture. We'll see. Someone might think that's not okay. But we've got Foucault and Freud, and on the handout, I want you to skip the first quote underneath the boxes and go down to the second. Freud and Foucault on Secrets. And this quote from Freud is one that I talked about two weeks ago. Freud says, if it is true that the causes of hysterical disorders are to be found in the intimacies of the patient's psychosexual life, so hysteria is caused by some sort of intimacy, some sort of hidden thing in their psychological and sexual life, and that hysterical symptoms are the expression of their most secret and repressed wishes, then the complete exposition of a case of hysteria is bound to involve the revelation of those intimacies and the betrayal of those secrets. So that's in a nutshell, Freud's response or Freud's idea about the secrets within our psyches and why sometimes we may have to expose those because they could be causing symptoms, like hysterical symptoms. And once we bring those ideas to consciousness, they can be expressed in other ways and the symptom will go away. Well, I noticed again on this reading of Foucault as I've read it many, many times before, but especially in connection to what we just read with Freud, I noticed that the word secrets appears over and over in this text by Foucault. And maybe that's because I've made it a theme of my Freud lecture and so it just stood out to me. But here's one place where Foucault talks about secrets, the next quote under Freud and Foucault on secrets. This oft-stated theme that sex is outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the wave leading to it is precisely what needs to be examined. So Freud's very idea that sex is something hidden and secretive within us that needs to be divulged, that's precisely what needs to be examined. So he's questioning that idea of sex. Does it not partake of the injunction by which discourse is provoked? Is it not with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made to mirror at the outer limit of every actual discourse something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge? There, among other things he's talking specifically I think about Freudian psychoanalysis, that the idea that within us there is some kind of hidden secret about our sexuality that we are trying to repress, that is being kept down by our conscious or unconscious, probably psyches, so that we can't talk about it and think about it consciously. So therefore it's a secret, that whole idea is something that he's going to question. And in this quote Foucault says, thinking about sexuality as a secret in that way encourages us to talk about it. Thinking about it as something that's dangerous to keep hidden inside encourages us to talk about it. And as we'll see, part of his main argument in this book is about how we have not been repressing sexuality, we have not been keeping it under wraps, we have been talking about it more and more and more and studying it more and more and more. And one of the ways we encourage people to keep talking about it is to say you've got a hidden secret inside you that needs to come out, because it's dangerous if you keep it repressed. That's what is encapsulated in this quote. And then the second quote I want, set of quotes I want you to look at is on the back, Freud and Foucault on the spontaneous upward movement of what is repressed. This is not from Dora, this is two quotes from other texts by Freud. We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter pressure. That's from a text called repression by Freud. The idea here being that once things that you don't want to think about, often sexual things, once those are repressed into the unconscious, they keep exercising a pressure to move upward. They sort of want on their own to come out. This is the way that Freud talks about the return of the repressed. The repressed often wants to return. It's hard to keep down. And a similar quote from a different text called an outline of psychoanalysis. The unconscious has a natural upward drive and desires nothing better than to press forward across its settled frontiers into the ego and so to consciousness. So similar idea. And Foucault also questions this idea from Freud on page 60 in a slightly different context. That is when he's talking about confession, which we will look into in a bit more detail later. Foucault says, the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us. On the contrary, it seems to us that truth lodged in our most secret nature demands only to surface. That if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place. It sounds exactly to me like what Freud is saying. The violence of a power weighs it down and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. So here he's saying, yeah, it looks like the truth about our unconscious, about ourselves, about our sexuality that has been repressed just wants to come out, just has this voluntary movement. Well, it's not voluntary because it's unconscious and it's not an agent, but just has a natural movement to come to consciousness. Foucault diagnoses that and says, actually, we no longer perceive that as the effect of a power that constrains us. What he means is rather than those things just sort of wanting of themselves to come out, we've been subject to power relations that pull those things out of us that require that we speak about those things. And it's become so common that we no longer see that power anymore. We just think, oh, our unconscious desires need to come out. They just want to. And what Foucault is going to say is we've been subject to what he calls bio power, which is a very large category of different kinds of relationships between people, states, schools, employers, in which we are continually incited, asked, encouraged to talk more and more about sexuality. And in so doing, we are releasing that which seems unconscious and seems a hidden desire, but in a way is actually being pulled out of us by these power relationships. So those two quotes kind of encapsulate some of how Foucault questions what Freud is saying and kind of encapsulate important parts of his argument that we will get to in a more detailed fashion soon. Okay, these really have nothing to do with the book. That's why there's a question mark there. When I first saw, if I can remember back, you know, back in undergraduate or grad school or whenever I first read this text, I have this vague memory of looking at the title and going, history of sexuality. I wonder what that's going to be. What did you think it might be? History of sexuality. What could that be? You didn't know. Nobody had any thoughts before you opened the book. Text. In what sense? Well, okay, you don't have to go into any detail. Yeah, the way that different cultures, different time periods treat sex and sexual behaviors, that makes sense to me. Yeah. In which case, you might expect a bigger book than this, because it's only 150 pages. And are we going to cover all of human history in 150 pages? Well, first of all, let me say that this text is kind of like an outline of what he says he's going to do later. It's a short text because he claims he's going to go into a lot more detail on things like studying the hysterical woman, the child's sexuality, the perversions. So this is kind of an overview. So really, if you were to do deeply the study he was going to do, it should be longer. But it doesn't even do what I thought, which is the same as what you guys were thinking. Just the title might mean to me. The title would mean to me, well, let's look at ancient Greece here. Let's look at the man bargaining for sex. What was sexuality like in ancient Greece? What was allowed? What was disallowed? In what sense could men and boys have sexual relations? In what sense was that considered a problem? How was that connected to male and female sexual relations? So we could look at that in Greece. We could look at that in other cultures. And then we could look forward into the medieval times. This is how Ramon and Melusina were betrothed and by the bishop were blessed in their bed on their wedlock from the 15th century. And how religion plays into sexuality. We could look at that. That's not what we've got here, right? We don't have this story of different cultures and different time periods talking about sexuality. We do a little bit, but I'm not that much. More, I think what this book is, is a history of sexuality as a concept itself. And specifically, sexuality as it is understood in the past couple centuries in the West. Because Foucault never says, I'm going to also look at how sexuality is treated in other parts of the world. There's one part of the text where he claims maybe a different view of sexual pleasure has been followed in Eastern culture. But most of what he's talking about is in Western culture. And there's a reason for that. Foucault wants to talk about the things that now today to him and those around him, this is written in 1976. The things that are important to them, what sexuality means to them, and he wants to question, does it have to mean that? How did it come to mean that? Could it mean something different? So he's not trying to do an overarching history of all different cultures and time periods. He's trying to do a history of what sexuality has meant to particular people at a particular time. And then the history of how that happened. So he's writing in France, 1976. So he's going to be looking at what they thought, and maybe we still think today, sexuality means. And looking at that history. So here's a quote from Foucault. Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given. Something that we are just sort of born with or something that's just a naturally part of a human body, which power tries to hold in check or as an obscure domain, which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct. So the deep claim here is that our ideas or at least theirs in 1976 of sexuality are historically constructed. That they came to be, whatever concept we have of what sexuality is, that came to be at a certain point. And for a certain historical process led to that. And that also means we can think differently. Sexuality, if it is not something absolute, naturally given, we can think differently about it. And a similar quote on page 68. Nearly 150 years have gone into the making of a complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex. It is this deployment that enables something called sexuality. Again, the sexuality in scare quotes, this thing that he says it's something called sexuality indicates that it's something created. It's something that we have produced and that we could produce differently. It is this deployment that enables something called sexuality to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures. So what is he doing? Why is he doing a history? I mean, I'm still sort of looking at the title of the book and what it's doing. But why is he doing a history of sexuality? Could just sort of look at, you know, how is it that we think of sexuality today? The history part is important because for Foucault, what history can do is to, as he puts it, make things more fragile. It's a matter of making things more fragile through a historical analysis. And what that means is if you can show that some belief, some value, some concept, some kind of activity or practice has a history that it was produced at a certain time, it was accepted at a certain time for certain reasons, then you could conceivably say, well, if we're different now, if the historical conditions are different now than they were when that was produced, maybe we can come up with a different practice, a different idea, a different concept, a different value. So it makes things more mobile. And that's what LC says in this quote. And this is an interview from 1983. It's a matter of making things more fragile through this historical analysis to show that what appears obvious to us is not at all so obvious. So the way that sexuality has been considered today, which might just seem obvious, he says, well, we don't necessarily have to think of it that way. It doesn't have to be obvious. I wanted to reintegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices in the historicity of some of these practices. This is a terrible sentence. That's a hard thing to understand. We reintegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices into the historicity of some of these practices and thereby rob them of their evidentiary status, and this is my favorite part, in order to give them back the mobility that they had and that they should always have. By mobility, I think he means changeability, could be different, alterability. So if we look at the history of these practices and see how they came about, we might think, well, we don't need that anymore because that came about for a reason that we no longer need today. But Foucault has a particular view of his role as an intellectual. So you're going to get, in this text, history of how he thinks sexuality has come about in the West, and you're going to get a sense, I think, although it's pretty subtle, of how he thinks there may be problems with that view of sexuality that we have today. But what we don't get is any alternatives. He doesn't suggest, well, yeah, this is the way we've thought about sexuality. Here's maybe why you could think it's problematic. And here's a different way of thinking about it. He doesn't go that last bit. Why? It's because of his ideas of the political role of intellectuals, and that's also on the handout on the back. And I won't read all of this. I'll leave the third one for you to read. But Foucault says, in a couple of interviews, here's an observation that people often make of my thought. You do not ever say what the concrete solutions to the problems you pose could be. You do not make proposals. And he says, I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions. My role is to address problems effectively, really, and to pose them with the greatest possible rigor, with the maximum complexity and difficulty, so that a solution does not arise all at once because of the thought of some reformer or even in the brain of a political party. The problems that I try to address, these perplexities of crime, madness, and sex, which involve daily life, cannot be easily resolved. It takes years, decades of work carried out at the grassroots level with the people directly involved, and the right to speech and political imagination must be returned to them. He claims that his role, when he's writing, is just to point out particular problems, to point out thorny issues, to say, for example, here, this is how we've thought of sexuality. This is why we have come to think of it that way. Here's a subtle hint or two as to why you might not think that's a good idea. And then leave you free to decide whether or not to do anything about that yourself. The people who are involved in these particular issues on the ground, at the grassroots level, are the ones who are supposed to decide what to do. He doesn't want to come in as an intellectual sort of from the top, from the realm of theory and history, and say, I, Michelle Foucault, know what you want to do. He wants those who are involved in battles around sexuality to figure out what to do. And then similarly, the next quote, if I don't ever say what must be done, it isn't because I believe there's nothing to be done. On the contrary, I think it is because I think there are a thousand things to do to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they're implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. There are a thousand things to do. People who are involved in struggles around sex and sexuality are the ones who need to decide what they should do in their particular circumstances with their particular issues that they're dealing with, and not Foucault. So you might find it a little frustrating by the end of the book when he doesn't say, here's how we have thought about sexuality. Here's a great way to do it instead. But that's why he doesn't do it. He leaves it up to us. And if we want to change or not, if we could decide that the way we've been thinking about sexuality is actually just fine. So maybe we just leave it as it is. Last thing about the title. You can get a lot from a title, I suppose. So this one is actually subtitled in French, The Will to Knowledge. And this is a picture of my copy of the book. That's why it's not such a great picture. And this is another big point in his text that we have a will to knowledge about sexuality that's going to turn into what he calls a scantia sexualis. And he wants to know why we are so concerned about knowledge, about sex, about developing a science of sex. And that's such a big theme in his book that in French, it's actually the subtitle. In English, what did the translator do? History of sexuality, volume one and introduction. So boring. That doesn't really bring out one of the main questions that Foucault has. We have a will to knowledge. We need to know about sexuality. We think it's something that's so important. We have to develop a science about it. Why? That's one of his big concerns that just gets dropped from the translation that we have. And we'll get into that a little bit later too. All right. What is sexuality? This is a history of sexuality. I find that term very vague. Anybody want to take a stab at it? What would you say sexuality is? Define sexuality. Maybe you guys find it as hard as I do. Sure. Hello. So would it be, would it include the sorts of people or objects sometimes that would be involved in sexuality that would be involved in your sexual activities, but also your desires, your activities. So it's going to include that. Anything else? What would sexuality be? Sometimes we talk about it today in terms of sexual orientation, right? That a person's sexuality includes the type of people, the sex of the people that someone is attracted to, or that someone has sexual relations with. But I don't want to say that that's all that Foucault is talking about in this book about sexuality. He's not simply talking about homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, though that is part of it. He's also talking in wider terms, as Ola mentioned, about your general sexual desires and pleasures that are even beyond the type of person you would want to do those things with, but could also include the kinds of activities you like to do, whether you want to do those with certain objects or what have you. All of that would be part of sexuality. If Foucault gives some examples of what he means by sexuality, early on in the book, which 43 and 47. So in 43, here he's talking about the 19th century and the different kinds of sexualities, some of them that were created in the 19th century. So in the bottom of 43, there were crafts, ebbing, zoophiles, and zoorasts. So these are people who get sexual pleasure out of activities with animals. Rolders, onomonosexualists, those who only get sexual pleasure from themselves. And later, mixoscopophiles, that is voyeurism, so people who get sexual pleasure from watching others. Gynecomasts, which is actually a description of men who have large breasts. Presbiophiles, which is those who are attracted to old people. Sexo-aesthetic inverts, which is now called cross-dressing. And dispar... I don't know how to say this. Disparionist women, women who have pain during sex. So these are just some of the things that were created in the 19th century, some of the