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User talk:Legion

2010-02-15T23:10:51Z

Legion: /* New Articles */

==THS==

It's an important text, so needs its own article, apart from its author's biog... [[User:The Admins|The Admins]] 18:10, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Will create a fuller article on Foucault's work, and then link from there to his various texts, eg. THS.

How best to organize the pages on Queer Theory? I was thinking of creating a general page introducing [[Queer Theory]], linking to writers on the subject, e.g. this new page on [[Lee Edelman]]. What say you? --[[User:Legion|Legion]] 13:12, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
:That's about right. It just has to look like an encyclopedia article, however much of it is taken up with commentary. [[User:The Admins|The Admins]] 21:44, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

==New Articles==

I've created a more substantive (or at least, 'a') article introducing [[Queer Theory]]. A summary of Kincaid's ''Erotic Innocence'' will follow shortly. Obviously feel free to do whatever you think best to the Queer Theory summary....-- [[User:Legion|Legion]] 23:50, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Just added new pages on: [[James Kincaid]] and [[Erotic Innocence]] -- [[User:Legion|Legion]] 13:25, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

New page on [[Heteronormativity]] -- [[User:Legion|Legion]] 19:52, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

New page on the history of the crusade against childhood [[masturbation]] --[[User:Legion|Legion]] 13:11, 14 February 2010 (UTC)

New page on [[Judith Butler]] (and her work on gender theory) --[[User:Legion|Legion]] 23:10, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Judith Butler

2010-02-15T23:09:42Z

Legion: New page

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the Maxine Elliott professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Enormously influential in the fields of feminist studies and [[Queer Theory]], Judith Butler is most famous for her work on gender, and specifically for her theory of 'performativity' – which has been described as "perhaps the single most important concept for the institutional recognition of queer thinking".<ref> Tuhkanenin, Mikko, in Nigianni & Storr (eds), ''Deleuze and Queer Theory'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)</ref>

== Gender and Performativity ==

In ''Gender Trouble''<ref>Butler, Judith. ''Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'' (Routledge, 1990)</ref>, Butler first outlined her theory of gender-as-performance and gender 'performativity', which she subsequently developed in subsequent texts, including ''Bodies That Matter'' and ''Undoing Gender''.

Butler rejects essentialist-biological understandings of gender as being a somehow 'natural' or 'inevitable' characteristic. Influenced by the work of [[Michel Foucault]], and adopting the notion of 'performativity' from Jacques Derrida, Butler proposes that we understand gender not as a thing or as a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence, but rather as a 'doing': "gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural maker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort". Gender is not simply 'performed', however, but the acts which constitute it are ''reiterated'' throughout time, and reinforced through ''discursive'' practices.<ref>Butler, Judith, ''Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex''' (Routledge, 1993)</ref>

Butler's notion of the 'performative' therefore "moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality. Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief." <ref>Butler, Judith. ''Gender Trouble'', op. cit.</ref>

== Criticism ==

There are two main strands of criticism of Butler's work. The first focuses on her reliance on psychoanalytic theory, and her "neo-Freudian account of mourning and melancholia."<ref> Morland and O'Brien, quoted in O'Rourke, Michael, "Queer Theory's Loss and the Work of Mourning Jacques Derrida", Rhizomes 11/12 - Fall 2005/Spring 2006 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/index.html</ref> The second, linked, criticism concerns Butler's understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, her belief that subjection cannot be avoided.

For Butler, the queer is not radically outside or beyond recognition and selfhood; it is that which makes a claim to be heard as human – within the norms of speech, gender, the polity and the symbolic – at the same time as it perverts the normative matrix. Even when writing in later works of the ''inter''subjectivity of subjectivity<ref>Butler, Judith, ''Undoing Gender'' (Routledge, 2004) 'to be a subject, we are always already that subject for another, so that the very basis of subjectivity is that we are somehow always constituted as/by being "beside oneself" '</ref>, Butler's theory thus conceived still "allows for the (albeit problematic) maintenance of identity politics; for the assertion of oneself as this or that subject demanding recognition is both necessary for the social system at the same times as it introduces a necessary dynamism of the system."<ref>Colebrook, Claire, in Nigianni & Storr (eds), ''Deleuze and Queer Theory'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009)</ref>

What is required is a movement beyond all identity and ''any'' notion of a unified subjectivity (howsoever constituted). Fortunately, post-Butlerian Queer Theory is moving in this direction, influenced by the radical thought of [[Gilles Deleuze]] and [[Félix Guattari]].

== Context ==

Butler's work on gender has been widely influential throughout the social sciences, particularly in terms of generating ''institutional recognition'' of the fluidity of categories ("male", "female") previously understood as fixed and unalterable. This movement towards breaking down identities (gender, age, sexualities) and creating new possibilities for connections between bodies will be crucial for the acceptance in academic circles of the fundamentally flawed conceptualizations of "adult-child sex" and "the pedophile".

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category:Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:People]][[Category:People: Academics]][[Category:People: Critical Analysts]][[Category:People: Popular Authors]]

User talk:Legion

2010-02-14T13:11:30Z

Legion: /* New Articles */

Masturbation

2010-02-14T13:10:09Z

Legion: New page; history of the crusade against childhood masturbation

== Introduction ==

It has often been suggested that there is a connection between the cultural panic over 'pedophilia', and the hysteria surrounding childhood masturbation in the past. It is therefore helpful to recap the history of the masturbation crisis.

