History of Sexuality, v1

Although I never would have guessed it, The History of sexuality reads more or less like a history of naturalism, or at least traces a phenomenon which naturalism and degeneration are a part of. Along the way, Foucault does something which I find impressive and relieving in equal parts: he relieves Freudian psycho-analysis of the pseudo-scientific burden of naturalism and sets it up, at least partially, as an opposing force to the deterministic, normalizing, and racist beliefs of naturalism.

Foucault's thesis is a reversal of received wisdom: sexuality, which once flowed freely, was clamped down on during the 18th and 19th centuries - the periods of Victorian repression. Foucault denies such repression and argues instead that the tradition of confession, in which sexual desires, dreams, and whims, are extensively catalogued and brought to light, means that sexuality was actually flowing to an unprecedented degree in this period of so-called repression. Every single desire that a human has is transformed into discourse, and thus becomes a point of power relations (21).

This obsession with sexuality had four main outlets, which he outlines on pages 104-105:
1.hysterization of woman's bodies - women become "saturated" with sexuality
2.pedagogization of children's sex - children must be educated about the (paradoxically) natural inclination to a sexuality that is against nature
3.socialization of procreative behavior - power was exerted on the control and direction of fertility
4.psychiatrization of perverse pleasure - perverse pleasure was defined as anomalous, a normalization procedure was necessary

It's this last one that I deem most interesting. Foucualt tells of a village simpleton who paid young girls for some form of sexual gratification in 1867, and, when his actions are known, something quite remarkable occurs: the simpleton's "bucolic pleasures" become the object of "a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration... they went so far as to measure the brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect the possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life" (31). This is part of the project of naturalism, or at least it's fellow travelers; Foucault, in a very useful move, is linking naturalism's racist narrative of (in his words) "degenerescence" with this project of turning sexuality into discourse.

Almost of equal importance is how Freud downplays concerns about Freud's "normalization" and argues that psycho-analysis "rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system" (119). Psycho-analysis did this by, rather than hunting out desires like incest "as a conduct," "alleviating...the severity which repressed it" (130). Although this is a limited and not entirely clear endorsement of psycho-analysis, it is an important one for my project nevertheless.