categories that were created in the 19th century. But when you look at this, this is not just like the sex of the person that you're attracted to. This includes, you know, those who get sexual pleasure from activities with animals, those who just do it with themselves, those who like to look, those who have large breasts when they're men. That's an interesting thing to put into a sexual category. Women who have pain during intercourse, that's an interesting thing to put into a sexual category. So the idea of sexuality in this book, you start to get a sense that it's a pretty wide category. It includes sexual activities, but it also includes discussions about the type of body you might have. Physiological expressions of pleasure or pain in that body having to do with sex. There's one other list of, at least that I found recently, one other list of sexualities on page 47, bottom paragraph. And this again is from the history, this is from the 19th century and early 20th century. The manifold sexualities, those which appear with the different ages, sexualities of the infant or the child, those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices, the sexuality of the invert, which is what is now called homosexual, the gerontophile, which is also love of older people, the fetishist, which is having a sexual obsession about a particular kind of object or part of the body. Those which in a diffuse manner invest relationships, the sexuality of the doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient, and those which haunt spaces, the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison. That's a lot of things that have sexuality. That is, types of people, what they do to get sexual pleasure, different ages, so infants have a sexuality, adolescents have a sexuality, women have a sexuality, men have a sexuality, these might be different. The sexuality of relationships, doctor and patient might have a sexual component to their relationships, and the sexuality of institutions, schools, prisons, home. That one is interesting. Foucault also does mention, and let me find exactly where that is. Hold on because it's a little later in my notes. Yeah, around page 27 and 28 in this book, I won't read anything from it. Around page 27 and 28, Foucault says that even the discussion of the architecture of schools can express a concern about sexuality. You can have a layout of the school that makes sure that children are not able to congregate by themselves in dark places without teachers observing them, so that you couldn't have sexual activities going on there. In another text, not this one, Foucault describes a school in which the lavatories have doors that only are like from here to here so that the teachers can make sure to see the heads and the feet of the students, so that wrong things are not going on in there, and that the walls on the sides are high enough that the students can't just look over at each other. And Foucault says there's clearly a concern about sexuality going on in the architecture, so even there's a kind of sexuality in the design of buildings, which makes the whole term sexuality start to come apart for me. There's so many things that can be included in sexuality in this book. I had to just come up with my own. This is what I think we can say sexuality is in this book. There's probably more to it than this, but this is one way to think about it. It seems to refer to some aspects of individuals and relationships, because you can have sexuality between two people. That includes physiological organs and systems, genitals, hormones that are functioning, mental things, desires, feelings, fantasies, pleasures, and then the outward activities and behaviors that one engages in. So it's sort of a conglomeration of physiological, mental, and then actional or behavioral. So when we talk about the sexuality of a person, it's a pretty big, unifying thing collecting all of those aspects, some physiological aspects, some mental aspects, some aspects of their behavior. And maybe there's more to it than Foucault says, but that's what I'm going to use. Now, when he says sexuality is historically constructed, sexuality is not a natural given. One of the things I think he means is that putting all of this stuff together into a category called sexuality and then labeling people as having this or that kind of sexuality. Fetishists, auto-monosexualists, although I don't think that word is used anymore, voyeurists, heterosexual, homosexual, that that idea of classifying people according to categories by putting all of these disparate parts of the person into one thing we call sexuality, that's what I think he thinks is constructed, is historically constructed. Because we could just look at people as having different feelings, different thoughts and different activities, but we put some of those together as sexual and others are not. But do we have to? This is part of our sexuality, but this is not. We have to separate out a whole aspect of a person that is just sexuality. And then do we need to put people into classifications on the basis of that? Sexuality also, Foucault says, is considered an important part of one's identity. Once we are classified or classify ourselves as a certain kind of sexual being, as having a certain sexual identity, or sexuality I should say, then often this is taken in by people to be an important part of their identity, that I am this kind of person. Now some of the negative ones, like pedophilia, a person is probably not going to take that on as a part of their important identity. They're probably going to want to get rid of that, I think. But something like homosexuality, a person may very well take that on as an important part of their identity and say that is a crucial aspect of who I am. Right? So let's just get some examples for today. In 1976 when Foucault was writing, there are sexualities. In 2013 and 2014, what year is that? 2014, there are perhaps even more sexualities. There are different sorts of names and labels and words and identities than may have existed even then. So I looked up a few of these. There's way, way many more sexual identity categories that I'm going to list here. The icon there is polyamory, which I'll talk about in a minute. These three are the ones you hear most. It's homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality. Those are the most common that people talk about or identify as. But there are plenty more. Androphilia and gynephilia or gynecophilia. Those are similar to heterosexuality, homosexuality or bisexuality, except that androphilia is a love of or an attraction to males, but it doesn't say whether the person themselves is male or female. Gynecophilia is a love of or attraction to females, but it doesn't refer to whether that person themselves is male or female. So if you notice, heterosexuality and homosexuality refer to both the object of who you're attracted to and who you are. And some people are now questioning whether we need to even hold ourselves to a particular sex ourselves. Do I need to say I am just a female? Is it so important to distinguish between male and female? Maybe I don't want to identify myself that way, but I am attracted to males. You could say that. Henssexuality, omnisexuality, that is I don't care less about the sex of my partner. Bisexuality, as I like both men and females, omnisexuality is a little bit different, and then they try to say I would rather just get rid of the whole idea of sex and gender. Just a person is a person. Polyamory. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the sex of the person that you are attracted to. It is more the idea that you don't have to have monogamous relationships. That love is something you can share with many people at the same time equally as long as everyone is fully consenting with informed consent. You would never do this if the other person didn't know. That's called adultery, right? If they didn't want you to be with other people and you did it anyway, that's different. Everyone knows what's going on and everyone is okay with it. There's no reason to limit your love to just one person. It can be taken on just as a kind of relationship or even some people take it on as this type of identity. I am a polyamorous person. That is my sexual identity. Lastly, just for now, asexuality or nonsexuality. I hear this mostly called asexuality. I think that's a little less of a negative term. Nonsexuality is just an automatic negative. But asexuality refers to people who have taken on a sexual identity that says we are simply not interested in sex. We have love relationships. We have very close love relationships. We have affection for other people. But that does not express itself in sexual relations. In a way, this can be considered a sexual identity even though it's a sexual identity that denies the need for sexual activity. There's many different ways that one could have a sexuality today. And this is just a few, not even a partial list. And then in terms of science, in terms of the way that we have tried to get knowledge of sexuality and study it scientifically today, we certainly see a lot of that happening these days as well as in 1976 and the 19th century. Some more sexual categories. These are the disorders. This is from the DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that's used by Psychology, the American Psychological Association. And these are just a few of the sexual disorders. You've got exhibitionistic, which is showing, getting pleasure from showing your genitals. Voyeuristic, getting pleasure from... Let me get this right. Looking, spying on others in private activities. I'm looking at the DSM-5. Frateristic disorder, touching or rubbing against a non-consenting individual. Sexual masochism