The historical problematization of childhood masturbation is often simplistically rendered as a question of 'morality'. A second, more insightful, explanation is that with the development of capitalist society, the body – which until then was an 'organ of pleasure' – had to become an 'instrument of performance', necessary for the requirements of production; the body was repressed as an organ of pleasure, and codified and trained as an instrument of production and performance.

While the first 'explanation' (morality) is historically inaccurate, the second analysis (the requirements of capitalism), is perhaps too general to be false, but does require further response. By placing 'repression' at the center of its analysis, it conceals the productive and constitutive effects produced in society. Further, if it was solely a question of 'the productive body', one would expect to see a repression of the adult worker's sexuality. However, what initially arises in the mid-eighteenth century was not a question of sexuality, but more particularly of masturbation by ''bourgeois'' children. A more complex analysis is therefore necessary.

== The Campaign ==

The clamorous obsession with masturbation began in the eighteenth century.<ref>While there have been a number of texts on masturbation, here we broadly follow the schema of Foucault, as developed in ''Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975'' (Picador, 2003).</ref> One of the first texts was ''Onania'', which appeared in England in 1718, followed by Tissot's book in Switzerland (1758) and ''Basedow'' in Germany (1770). A rash of texts – books, leaflets and tracts – suddenly began to appear.

There was very little moralizing in the campaign against masturbation; the threat was one of illness. Masturbation began by being an illness in itself, with symptoms, and subsequently became the root of every possible illness that could be encountered in life; a general etiology, a causal power, was attributed to 'masturbation'.

The child himself was not initially treated as culpable – the crusaders often insisted that masturbation was not of endogenous origin, a question of nature, but was a learned or taught behavior. Almost from the start, the campaign against masturbation was directed against the seduction of children by adults or by others in their immediate circle – servants, nannies, tutors, cousins, aunts and uncles – the devil was there beside the child, and particularly in the form of an adult who was the intermediary between child and parent. So it was ultimately the parents who were guilty, for allowing all these intermediaries. What was being called into question was the parents, their relationship with their children within the family space.

What was demanded by the campaigners was essentially a new organization, a new physics, of the family space. The ideal solution would be the infant alone in a sexually-aseptic family space. Being unrealizable in practice, the family space had therefore to become one of continual surveillance; the child's body had to become the object of the parents' permanent attention. Numerous well-documented practices – tying the child's hands up, deploying technical devices to prevent the child having access to his body – were suggested. If necessary, parents literally would have to sleep in the same room as the masturbator, perhaps even in the same bed, or lift their bed covers frequently to check. The pamphlets and leaflets that circulated required the direct, immediate and constant application of the parents' bodies to the bodies of their children.

== Analysis ==

[[Foucault]] suggests that these practices reveal the central objective of the crusade against masturbation: the constitution of a new family body. What was now being constituted from the mid-eighteenth century was a restricted, close-knit, substantial, compact, corporeal and affective family core; the cell family in place of the extended relational family, entirely saturated by direct parent-child relationships. By highlighting the child's masturbatory activity, and the body of the child in danger, parents were urgently enjoined to reduce the large, polymorphous and dangerous space of the household, and to forge with their children a sort of single body. From the end of the eighteenth century, the child's autoeroticized body was the instrument, element or vector for constituting the cultural involution of the family around the parent-child relationship.

This nuclear family was constituted on the basis of the caressing incest of looks and gestures around the child's body; ''an epistemophilic incest of touch, gaze and surveillance is the basis of the modern family''.

The direct parent-child contact so urgently prescribed gave parents absolute power over the child; yet total power was not given to parents, since at the same time parents begin to be connected to a completely different type of relation and control: since masturbation registered at the level of illness, the control exercised by parents was necessarily plugged into an external medical control. The parent-child relationship had to be consistent with, and to extend, the doctor-patient relationship. Parental control was thus subordinate, and had to be open to medical and hygienic intervention.
The new substantial, affective and sexual family was at the same time a medicalized family.

With and within the newly constituted cellular family, a constant advance of the medicalization of sexuality took place, introducing new medical techniques and forms of intervention into the family space. A medico-familial mesh organized a field that was both ethical and pathological, in which sexual conduct became an object of control, coercion, examination, judgment and intervention. ''The medicalized family could therefore function as a source of sexual normalization.'' From the first decades of the nineteenth century, it is this medicalized family which could reveal the normal and the abnormal in the sexual domain. The nuclear family was not only the basis for the determination and distinction of sexuality, but also for the rectification of the abnormal.

== The Family, and State Education ==

Why was the reorganization of the family necessary? The child's body was becoming an important political stake by the end of the eighteenth century. There is a political and economic interest in the child's survival: the State demands from parents, and the new forms and relations of production require, that the parents take responsibility for the child's body and life.

The crusade against masturbation was only one chapter of a '''broader crusade''' for the eduction of children: an education that conformed to a number of rules for securing the survival of children on one hand, and their training and normalized development on the other. The widespread call for ''education by the State'' occurred ''precisely at the same time as the campaign against masturbation began''. At the same moment that parents were enjoined to take direct responsibility for the bodies of their children, they were asked to cede back their children to the State for their instruction and technical training.

Parents must take care of their children's strength and obedience – so that the State could put them through the machine of the system of state education, instruction and training over which parents had no control. A process of exchange was therefore called for: the parents had to be given something in return. ''The child's body served as this unit of exchange''. Parents were told that there was something in the child's body that belonged wholly to them, that they'd never have to give up: the child's sexuality. The child's sexual body belonged to, and would always belong to, the family space, and no one else would have any power over this sexual body.

