Back to the old drawing board! I thought that Foucault’s piece was very interesting. When I first started reading it, I was a bit confused. I had to read it twice to actually understand some of things that were said in here. After doing this, I realized that this was not the hard to comprehend. Maybe this was because it was a slightly more interesting and attention grabbing subject? Either way, I’m happy that I at least understood a few things here.
On page 1648 Foucault says: “…but more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.” There is a lot to digest in these few sentences above. What I think Foucault is trying to say here is that sex and anything spoken about it is mostly about power. Even controlling when it is spoken about, who speaks about it and actually who performs it is an act of power. Who has more power over who depends on the subject that is being debated and who has the upper hand on controlling it.
Foucault says on page 1653 that “it had long been asserted that a country had to be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful; but this was the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant way, that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the number and the uprightness of it citizens, to their marriage rules and family organizations, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex.” Again, this all goes back to “power” and who holds it. This made me think of society today. I think that sex holds a lot of power today. If you think about it, everything is about sex nowadays. Our society tends to be a bit more promiscuous that is was “back then.” It seems like it is not the person who holds the power of sex, it is sex that holds the power itself. Yes, people do make their own decisions on what to do with their lives, but I believe that sex is defiantly one of the factors that leads people to choose certain decisions in their lives.
I really liked his ending sentence. Foucault says that “never have there existed more canters of power; never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere” (1666). I thought that this was a very strong sentence to end with. I liked how he basically summed up everything that he had just said and it makes more sense to me if you read it like this. I think that he is right. Sex=power, especially today. Along with money, it is basically the “controller” of our world today. I think it is everyone’s personal choice on if they let it control their lives, or if they control them themselves.