disorder, undergoing humiliation, bondage or suffering. Sexual stadium disorder, inflicting humiliation, bondage or suffering. Pedophilic disorder, sexual focus on children. Fetishistic disorder, using non-living objects or having a highly specific focus on non-genital body parts. And transvestic disorder, engaging in sexually arousing cross-dressing. Now, these are not necessarily... And this is a new thing with the DSM-5. They want to say that these things are not necessarily always bad, although some of them are, you know, pedophilia. But cross-dressing, not always bad. They're trying to say, look, this is only a disorder if you feel personal distress from it. Not merely distress resulting from society's approval, disapproval, because that's going to happen, even if you feel happy about your identity, but society doesn't. Or you have a sexual desire or behavior that involves another person's psychological distress. Pedophilia, injury or death. Or a desire for sexual behaviors involving unwilling persons or persons unable to give legal consent. So all of those things are going to make it a problem if you have a sexual desire. Now, why am I bringing up this thing here? This is partly to get us an idea of what sexuality means today, and partly to lead into what Foucault's going to say later about how we have developed, over the course of the last 200 years or so, a science of sexuality. That rather than not talking about sexuality, we've actually talked about it more and more. We talk about it so much in scientific studies of it. And now we have a bunch of information about sexuality. Now, I don't have the actual DSM-5 book. It's very expensive, I think. I just got bits of it from the internet. But I bet if I read through there, I would get tons of information from all the data that has been collected about sexuality. And that suggests, as Foucault says, we have not repressed sexuality. We have, in fact, opened it up and dug into it and gotten a will to knowledge about creating scientific studies of it. And we still do today. I'll skip that one for a moment. You can look at it later. And then, also, when Foucault says sexuality is considered an important part of one's identity, just here's a couple of examples from the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network website. And asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction, unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. So just an example of expressing the sense that one's sexuality is important to one's identity. And from the PFLAG Canada website, which is Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, sexual orientation and gender identity are important aspects of our overall identity. This kind of thing helps me with two quotes from Foucault that when I've read this in the past, I've been a little confused by it. I think he might mean something like this, but you can decide. On page 69, towards the bottom, he says, we demand that sex speak the truth, but since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, and we demand that it tell us our truth or rather the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness. We demand that sex tell us our truth or that deeply buried truth of ourselves that is hidden from us. But sometimes when I read this, I think, what does it mean by we demand that sex tell us our truth? I mean, how do I get my truth about myself from sex? There's a kind of odd thing to say, but if I think about it in terms of my identity, who I am, and that my sexuality, my sexual behaviors, my sexual pleasures, all that goes into who I am. And if I think of that as an important part of myself, then I can get it. And similarly on page 78, first full paragraph, in the space of a few centuries, certain inclination has led us to direct the question of what we are to sex. Let's direct the question of what we are to sex. Well, maybe, maybe, if we think of ourselves, if we think of our sexuality as an important part of an identity. But you could also think of Freud. And he is talking about Freud in this book quite often, even when he doesn't mention him by name. That for Freud, who we are, what's going on in our unconscious, what causes our neuroses, what Dora was dealing with, most of it had to do with sex. Sex is an explanation for a lot of our behavior for Freud. So there may be some of that going on in Foucault's text as well. Okay, before we do a break, I want to talk just briefly about Foucault himself. And this is where, you know, I've got pictures of my books of him. So I'm not putting these books up because the books themselves are things I think you should read. I just picked some books that have pictures of Foucault on the front. So these are his images of him with his head shaved, which I think he did pretty early on in his life. There are a few pictures available on the web where he has hair, but most of the pictures you'll see of Foucault are bald. And I think the one on the far right is a little bit younger than the other ones. But the one in the middle is a pretty famous picture, too. It's kind of funny the way he's looking at this. And the one on the left is that most happy picture I've ever seen of Foucault. It's not that he's not a happy guy, but many of the pictures are not quite that joyous. So he died pretty young. As you can see, he was actually just about 57 or 58. And that... he was one of the first sort of very famous people to die of AIDS in 1984. Not certainly the first, but one of the first that really came out later about being an AIDS death. And he was someone who was attracted to men and engaged in sexual relationships with men. And he lived with a man for most of his life and was very quiet about this aspect of his life outside of his small circle of friends, but it became much more well-known after his death, especially when it turned out that he had died of AIDS. But for his life, he was born and educated and lived most of his time in France, thus the French name. In his youth, he studied history and philosophy, but also psychology and the history of science. So he went to the École Normale Supérieure, sort of a very prestigious school in France that eventually would produce many university professors, which he became. And there he studied philosophy, history of science and psychology, and his degrees were in philosophy and psychology. Then in his youth, he also was a part of the French Communist Party for a while. So you can kind of get a sense of his politics. He was very left. And he eventually left the French Communist Party for various reasons. One having to do with something that they lied to him about. But after his education, he went on to teach in a couple of posts in France as a university professor, as well as in Sweden and then Poland, Warsaw, and then I think also in Germany, Hamburg. And he claims that he left France for Sweden in 1952, so he was still pretty young then. He claims that he left France because he was having a hard time with the social conditions in France. He says this in an interview. Freedom for personal life was very sharply restricted there in France. At this time, Sweden was supposed to be a much freer country. And the person who quoted this in one of a biography of Foucault who says it's probably a veiled reference to being able to live as a person who sleeps with men. In 1946, there was a law passed in France that only persons of good morality could be employed in the service of the state, including teachers in schools and universities, which meant that if people knew that you were attracted to and had relations to the same-sex person, you would not be hired as a professor or as a teacher. It turns out that he was able to do so anyway because of various connections that he had, friendships, et cetera, but officially he was not supposed to do so. In 1949, Paris passes a rule that says it is an offense for men to dance together in any public place or establishment open to the public. So these are just examples of things that show you what France was like. It's not as bad as it could have been, but it certainly isn't an open place. But he was in Sweden for a couple of years, and his post ended there, and he was sent to Warsaw to do some teaching. And there he had to leave his post because of a scandal involving a relationship with a man, even though homosexual activities were not illegal in Warsaw at the time. It certainly wasn't something that you were supposed to do as a public official, as a professor, a teacher, et cetera. So he ran into some persecution, not a huge amount during his life, but it did make his life somewhat difficult because of his sexual choices. In 1969, he was elected to what's called still the Collège de France, and this is a very prestigious type of school where what you do is you give a series of lectures every year on what you're researching to the public. They're free, anybody can go, and that's all you have to do every year, and the rest of your time is spent researching, and that's where he spent most of the rest of his life writing, researching, and giving public lectures. So when he would give lectures at the school, and he did so from 1970 to 1984, the rooms were packed. They had to have a second room and pipe the sound in because he was so popular. And he became an extremely popular intellectual in France who gave many, many interviews on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines. Much of the writing by Foucault that exists is not just in his books, but also in interviews because there are so many. And now, in the course of the last 10 years or so, almost all of the lectures that he gave at the Collège de France are now published in French and many of them in English as well. So now there's a whole new set of Foucault's texts that are in