However, since masturbation could never be eradicated, parents were ultimately committed to the infinite task of possessing and controlling an infantile sexuality that would in any case always elude them. The child's sexuality was the trick by which the close-knit, affective, cellular family was constituted, and from whose shelter the child was extracted.<ref>In the last few decades, when the question of ''sex education'' in school arose, this process of exchange was revealed: parents had been told that in exchange for their children, they could guarantee that sexuality would develop in a space controlled by them, but now the State, psychologists, began claiming this education for themselves.</ref>

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category:Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:History & Events]][[Category:History & Events: International]]

Research: Youth sexuality

2010-02-14T12:50:22Z

Legion: /* Prevalence and diversity */

{{research}}
Sexual activities among minors are common and do not tend to damage participants. Whilst they play an important part in learning, their diversity refutes the common myth of "childhood sexuality" and "innocent sex play".

==Sexual behaviour among youth==
===Effects===

*'''Larsson, I. & Svedin, C. G. (2001). "Sexual experiences in childhood: young adult's recollections," Arch Sex Behav, 31(3):263-73'''
*:In a 2002 study of 269 Swedish students, 30% of those who had a sexual experience with a peer before the age of 13 assessed the activity as having had a positive effect on them as an adult, 66% thought it had no positive or negative effects, and 4% reported a negative effect. Except one, all of the subjects who reported a negative effect were involved in coercive activities.

*'''Levine, J. (1996). "[http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/1996/07/levine-2.html A Question of Abuse]," ''Mother Jones''.'''
*:"What's wrong with these things? "They make parents nervous," says Allie Kilpatrick, a social work professor at the University of Georgia who conducted a massive review of the literature on childhood sexual experiences, both wanted and unwanted, and administered her own 33-page questionnaire to 501 Southern women. Most of Kilpatrick's subjects had kissed and hugged, fondled and masturbated as adolescents, and more than a quarter had had vaginal intercourse. Her conclusion: "The majority of young people who experience some kind of sexual behavior find it pleasurable, without much guilt, and with no harmful consequences." A similar study of 526 New England undergraduates revealed "no differences...between sibling, nonsibling, and no-[sexual]-experience groups on a variety of adult sexual behavior and sexual adjustment measures."

*'''Harden, K., Mendle, J., Hill, J., Turkheimer, E., and Emery, R. (2008). "[http://virginia.academia.edu/EricTurkheimer/attachment/26362/full/Harden---K--P---Mendle--J---Hill--J--E---Turkheimer--E-----Emery--R--E---2008---Rethinking-timing-of-first-sex-and--delinquency--Journal-of-Youth-and--Adolescence--37--373-385- Rethinking timing of first sex and delinquency][http://www.springerlink.com/content/q3041xv951427308/fulltext.html]," ''Journal of Youth and Adolescence'', 37(4), 373-385.'''
*:"The relation between timing of first sex and later delinquency was examined using a genetically informed sample of 534 same-sex twin pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, who were assessed at three time points over a 7-year interval. [...] After controlling for these genetic and environmental confounds using a quasi-experimental design, earlier age at first sex predicted lower levels of delinquency in early adulthood. [...]
*:Although the current results are contrary to embedded assumptions, they are actually consistent with previous research. Specifically, three quasi-experimental (longitudinal or behavior genetic) studies that examined whether timing of first sex influences subsequent psychosocial functioning, controlling for psychological differences that precede sexual initiation, have all failed to find adverse effects for sexual timing. [...]
*:The current study suggests that there may be positive functions for early initiation of sexual activity, in that the co-twin with earlier age at first sex demonstrated lower levels of delinquency in early adulthood. This result echoes a small but important body of previous research. In one of the first pieces of sex research, Kinsey et al. (1953) concluded that premarital sexual activity resulted in minimal "psychological disturbance" and may result in healthier non-romantic relationships and greater happiness later in life. More recent research has indicated that early sexual timing is associated with popularity (Prinstein et al. 2003); high self-esteem (for a review see Goodson et al. 2006; Paul et al. 2000); positive self-concept (Pedersen et al. 2003); high levels of body pride (Lammers et al. 2000), and increasing closeness to the same-sex best friend (Billy et al. 1988). [...] In the domain of adult sexual functioning, earlier age at first sex was found to predict greater coital orgasmic capacity in adult women (Raboch and Bartak 1983) and to discriminate sexually functional versus non-functional older men (age 64 years; Vallery-Masson et al. 1981). Women reporting an earlier age at first sex demonstrate less reactivity and faster recovery (as measured by cortical response) in response to stress (Brody 2002)."

*'''Arreola, Sonya; Neilands, Torsten; Pollack, Lance; Paul, Jay; Catania, Joseph (2008). "Childhood Sexual Experiences and Adult Health Sequelae Among Gay and Bisexual Men: Defining Childhood Sexual Abuse," ''Journal of Sex Research'', 45(3), pp. 246 - 252.'''
*:"Those who had forced sex were significantly more likely to be depressed or have suicidal ideation than those who had consensual sex and those who had no sex before age 18. There was no difference between the consensual sex group and those who had no sex before age 18. The level of well-being was significantly higher for the consensual group compared with the no sex before 18 group and the forced sex group. The latter two groups did not differ from each other on well-being. [...] Interestingly, the forced sex group and the no sex group were statistically indistinguishable in their level of well-being, while the consensual sex group was significantly more likely to have a higher level of well-being than either of the other two groups. This suggests that consensual sex before 18 years of age may have a positive effect, perhaps as an adaptive milestone of adolescent sexual development." This study was inclusive of both minor-minor relations and adult-minor relations; no distinctions were made.

