The Power of Sex

In addition to the portion of his section on war, I found Foucault’s analysis of the role sex plays in societies, and the evolution of this role, to be extremely fascinating. The “politics of sex,” and the idea of “administration of sex,” sounds like a complete invasion of private natures that is reminiscent of medieval times (think of “fornication under the consent of the king”), (P. 148). However, this turn of phrase is not referring to a more subliminal “administration of sex,” through the propulsion of gender roles.

I am currently taking the class entitled, “Gender, Culture, Madness,” and we discuss at length, the expectations put on especially women to avoid what Foucault refers to as “taboo,” (p.148). Women in the United States in the 1950s for example, had a whole laundry list of things they had to do to be a good wife for their husband; this included avoiding sex before marriage, but preparing for it when marriage was happening. This went beyond the serious talks with their mothers or older sisters the night before their wedding night; in this era there were even special types of doctor’s appointments women could go to in order to learn about what to expect for their first sexual encounter. Ironically as well prepared as these women were meant to be, up until that moment, they were supposed to be perfectly chaste and naïve to any knowledge that even broached the topic of sex.

It is through these restrictions, that the hype about sex and sexuality became the alternative vehicle for power as Foucault discusses. After all of this discussion analyzing the construct of sex, he advocates the breaking down of this construct. He argues that we should do this by simply taking the physical nature of sex as all that it is: “It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies,” (157).