existence. In the 1970s, he formed a Prisoners Information Group. This is part of his political activities to help prisoners express their own views on what goes on in the French prisons and what needs are forming. So he was interested in making sure that conditions were good for prisoners. And generally had a Marxist outlook and generally a liberal outlook, though he did not fight for gay rights at any time during his life, perhaps to sort of keep that aspect of his personality hidden. And then in 1984, he dies in age 57 of an age-related illness. Not without publishing a huge amount of books, however, and this is just one of many, many texts that Foucault has written. Let's take a break. We'll get into the text from there. So let's do about five or six minutes or so, because I've got a lot to get through the argument of the text. Okay, so I'd like to set the stage a little bit for the beginning of the text, because in the beginning of the text, Foucault says things like page six and seven, page six, halfway down, first full paragraph. There may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression. If sex is repressed, that is condemned to prohibition, non-existence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such a language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power. He upsets the law. And then later, for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose. We are conscious of defying established power. Our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future. So there, and on page seven a little bit on page eight, he's trying to talk about people who speak about sex as if they are thereby transgressing rules. They are thereby being rebellious. They are thereby being revolutionary. And to some degree, he might be referring to things like the liberation movements that were occurring in the 60s and 70s. And there were lots and lots of liberation movements in North America and in Europe at this time, like women's liberation, feminism generally, trying to allow women to do more with their lives and be appreciated as equals, like racial concerns, so equal rights, civil rights for different races in different parts of the world. This particular picture is a gay rights demonstration in New York City in 1976. That was certainly going on at the time. There were also people just generally, if you've heard of peace and love and free love, sort of free love movements being people who were thinking that we shouldn't be held down to traditional visions of family and marriage, and might be more like polyamory today, where we should be more free to express our loves and our desires and our pleasures in different ways and not just be held to traditional sorts of institutions. That was pretty big at the time in the 60s and 70s. And just generally, you know, things like being able to have sex with contraception, the development of the birth control pill. Contraception for a while was illegal in many parts of the world up until the 60s or 70s in North America, at least. I don't know about the history in France exactly. But there were a number of, you know, freedom movements, rights movements, equality movements that had to do with sex in one way or another. And so when Foucault says we sometimes speak now of sex in a way that makes it feel like a revolution, in a way that makes it feel like we're transgressing, you know, the rules and the laws, I think these are the kinds of things that he's trying to talk about. And since we're not living in 1976 in France, it may be hard to keep that in mind. I had this wonderful picture last time I did this lecture of a bunch of naked people standing in a circle, but they were, it was taken from the back, so I could see where they're, you know, back sides, all holding up a sign or something that said free love. It was this wonderful picture, but it's copyrighted and I can't put it up here. But that's also the idea is this generally free love kind of thing. So that I think is where he's going to when he's talking about how people are thinking about sexuality in 1976. But that also gets us to the repressive hypothesis, and this is where I want to look at the handout and the boxes on the top. I think, though the second one refers to later on in the text, the first chapter is all about the one that's called We Other Victorians, and maybe we can talk in seminar about why it might be called that. That's kind of an interesting title, but that one is all about the repressive hypothesis. And if you get nothing else from this lecture, then this, get this, because this is the most common problem when people read Foucault. Foucault is not endorsing the repressive hypothesis. Foucault thinks the repressive hypothesis is somewhat problematic. I don't want to say he rejects it entirely, but he does criticize it. And sometimes it's hard to get that from the first chapter because the first chapter, he's just talking about it as if it is what we all believe. We think this, we do that, we think sex has been repressed. And then even in the start of the next chapter, he says, so, sex has been repressed from the 17th century onwards. So the way he writes can give you the wrong impression. Foucault says, we, meaning generally people around him, believe in the repressive hypothesis, but then he's going to go on to question it. And I've set out three parts of the repressive hypothesis on here. And the repressive hypothesis is just a word that he uses to say this is how sex, sexuality, and power have been considered by many people over the past couple centuries. And this is what I think is not quite right. So the first part on the left, since the 17th century, sex has been repressed and silenced by power, reduced to a single permitted form, the heterosexual couple for procreation. So the usual story, he says, how people tend to think of sex and sexuality over the past few hundred years is that maybe there was some more freedom in sex before the 17th or 18th century, but then the Victorians came around and we stopped talking about it. We stopped thinking about it. It was no longer something that was in the public. It was hidden away. And the only kind of sexuality and sex that was allowed was heterosexual activities precisely for the purpose of procreation. That's one idea about how sex has been treated that Foucault is going to question. And on the right, I've got Foucault's responses to all of these. But I'll just go down to the next part of the repressive hypothesis. Power operates on sex only negatively by prohibiting, rejecting, hindering, and blocking. So what he means there is people have thought that sex, sexuality, have been repressed, hindered, blocked, stopped, put in obstacles in the way by power relationships, whether they be the government, religion, rules telling you when you can have sex and when you cannot and where and how, morality, all of those things being part of power that restricts and represses sex. And he then has response to that as well. And number three, we should liberate ourselves from repressive power by recognizing, expressing, and acting on our natural and true sexual identities because repression of these is wrong and harmful. This to me sounds like Freud, that repression is something that hurts us, or at least I shouldn't say that entirely, because for Freud you have to do some repression of some of your unconscious desires and your id in order to exist in the world. But repression can lead to symptomatic developments, hysteria and neurosis. And when it does, you have to lift that repression in some way, you have to be able to accept that part of yourself in some way. So this part of the repressive hypothesis says instead of allowing power, morality, rules, laws, religion, whatever, to keep us from talking about and acting on our true desires about sex, we should liberate ourselves. We should have a sexual revolution. We should have free love. We should allow people to love who they want to and when and how. And the reason why I say Foucault doesn't completely neglect or reject this hypothesis is because Foucault doesn't think all that stuff is wrong completely. Number three, he doesn't think, oh, we should definitely keep sex under wraps and hide it and not allow people to act as they choose. He doesn't think that. What he thinks is that this story of how sex has been treated is incomplete. That this is going on. There is some repression of sex. People are not allowed to love who they want and when and how. But that is not all that has been going on about sex. And he wants to bring in another aspect of the story. Any questions on that so far? Is that sort of the basics of what he's going to respond to? Does that sound like the correct way to think about how sex has been treated in the past history? Do you feel like sex has been repressed and now we are finally liberating ourselves from it? Slowly? Yes. Actually, when Foucault says those things on pages six and seven about how when we talk about sex we speak as if we are doing something revolutionary, as if we are being rebels, as if we are transgressing the law and that gives us a sense of power and pleasure. I thought precisely of Freud in Dora where he says, and I don't have the page number on the top of my head, but he says something like, yeah, that there may be doctors and lay people who will read this and be shocked at what I have talked about with this young girl. But, you know, there's no need to be indignant. I'm just doing this in a scientific manner. There is no sexual interest going on. But he certainly does kind of present himself as being, you know, revolutionary. I'm breaking the codes on doing this thing beyond what you're supposed to do. And of course the whole idea of the repressive hypothesis really fits with what Freud is