*'''Bauserman, Robert, and Davis, Clive (1996). "Perceptions of Early Sexual Experiences and Adult Sexual Adjustment," ''International Journal of Sexual Health'', 8(3), 37-59.'''
*:"Results supported the hypotheses that positively evaluated early sexual experiences would be associated with greater erotophilia, more acceptance of various sexual behaviors for self and others, and greater sexual satisfaction." (From [http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a904613806~db=all abstract].)

===Prevalence and diversity===
Most prevalence data is limited to parentally-observed behaviour.

*'''Martinson, Floyd M. (1973). ''[http://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/martinson/infant/InfantAndChildSexuality.html Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective]''. The Book Mark.
*:"By twelve years of age, approximately one boy in every four or five has tried at least to copulate with a female and more than ten percent of preadolescent boys experience their first ejaculation in connection with heterosexual intercourse, according to Kinsey. Ramsey reported that about one-third of his sample of middle-class boys had attempted sexual intercourse."

*'''Ford. C. S.. & Beach. F. A. (1951). ''Patterns of sexual behavior''. New York: Harper & Row.'''
*:"As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women. [p. 197] [...] After reviewing the cross-species and cross-cultural evidence, we are convinced that tendencies toward sexual behavior before maturity and even before puberty are genetically determined in many primates, including human beings."

*'''Reynolds, M.A., Herbenick, D. L., & Bancroft, J. (2003). The nature of childhood sexual experiences: Two studies 50 years apart. In J. Bancroft (Ed.), ''Sexual Development in Childhood'' (pp. 134-155). Indiana: Indiana University Press.'''
*:In a 1999 study of undergraduate students, 5.2% of females and 12.8% of males reported having engaged in sex play with their peers involving genital contact before elementary school, and that 1.3% of girls and 4.0% of boys had engaged in sex play involving anal/genital insertion (with objects or fingers) or oral-genital intercourse before elementary school. By the end of elementary school, the numbers increased to 29.2% for females and 32.9% for males for genital contact and 12.3 for girls and 10.1% for boys for insertion or oral sex. Very little pressure and almost no coercion were reported.

*'''Thigpen, Jeffry W. (2009). "Early Sexual Behavior in a Sample of Low-Income, African American Children," ''Journal of Sex Research'', 46(1), pp. 67-79.'''
*:"Some recent studies of primarily White, middle-class children have expanded our knowledge of the types of sexual behavior observed in children without known or suspected histories of sexual abuse. These studies show that children engage in sexual play (Lamb & Coakley, 1993; Leitenberg, Greenwald, & Tarran, 1989; Okami, Olmstead, & Abramson, 1997); show interest in viewing the bodies of others, as well as displaying their own (Friedrich, Fisher, Broughton, Houston, & Shafran, 1998; Friedrich, Grambsch, Broughton, Kuiper, & Beilke, 1991; Phipps-Yonas, Yonas, Turner, & Kauper, 1992; Shafran, 1995); and have knowledge of sexual anatomy and function (Gordon, Schroeder, & Abrams, 1990a,b; Grocke, Smith, & Graham, 1995). Taken with the findings from earlier descriptive studies that document the occurrence of such sexual behavior as penile erections in male infants, genital manipulation and play, and [[masturbation]] (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953; Moll, 1913; Spitz, 1949), non-abused children are suggested to display a wide range of sexual behavior. Behavioral differentiation by gender has been suggested, as genital manipulation and masturbatory behavior have been reported to be more common among boys (Friedrich et al., 1998; Gagnon, 1985; Rutter, 1971). Older children are suggested to be more knowledgeable than younger children about sexual behavior, pregnancy, and sexual abuse prevention (Gordon et al., 1990a), whereas hugging and kissing, self-stimulation, and exhibitionism are reported to be more common among younger children (Friedrich et al., 1991; Kinsey et al., 1948). The findings of some studies have noted an inverse relation between age and childhood sexual behavior, suggesting that the sexual behavior of children becomes covert over time (Friedrich et al., 1998; Friedrich et al., 1991; Gagnon, 1985)."

*'''Yates, A. (2004). "Biologic perspective on early erotic development," ''Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America'', 13(3), 479-496.'''
*:"Eighty-five percent of young university women recalled erotic games and 44% recalled erotic games that involved boys [79]. Most remembered feeling sexually aroused or excited at the time. Most of the play involved exposing or touching the genitals. Insertion of objects in the vagina and oral contact was distinctly unusual. Other studies confirmed that most young adult students recalled early sex play that they viewed in a positive light as pleasurable and exciting [40, 80 and 81]."

==Fetal/infant sexual capacity==
*'''Giorgi, Giorgio, and Siccardi, Marco (1996). "Ultrasonographic observation of a female fetus' sexual behavior in utero," ''American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology'', 175, 3(1, part 1), 753.'''
*:"We recently observed a female fetus at 32 weeks' gestation touching the vulva with the fingers of the right hand. The caressing movements were centered primarily on the region of the clitoris. Movements stopped after 30 to 40 seconds and started again after a few minutes. Furthermore, these slight touches were repeated and were associated with short, rapid movements of pelvis and legs. After another break, in addition to this behavior, the fetus contracted the muscles of the trunk and limbs, and then clonicotonic movements of the whole body followed. Finally, she relaxed and rested.
*:We observed this behavior for about 20 minutes. The mother was an active and interested witness, conversing with observers about her child's experience.
*:Evidence of male fetuses' excitement reflex in utero, such as erection or ″masturbation” movements, has been previously reported.
*:The current observation seems to show not only that the excitement reflex can be evoked in female fetuses at the third trimester of gestation but also that the orgasmic reflex can be elicited during intrauterine life. This would agree with the physiologic features of female sexuality: The female sexual response is separate from reproductive functions and doesn't need a full sexual maturity to be explicit."


*'''Yates, A. (2004). "Biologic perspective on early erotic development," ''Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America'', 13(3), 479-496.'''
*:"William Masters was an obstetrician before he became a sex researcher. He devised a game that he played while waiting for an infant to be born. He would bet that, if it were a boy, he could deliver the infant before the child could produce an erection. He won the game only half of the time."

*'''Yates, A. (1978). ''[http://www.ipce.info/booksreborn/yates/sex/SexWithoutShame.html Sex without shame: Encouraging the child's healthy sexual development]''. New York: William Morrow.'''
*:"He also noted that all girl babies lubricated vaginally in the first four to six hours of life. Infants were born ready and fully equipped. During sleep, spontaneous erections or vaginal lubrications occur every eighty to, ninety minutes throughout the entire life span. (Masters, 1975)[1] Throughout life, sleeping sexual function remains far more reliable. While awake, our conscious anxieties take their toll.
*:Masturbation culminating in climax may occur as early as the first month of life. The baby girl is the most enthusiastic and proficient. With unmistakable intent, she crosses her thighs rigidly. With a glassy stare she grunts, rubs, and flushes for a few seconds or minutes. If interrupted, she screams with annoyance. Movements cease abruptly and are followed by relaxation and deep sleep. This sequence occurs many times during the day, but only occasionally at night. The baby boy proceeds with distinct penis throbs and thrusts accompanied by convulsive contractions of the torso. After climax his erection (without ejaculation) quickly subsides and he appears calm and peaceful. Kinsey reports that one boy of eleven months had ten climaxes in an hour and that another of the same age had fourteen in thirty-eight minutes."

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Research into effects on Children]]

User talk:Legion

2010-01-13T19:52:54Z

Legion: /* THS */

Heteronormativity

2010-01-13T19:49:05Z

Legion:

'Heteronormativity' is a fairly well-established notion within sociological circles. It refers, broadly, to the idea that 'heterosexual' norms of behavior (familial, gender-binary, reproductive, and so on) are enforced culturally, politically and institutionally onto the entire social body. Dominant cultural 'norms' produce, and control, behavior and subjectivity, measured against an ideal Manichean heterosexual couple (and since this couple forms an 'ideal', ''every'' member of society becomes potentially a target for regulative intervention).

Gayle Rubin has observed that<ref>Rubin, Gayle: "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality", in Carole Vance, ed., ''Pleasure and Danger'' (Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1984)</ref>:

:"Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Martial, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid. Clamoring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals... Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couple are verging on respectability, but bar-dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochist, sex workers such as prostitutes and pron models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries...
:Individuals whose behavior stands high in this hierarchy are rewarded with certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical mobility, institutional support and material benefits. As sexual behaviors or occupations fall lower on the scale, the individuals who practice them are subjected to a presumption of mental illness, disreputability, criminality, restricted social and physical mobility, loss of institutional support, and economic sanctions...
:In its most serious manifestations, the sexual system is a Kafkaesque nightmare in which unlucky victims become herds of human cattle whose identification, surveillance, apprehension, treatment, incarceration, and punishment produce jobs and self-satisfaction for thousands of vice police, prison officials, psychiatrists, and social workers."

This hierarchical pyramid, situating heterosexual, reproducing married couples at its peak, is the standard against which all members of a society are measured. It is clear that the other 'castes' in society are both produced and ''necessary'' to the promulgation of heterosexual norms, since without their presence, the "threat" to the heterosexual ideal cannot be constantly narrated and guarded against.

== Homonormativity ==

More recently, and particular within [[Queer Theory]], there has arisen the idea of ''homo''normativity. This is a criticism directed primarily against the identity politics of the gay and lesbian movement, asserting that contemporary gays and lesbians have become complicit with heterosexual norms of behavior. Thus the 'big issues' within gay and lesbian politics focus around questions such as 'gays in the military', the rights of gay families, and 'gay marriage', whereby gays demand 'equal treatment' within the same social order as heterosexuals – in other words, their politics has been assimilated within the existing social order (betraying its more radical origins of revolutionizing the social order).

:"How has this become a community that privileges recognition so highly, and seems to have abandoned some of the more radical strategies and goals grounded in a politics that sought to destabilize dominant forms of sexuality and kinship, rather than seeking to be destabilized by them? ... Why have the gaining of rights and the politics of recognition been substituted for earlier political goals in the gay community that were committed to making viable a range of sexual and kin affiliations other than those that are narrowly domestinormative?"<ref>Franke, Kathleen: "The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas" 104 Colum.L.Rev. (2004)</ref>

Lisa Duggan has theorized homonormativity as a "new neo-liberal sexual politics" that hinges upon "the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption"<ref>Duggan, Lisa: ''The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003)</ref>. Equally, in ''Selling Out'', Alexandra Chasin writes: "Advertising to gay men and lesbians has played on ideas about national identity in two significant ways. First such advertising has often appealed to gay on the basis of their identification as Americans. Second, ... it has often promised that full inclusion in the national community of Americans is available through personal consumption."<ref>Chasin, Alexandra: ''Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)</ref>

Clearly the concept of 'normativity' can in fact be applied to ''any'' community that posits, or insists upon, compliance with certain norms of behavior. Arguably such standards become just as necessary – if not more so – to minority-identifying communities, who have a tendency to replicate the standards of mainstream society in attempting to preserve their 'identity' and 'uniqueness' by seeking to exile or marginalize those who do not conform to that figural identity. This danger would appear to increase concomitantly with the longevity of a minority group's existence; a transition from a loose collective of radicals to what Félix Guattari would call a 'subjected group' – a group which receives an identity from outside pressures, and imposes hierarchical, fixed roles on its members.