saying, right? That we have repressed too much of our sexuality. We're wrong with recognizing our incestuous or other desires inside and we need to pay attention to those and liberate those, to some extent, not that he thinks we should act on all of them. Okay, Foucault's overall response, like his general response to this story, this is not the whole story, I just said that. There's more to it than that, not that it's wrong, but that it's more complicated. And his sort of overall conclusion, which is I think one of the hardest things to get in the text, although there are numerous of the hard things, trying to liberate ourselves from repression as if we have some sort of true natural sexual identities. That, of course, remember for Foucault, sexuality and these sexual identities are not natural, they're historically constructed. They are things that get implanted in us through a scientific study of sex. So the idea that we have some sort of true and natural ingrained sexual nature is problematic to begin with, for Foucault, but trying to liberate that ignores how those identities themselves are produced by a form of power. And it's a form of power, he goes biopower. And we'll talk about that as we go on with the lecture today. So I think that's an important thing to get. Not only that sexuality is constructed for Foucault rather than something that's just natural to human beings, that this whole idea that we have a conglomeration of biological, physiological, mental, and activities that you can put together into a package called sexuality, that is a constructed idea. The sorts of sexualities that we claim to have, those are constructed largely through a scientific study of sexuality that operates through what he calls biopower. So I'm going to try to put all that together in the next little bit before we end. Okay, on the handout, I've got the numbers on the boxes. So when I say RH1, that's repressive hypothesis one. How does he respond to the idea that sex has been repressed and silenced by power? Well, on the contrary, of course, there has been a discursive explosion, a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex. Now, what does that mean? What are discourses? I think in this text Foucault simply means by discourses, things like medicine, pedagogy, political science, demography, so studying demographics, psychology. These are all different ways of talking about and studying phenomena around us. And usually, I think he's calling these sorts of things discourses. So he'll say, there's a medical discourse about sex. There's a psychological discourse about sex. There's a criminological discourse about sex, et cetera. So we've had lots and lots of different ways of speaking about sex. So it's not that we haven't talked about it. It's that, in fact, he says on page 33, let me find it, end of the first paragraph on page 33, it may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else. We set our minds to the task. We convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that through inertia or submissiveness we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence and that what is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out once again in search of it. It's possible that where sex is concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own. So it's not that sex has only been repressed, but it is true that people have not been able to do perhaps everything that they might want to do in terms of sex. Foucault himself felt a certain amount of repression and silencing of his own sexual desires and activities. So it's not that that isn't happening. But at the same time, there's a huge amount of study of sexuality. Medical, psychological, psychiatric, people studying populations, birth and death rates, criminology, how does sexual behavior relate to crime? There's been many, many discourses that have developed over the last couple centuries about sex. And some of these, he says, later on in the text, concern things like children's sexuality and masturbation, onanism, women's hysteria. These are four figures of kinds of people that have been studied in particular. Children, women with hysteria, the study and classification of abnormal and perverse sexualities, as well as, he says, later on in the text, the couple, the heterosexual couple, and whether they are having enough children, enough right kinds of children, et cetera. So over the course of the last couple centuries, these things and others have been really intensely studied and carefully focused on. Hysteria we've already looked at to some degree, but there was a lot more discussion of hysteria than just with Freud. The study and classification of abnormal and perverse sexualities, as we'll see in a minute, there were lists, huge lists of perversions of things that people were doing that was considered a certain kind of sexuality that developed over the course of the last couple centuries, and we still have it today in the DSM-5. So onanism, masturbation, just some examples of how Foucault says, this was studied intensely and not ignored. It's not that we ignored this issue of sex, it's that we were really concerned about it. So an anonymous pamphlet in the early 18th century called Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution and all its frightful consequences in both sexes considered with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice, that this was widely circulated, I'm not sure exactly why it was anonymous, but it claims that what onanism can do is cause illness, I mean, among other things, weakness, stunted growth, impotence, hysteria, barrenness, epilepsy, and vaginal discharge. You know, that one's not so bad. But many other terrible, terrible things. Similarly, this is also 18th century, 1760, Samuel Auguste Tistot. Onanism, a dissertation on the maladies produced by masturbation, says, masturbation includes, the problems with it include loss of strength, memory, headaches, blood in the urine, blurred vision, and numerous nervous disorders. The point is, and Foucault then goes on in parts of his text to say, people were not ignoring children's sexuality. They were very worried about it. They wanted to make sure that children were not doing the things they were supposed to do. And there were lots of books, and tracks, and pamphlets, and advice to parents on what to do about the situation, and how terrible it could be. I found this wonderful poster from the, I think it's from the early, no, probably early 20th century, but I couldn't really fit on a slide. But it had two paths for a boy. One path was where he, you know, at age 16, he's studying, and he's really a nice, normal kid. And at age 20, he's, you know, starting to get a job at age 35. He has kids, and everything's all good on this side. And on this side, what happens to him at age 16 is self-abuse and cigarettes. And then the rest of his life goes downhill at age 20. You know, he's into crime at age 35. He's penniless at age 60. He's dead. He's just because of masturbation, right? And cigarettes. Let's not forget cigarettes. So this was very, very much on people's minds. It was not ignored. Sexual perversions. This is Kraft Ebbing, whom Foucault mentions, I think, on page 43. This particular text, Psychopathia sexualis, is one that has a whole bunch of lists of various perversions. And, you know, late 19th century, fairly early. He believed, and a lot of people believed at the time, that there is a normal sexual instinct that is heterosexual, that directs your body to who you will be attracted to, male or female. And it can be perverted. It can be taken off track by things such as environmental causes, hereditary problems. You might get it from your parents. Or masturbation could also lead you into changing the direction of your sexual instinct towards a perversion. So things like zoophilia, love of animals, homosexuality was considered a perversion, sadism and masochism, pedophilia, et cetera. These things are still in existence. And Foucault's point is, it's happened over the last 200 years or so, not that we've ignored sex, but that we've actually started studying it very, very carefully. And we have talked about it a whole lot. And we have developed the sciences around it. And now we have created classifications for people about their sexuality. So it has not gone into hiding. It has come out even more. So with that, we've created a schientia sexualis. At least that's one way of announcing it in Latin. I don't know why he gives us a Latin term for it instead of just saying a science of sexuality. Interesting, but I just don't know. Because that's basically what it means. We've created sciences around sexuality. And in part, we've done so by using what he calls confessional techniques. And he says, this comes from the practice of Roman Catholic confession. He starts off really in the text saying, well, you know, for a while, in confession, you were supposed to confess your sexual acts insofar as they were sinful. You don't have to do all of them, because some of them are just fine. But later, in 16th century and beyond, the confession starts to focus on your inner thoughts, desires, and fantasies, not only on your activities. He doesn't say why this happens. He just notes it. That pretty soon, sex starts to become something more important. Important enough that we need to look into what you're thinking and what you're fantasizing about and what you're dreaming about, not just what you've done. This becomes important later in giving people their identity through sexuality. Because sexuality no longer acts. It's a matter of thoughts, feelings, emotions. It's a deeper part of who you are. And Foucault says this starts in confessional practices in Catholicism. And then, though again, he doesn't say