Is there a ''pedonormativity'' forming? Debates over "responsible boylove", "principled celibacy", "a genetic origin to 'pedosexuality'", the "pedagogical/mentorship" model – all can be viewed as attempts to test and formulate a group cohesion, in accordance with dominant societal pressures toward self-identification.

== Homonationalism ==

Jasbir Puar takes the notion of 'homonormativity' a step further, and offers the concept of 'homonormative nationalism' (or 'homonationalism')<ref>Puar, Jasbir: ''Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times'' (Duke University Press, 2007)</ref>.

Within the context of the 'War on Terror', there has been a resurgence in governmental need to foster nationalism/patriotism. Puar argues that the invocation of "the terrorist" as a non-national, perversely-sexualized, perversely-racialized Other, has become part of the normative script of the US-orchestrated 'War on Terror'. Terrorist bodies must be discerned, Othered, and quarantined, through being cast as racially and sexually perverse figures. This, correlatively, helps to discipline and normalize subjects worthy of rehabilitation ''away from'' such bodies, i.e. to signal and enforce the mandatory terms of patriotism. (Hence there is a double deployment: the emasculated "terrorist" is not merely an Other, but is also deployed as a barometer of ab/normality involved in disciplinary apparatuses.)

Puar suggests that ''domesticated'' homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects, by figuring the heterosexual norms in the guise of 'tolerance' and 'diversity'; situating domesticated homosexual bodies vis-à-vis perversely racialized bodies of pathologized nationalities (both inside and outside US borders); and by fostering nationalist homosexual positionalities indebted to ''liberalism'' (via normative kinship forms, as well as via consumption spheres that set up state/market dichotomies), which then police (via 'panopticon and profile') non-nationalist, non-normative sexualities.

We can go further than 'homonationalism', and observe that nationalist and patriotic normativity need not be limited to hetero- and homosexual-identifying bodies. It has the capacity to traverse and stratify the whole of society, regardless of membership in any particular minority grouping.

== Conclusion ==

For the purposes of the present article, it can be said that normativity and patriotism/nationalism collaborate in the task of ''State racism'', whose first function is to fragment, to create caesuras, within the population. From this perspective, 'community norms', normativities of all types – national, sexual or racial – are deployed to effectuate the more precise control of populations, or of groups within populations.

Those who self-identify within any minority grouping – including self-identified 'pedophiles' – must be wary of normativizing standards within their community, and normativizing tendencies ''within themselves''. The imposition of such standards, along with the insidious growth of nationalism (witness the hatred that self-identifying minorities direct against ''other'' minorities – 'terrorists', 'illegal immigrants', 'welfare claimants'), evinces complicity with the practices of the dominant order.

''All'' borders and boundaries – whether spatio-geographical (territorial), cultural (separating out the 'generations'), or philosophical (those that block thought) – must be resisted, wherever they appear.

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category:Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:History & Events]][[Category:History & Events: International]]

Heteronormativity

2010-01-13T19:48:08Z

Legion: New article

User talk:Legion

2010-01-09T13:25:53Z

Legion: /* THS */

==THS==

It's an important text, so needs its own article, apart from its author's biog... [[User:The Admins|The Admins]] 18:10, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Will create a fuller article on Foucault's work, and then link from there to his various texts, eg. THS.

How best to organize the pages on Queer Theory? I was thinking of creating a general page introducing [[Queer Theory]], linking to writers on the subject, e.g. this new page on [[Lee Edelman]]. What say you? --[[User:Legion|Legion]] 13:12, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
:That's about right. It just has to look like an encyclopedia article, however much of it is taken up with commentary. [[User:The Admins|The Admins]] 21:44, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

::I've created a more substantive (or at least, 'a') article introducing [[Queer Theory]]. A summary of Kincaid's ''Erotic Innocence'' will follow shortly. Obviously feel free to do whatever you think best to the Queer Theory summary....--[[User:Legion|Legion]] 23:50, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Just added new pages on: [[James Kincaid]] and [[Erotic Innocence]] --[[User:Legion|Legion]] 13:25, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Queer Theory

2010-01-09T13:23:54Z

Legion: inserted reference

Queer Theory is a burgeoning field of critical theory, which has only explicitly been named as a distinct discipline since the 1990s. [[Michel Foucault]]'s [[The History of Sexuality]] is often considered a foundational axiom for queer theory. While there are in fact a diverse variety of theoretical approaches to be found among queer theorists (including [[poststructuralism|poststructuralist]] thought, psychoanlaytic theory and gender theory) what these approaches tend to share is a recognition of the need to challenge essentialist understandings of, among others, "gender" and "sexual identity" - along with the dominant hegemonic practices ([[heteronormativity]]) that shore up such understandings. In the process, it is intended to free up a space in which entirely new trajectories can unfold.

The term 'queer' is therefore employed not so much in the sense of dissident sexualities that might be named, but in the sense of a resistance to containment in such legible identity categories, as "a refusal of every substantialization of identity" ([[Lee Edelman]], ''[[No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive]]'' (Duke University Press, 2004)).

A number of queer theorists are playing an important role in re-conceptualizing 'childhood sexualities', and more particularly with a goal of 'queering the child'. As in much queer theory, the term 'queer' is used here precisely for its indefiniteness. The figure of the queer child could be viewed as "that which doesn't quite confirm to the wished-for way that children are supposed to be in terms of gender and sexual roles. In other circumstances, it is also the child who displays interest in sex generally, the same-sex erotic attachments or in cross-generational attachments." Academics theorizing the queer child aim to "tease out the range of possibilities that exist for child sexuality", while looking to "the dominant heteronarrative to see how normalizing language itself both produces and resists queer stories of childhood sexual desire."<ref> all quotes from: Bruhm & Hurley (eds), ''Curiouser'' (University of Minnesota Press, 2004)</ref>

Queer theorists are of crucial importance, since their challenge to developmental models of childhood, along with (more broadly), their opposition to biological, medical and psychological reductionism, not only creates possibilities for new narratives, but unsettles all entrenched presumptions relating to childhood, sexual desire and cross-generational intimacies.

Key thinkers (and early influencers) of what has fallen under the general umbrella term, 'queer theory', include:

*Guy Hocquenghem
*[[Michel Foucault]]
*Judith Butler
*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
*Leo Bersani
*[[James Kincaid]]
*[[Lee Edelman]]
*Kathryn Bond Stockton

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Gay]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category: Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]]

Erotic Innocence

2010-01-09T13:21:43Z

Legion: new article

Building on from the position of those such as Philippe Ariès, James Kincaid recognizes that the modern notion of 'childhood' is a social construction. In his texts ''Child-Loving''<ref>''Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture'' (New York: Routledge, 1992)</ref> and ''Erotic Innocence''<ref>''Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting'' (Duke University Press, 1998)</ref>, he argues that our modern child is an "erotically-appealing blank", and that this erotic child is manufactured – in the sense that we produce it in our cultural factories, i.e. those that 'make meanings' for us. They tell us what "the child" is, and also what "the erotic" is. For the last two hundred years or so, they have confused us, have failed to distinguish the two categories, have allowed them dangerously to overlap. And the result of all that is public spectacles of child eroticism, an eroticism that can be flaunted and also screened, exploited and denied, enjoyed and cast off, made central and made criminal.

'''The erotic child'''

Kincaid asserts that this new thing, the post-romantic 'child', has been deployed as a political and philosophical agent, a weapon used to assault substance and substitute in its place a set of negative inversions: 'innocence', 'purity', and 'emptiness'. The construction of the modern 'child' is in this sense largely an evacuation: childhood in our culture has come to be largely a coordinate set of have nots: the child is that which does not have. Its liberty, however much prized, is a negative attribute, as is its 'innocence' and 'purity'.

Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century, notions of 'innocence' and 'purity' became more and more firmly attached to what was characterized as sexually ''desirable'', 'innocence' in particular becoming a fulcrum for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' ambiguous construction of 'sexuality' and sexual behavior. The instructions we receive on what to regard ''as'' sexually arousing tell us to look for (and often create) this emptiness, to discover the erotic in that which is most susceptible to inscription, the blank page. On that page we can write what we like, write it and then long for it, love it, have it. Children are defined, and longed for, according to what they do not have.

Filmmakers, talk-show hosts, journalists, police, psychologists, and 'concerned parents' all have a stake in propagating the image of the sexual child through the same endlessly repeated and repeatable gothic narrative of protection and redemption that allows us to disavow our own sexual investment.

Thus the major point and dilemma is that we are instructed to crave that which is forbidden, a crisis we face by not facing it, by becoming hysterical, and by writing a kind of pious pornography, a self-righteous doublespeak that demands both lavish public spectacle and constant guilt-denying projections onto scapegoats. "Child-molesting" becomes the virus that nourishes us, that empty point of ignorance about which we are most knowing. It is the semiotic shorthand that explains everything, that tells us to look no further.

Our favorite public entertainment has therefore become staged dramas of 'child-molesting', masked as exercises in justice. The media here is not so much a ''source'' as a friendly satellite, bouncing back to us the story of child molesting we often hear, tell ourselves and find so satisfying that we love even the echoes. The idea of fear-provoking rumors is not to erase the anxiety but to execute it, since it is the anxiety itself that is doing so much for us.

Killing the bad guy delivers us too – enabling us to enter guilt free into the child's eroticism. Having demonstrated our righteousness by taking such an active part in expelling monstrous evil, we can proceed with an easy heart. Drive a stake through the heart of the pedophile and bourgeois America will be safe, along with our illusions about childhood, the family, sexuality, and our own rectitude.

:"Such frenzied denunciations of the villains, such easy expressions of outrage, such simple-minded analyses of the problem of child-molesting as we love to repeat serve not simply to flatter us but to bring before us once again the same story of desire that is itself desirable, allowing us to construct, watch, enjoy the erotic child without taking any responsibility for our actions."