how exactly or why, other kinds of discourses, other kinds of practices take on confessional techniques. Things like medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis take on something like a confessional type of technique. You can see it in Freud and there's this quote on the fronts of the handout. I should have put this on the back, but I was thinking of the lecture a little differently earlier. On the fronts of the handout, Freud and Foucault on psychoanalysis and Freud directly links psychoanalysis as a kind of confessional relationship. Here's the past that must be established between analysts and patients from Freud. Complete candor on one side and strict discretion on the other. This looks as though we were only aiming at the post of a secular father-confessor. But there's a great difference for what we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and conceals from other people. He doesn't do what he does not know. He is to tell us not only what he can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like a confession, but everything else as well that his self-observation yields him. Everything that comes into his head even if it is disagreeable for him to say it, even if it seems to him unimportant or actually nonsensical. This thus puts us in a position to conjecture his repressed unconscious material and to extend by the information we give him the idea of being there that in the situation where you're confessing to a priest you don't necessarily have to confess everything that's coming up in your head. But for Freud you do because what you have to do is say everything that comes to mind even if it seems nonsensical, even if it seems unrelated because for Freud the unconscious will come out in small ways and you need to have all that information to put it together into a coherent picture. But what's interesting here is that Freud is putting himself in the position of a confessor and Foucault picks up on this nature of psychoanalysis. It's a kind of confessional relationship. So let's look quickly at what a confessional relationship looks like. In 1661 at the bottom confessional relationship is a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship for one does not confess without the presence or virtual presence of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession prescribes and appreciates it and intervenes in order to judge punish, forgive, console and reconcile. And he goes on a little bit later too but I just want to focus on that for a moment. But in some ways the confessional relationship is a power relationship. The person you're confessing to can in a way require your confession, can pull it out from you is there to judge to console or perhaps to heal as Foucault suggests that Freud is. Freud is someone whom you confess to not to be forgiven like a priest but to be healed instead. But Foucault still thinks that's rather similar. Then on page 66 where he's talking about confession turning into something like a scientific practice there's some places where he talks about Freud directly even though he doesn't mention him. So number three on page 66 it was necessary to extract the truth of sex through the technique of confession this was not simply because it was difficult to tell or stricken by the taboos of decency but because the ways of sex were obscure. It was elusive by nature. Then a little later on it tended no longer to be concerned solely with what the subject wished to hide but with what was hidden from himself being capable incapable of coming to light except gradually and through the labor of a confession in which the questioner and question each had a part to play. The principle of a latency essential to sexuality made it possible to link the forcing of a difficult confession to a scientific practice. So here this sounds very much like Freud turning a kind of confession into a science. Then lastly on the bottom of page 66 the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass through this relationship if it was to be scientifically validated. The truth did not reside solely in the subject to by confessing would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted in two stages later. It was the latter's function to verify the obscure truth. The revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. So you needed to have someone that you were confessing to like Freud to decipher what you're saying because to you yourself it is hidden. It is unconscious. You don't really know what it means. So Foucault is arguing that this practice of confession moved from religion into science including Freudian psychoanalysis which is a kind of a confessional relationship. And he goes on to say the confession has now expressed itself become something that we have all over in our society. Page 59. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effect far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships and love relations. One confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles. That's an interesting thing to think about for a seminar. To what degree have we confessing society? Even though we're not confessing to a religious authority, to what degree do we confess to ourselves and to others? And to what degree do we do that with sexuality? Now why is all this important? Again, the idea is that we haven't repressed sex, we haven't stopped talking about sex but we talk about it all the more. We study it scientifically and we study it scientifically through in part practices of confession. Now, Foucault says there's another way we could have approached sex. We do it scientifically, we could have approached it through what he calls an ars erotica, and he hardly says anything about this in the text. But it's almost one other way it could have happened. And so it's worthwhile at least thinking about there's two great procedures for producing the truth of sex. If we're so interested in sex, what could we have done besides study it scientifically? We could have studied sexual pleasure for the sake of intensifying it, multiplying it. He claims that there are practices out there in the world and in history where you focus a lot on sex and sexuality and think about it and study it but for the sake of making it better, for the sake of increasing pleasure, having the best pleasure possible. That's not what most of our scientific study of sexuality is about. Most of ours is about figuring out what's normal and what's abnormal, what's healthy and unhealthy, what can cause you problems. There's a little less scientific study about, although there has been some, about just what to do to increase your pleasure as much as possible. And Foucault's like well that would have been an interesting way to study sex but we didn't go there. Instead, what we tend to do is we are seeking the truth about sexuality in order to create scientific knowledge that categorizes individuals around a norm. So that we, you know we will say like in the DSM-5 there are these kinds of sexualities that are abnormal, that are disorders insofar as they cause people distress. And then there's other practices that are normal. There are you know, almost sexuality and heterosexuality now are finally becoming more normal right? But there are some sexualities that are still considered abnormal. That we do tend to think about classifying people in terms of what's permitted, what's normal, what's strange and that's what we do with our science of sex. Okay, response to repressive hypothesis number two power operates on sex only negatively by prohibiting, rejecting, hindering and blocking it. Alright, the thought here is yeah, there have been some power relationships, there's been some laws, there's been some pressures from morality or religion or rules in families and schools that say what you can't do. And we do tend to sometimes think of power in terms of rules and laws that negate, prohibit some actions and allow others. So we often tend to think what power is is something along the lines of a government or a state or an institution that has rules and those rules tell you what you can and can't do. So there are rules that say you must not do this but you can do that. And you get that from your state, you get that from your institution, you see how it's rules of what you can and can't do and many of these rules are negative. You must not do this, you must not do this, although there are some positive ones too. But Foucault says on 83 and 85 that's how we tend to think of power generally as just a set of rules that are enforced by officials, you know, by police or administrators in the school or by your boss or your parents and they stop you from doing certain things. That is a common way of thinking of power. And in terms of sex what this would mean is where sex and pleasure are concerned power can do nothing but say no meaning. This is the repressive view of sex that if you just think of power as something that blocks stops, rules that tell you what you can't do then your idea of what power does to sex is just going to be to say no. There's only certain things you can do with sex everything else I'm going to say you can't do that you can't do that, you can't do that. But he thinks there's a new form of power that's developed over the past few years, past few hundred years I should say that works to promote and manage life through regulating and managing sex rather than prohibiting it. So this is a subtle distinction the idea of of using power to monitor what's going on with sex and to manage what's going on with sex rather than ignoring it or prohibiting it and that's what he thinks is happening with all this science of sex. We're trying to figure out what's going on with it. What are people doing? What are people thinking? What are people feeling? What are their fantasies? Their dreams, their desires now let's put them into categories you are this and you are that and you are that and let's see what's happening with our society in terms of sex. Who's normal? Who's abnormal? Is there anything dangerous going on? And that's managing sex rather than not talking about it being silencing or prohibiting things that are considered wrong or bad. And part of what Foucault is saying here is look it's not that we are just ignoring those things that people think shouldn't be done. We're not just trying to put away masturbation or put away perversions or put away pedophilia and say those things. That has those things have been the study of multiple discourses and studies and sciences so that they can be better managed rather than prohibited. So I guess I just said this, the new form of bio power, sex is something to be managed and controlled, regulated by medical and social sciences, public health authorities rather than prohibited. So for example on page 24 hmm yeah towards the bottom one had to speak of it sex as a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed inserted into systems of utility regulated for the greater good of all made to function according to an optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged, it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential it called for management procedures. Now in a way though I think this is subtle Foucault may be saying you know it's one thing to just say let's ignore sex and let's repress the kinds of things that we think are wrong about sex. Let's only talk about heterosexuality and procreation. It's one thing to sort of leave that other stuff off to the side and let it be and try to ignore it. It's quite another thing to spend a lot of time studying it and managing it and controlling it and surveying it which actually could be thought of as power becoming even more ingrained in people. Now we are the subject of very deep study and control insofar as we are told we have certain sexualities you're going to be put into this category you're going to be considered normal or abnormal etc and so in a way it's actually even deeper of a problem okay quickly two ways he thinks about this kind of biopower one is in well just relationship to what he calls sovereign power at the end of the text this is kind of a confusing distinction but at the end of the text he says in the last chapter there's something called sovereign power and though there's many aspects of what he means by sovereign power the one thing he's focusing on here is its relationship to life and it has a particular relationship to life the kind of power he calls sovereign is the sort of thing you might think of with a monarchy or something like with Hobbes the sovereign power is one that has the right to make die or let live and all he means by this is sovereign power is the kind that has the right to take away the life of the citizens through capital punishment through sending them to war or even deep harm, deep injury as a matter of punishment but sovereign power is not the kind that invests a lot of energy in trying to manage the life of the citizens in trying to enhance their life to make their health better it's the only thing it does with life is kill people or let them live that's the way Foucault puts it and I was looking back at Hobbes and I was looking at all the things that the sovereign can do in Hobbes and none of it has to do with let's make life better let's talk about the health of the citizenship let's manage their sexuality let's see what the birth and death rate is, all this stuff that bio-power is going to be about Hobbes doesn't talk about that Hobbes talks about what the sovereign can do in terms of punishing you making laws, you can take away your life and I think maybe you could think of Hobbes as a kind of sovereign power but bio-power is the power to make life or let live and this is just the way he puts it in a slightly different text bio-power he says on page 136 is bent on generating forces making them grow and ordering them rather than impeding them or making them submit better quote on 137 it's a power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors to administer, optimize and multiply it bio-power is when a state or an institution tries to intervene in people's lives to make them flourish to make their health better to think about what's going on with the population in terms of life birth rates disease rates death rates all those things that might fall under population health would fall under bio-power so I have I think here examples, yay so studying birth and death rates to determine how your population is doing in terms of its life how long are people living how many kids are being born distribution of diseases how they spread how many diseases we have health issues related to living and working conditions these things would be examples of how a state or a society might practice bio-power and it's different that a state that just is worried about you know you guys can live however you want to but I as a sovereign I'm going to make sure you follow these rules or I'm going to punish you this is a state that really carefully looks into its citizens lives that worries about their sex because that has to do with the birth and death rate or the rate of disease that has to do with the general health of the population and you can start to see how and why Foucault starts to mention things like racism towards the end of the tax state-controlled racism and Nazism because this could lead directly into the idea that we have to be very careful about the health of the race and about our population and make sure our kind of people have the right kind of health and that we are having enough children of our kind of people and that the other kind of people are not having too many children to overrun our state these sorts of practices are precisely what's needed for something like eugenics and state racism but other examples of bio-power we have now determining when and how often women need to have mammograms that's we still do that so let's just figure out what's going to be good for our population in terms of their health vaccination programs free vaccinations this is public health issue vision and hearing screening for children look none of this is a bad thing right these are useful things for making sure the population is healthier all that Foucault is saying is it is also it also means that we are being studied more and more and vaccination programs and all that it doesn't have anything to do with sex but a lot of our sexual lives are being studied more and more and controlled and managed by the state for the sake of population health and other concerns about the state and its people and that it could be problematic okay quickly last thing we should liberate ourselves from repressive power by recognizing expressing and acting on our natural and true sexual identities so remember again there is no natural and true sexual identity it's created through all this study of sexuality scientifically that physiology, emotions, desires and pleasures can be linked to sexuality is constructed by practices of bio power that we think we have a particular sexuality is constructed by all of these sciences that have developed over the course of a number of years and we still have those sciences today telling us what different kinds of sexualities are and sexuality then becomes a principle of classifying individuals and we think of ourselves as having that I think of myself as this type of sexual being because I have been told that's what I am not by any particular person but by looking around what that kind of sexual being means I then take on that identity this will connect with hacking for next week we cannot liberate ourselves from repression or call us to liberate sexuality from repression support the operations of bio power so if we think we are just going to liberate our natural sexuality from those who would tell us not to express it that encourages us to think we have a natural sexuality that we have this secret inside of us that needs to be expressed which Foucault is questioning and this supports confessional practices that allow sexuality to be studied monitored and managed if we think we should talk about it more because it's a seeker that has been repressed that's precisely what's needed to study it control it and manage it we need to be a confessing society so that we can learn more about sexuality so that it can be managed and I am going to zip through this quickly I will post these on the web I am going to miss this one because I want to get to the last quote from Foucault which actually is on the handout last quote on the handout and then we can leave sorry just a couple of minutes over Foucault's only suggestion of something different than what we have right now is in this sort of statement which he says at a couple of places there is a problem when people think they have to uncover their own identity and that their own identity has to become the law and the code of their existence if the perennial question they ask is does this thing conform to my identity the notion of sexual identity has been very useful but it limits us and I think we can and have a right to be free and then later sexuality is something that we ourselves create it is our own creation and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desires sex is not a fatality it's a possibility for creative life we have been thinking we have to uncover some truth about our sexuality inside of us recognize it's a creation we can create it how we want to and this is an emphasis of freedom that he gives not in this book but elsewhere okay I managed to make it all the way through so thank you