We reject this monstrous activity with such automatic indignation that the indignation comes to seem almost like pleasure. We have constructed the crisis of '[[child sexual abuse]]' as a demonic trap, a tale of terror from which there is no escape. Though we've created hundreds of public and private agencies, and spent millions, located more pedophiles, jailed them faster and longer, castrated them, tracked them – where are we? Still with a 'rising epidemic'. We've plotted the mystery story precisely so that it can have no solution and no ending.

'''Backlash and counter-backlash'''

Kincaid recognizes that things have not remained static, that the image of 'childhood innocence' and the story of 'the pedophile' encounter fluxes, for example with the doubt that has been cast at times on 'satanic rituals', or the rise and fall in popularity of 'recovered memory' cases. These back and forwards movements in the discourse may be described as 'backlash' and 'counter-backlash' stories.

However, these movements all enter into a symbiotic relationship with 'the problem' to keep the talk going by slightly re-jiggling the terms; a way of maintaining the same structure of titillating talk and effective self-protection. In fact, these new twists are so intriguing they demand even more talk, serving the same old needs. The charges and counter-charges merely change and adapt to one another and, more important, the 'problem' changes shape to accommodate the ever-more complex dynamic relations. Hence what looks like violent disagreement in fact seems more like sweet concord. In whatever ways the stories are made more complicated, they remain gothic melodrama, filled with self-protective name-calling. The game stays as it was; the primary discourse remains intact.

'''New stories'''

For Kincaid, the question to be studied and discussed is: why is our culture so fixated on 'sex with children' and how might we deal with that fixation?

Kincaid suggests that the 'child-molesting problem' is married to the way we ''think'' about 'the child-molesting problem'. He urges that we resist the most compelling ritual gesture of all: acknowledging that, "of course, sexual child abuse does exist, and exists on a very large scale". We need not deny this, we just do not want to begin the discussion in the territory ''left to us once we offer that disclaimer''. This disclaimer is a vital part of the discourse that eroticizes the child and keeps us blind to what we are doing. It forces the discussion into channels of diagnosis and cure, mandates certain assumptions about what is and is not important, allows us to see some things and blinds us to others. It traps us into offering one more set of tips on how to determine whether or not child molesting "happened".

We need to fly past the net of beginning with the acknowledgment that 'molestation happens'. That we are compelled to say that 'molestation happens' is an insistence that it must. Where would we be without it? Its material presence is guaranteed by our usual stories, stories of displacement and denial, stories that act to keep alive the images that guarantee the 'molesting' itself, or at least our belief in it.

Kincaid's conclusion is that we must snub the narrative authority and change the stories, begin tell ourselves new stories. This requires being 'scandalous', and being scandalous means being willing to take on big-time opprobrium (which "takes big shoulders, and many of them"). The only way to rewrite the script is first to jar loose the present one, to drain its power by drawing it into the trap that scandal can set and then spring.

Kincaid suggests that alternative genres would be mixed, modulated; abandoning, for instance, stark essentialist notions of sexuality and sexual behavior in favor of the idea of a range of erotic feelings even within and toward children. Such scandalous narratives might see more calmly the way children and eroticism have been constructed for us, and might help us decide that the problems involved in facing these things are much smaller than those that come down on us when we evade them. "We might find that, all along, we have been afraid of the wrong things. We might even find stories that are not fueled by fear."

'''Conclusion'''

One problem that remains largely unaddressed by Kincaid's important and insightful analyses is the question of how to make these new narratives ''sufficiently persuasive'' to enable the existing dominant discourse to be replaced. He suggests that we enjoy the predicaments we have concocted, that they satisfy our needs for titillation, self-righteousness and absolution from guilt. If so, then what incentive does our culture have to change this? Kincaid – paradoxically, we suggest – indicates that people are basically "well-meaning" and that "deep down [the [[CSA]] story] wants to do right by the child". He fails to offer any cause for this naïve optimism. Nonetheless, it remains the case that the creation of new narratives is crucial – and, whether or not our culture is ready or willing to hear them, we must continue to construct and vociferously proclaim them.

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category:Cyber Activism]][[Category:Anti-Pedophile culture]][[Category:Hysteria]][[Category:Youth]][[Category:Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:History & Events]][[Category:History & Events: International]][[Category:History & Events: 1980s]][[Category:History & Events: 19th C]][[Category:Publications & Documents]][[Category:Pubs: Books]]

James Kincaid

2010-01-09T12:45:05Z

Legion: new article

James R. Kincaid is currently Aerol Arnold Chair in English and Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where he has been teaching since 1987.

Kincaid is interested in the media's portrayal of childhood 'innocence' and sexuality, and more particularly with our culture's investment in perpetuating, exploiting and fetishizing the myth of the 'innocent child'.

A social critic, Kincaid's most infamous creation is perhaps the notion of '[[Erotic Innocence]]' – the idea that children in our culture are eroticized through emphatic de-eroticization. 'Innocence', he suggests, is a rhetorical category; its disavowals, self-justifications and recriminations mark the traces of a violent disidentification with children that constructs childhood by voiding it of content.

Kincaid rejects most stereotypes of childhood and pedophilia. He describes the "utopian and revolutionary" aim of his book ''Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture'' (New York: Routledge, 1992) as being the repositioning of sexual attitudes toward children, who are assaulted by societal protections. He advances "a form of sexual thinking that abandons fixed categories in favor of a scale of dynamic and relativistic measure of a shifting range of possibilities".

'''Controversy'''

When Kincaid's book ''Child-Loving'' was published in the UK, an article in the ''Sunday Times'' newspaper stated (erroneously) that "Kincaid's theories support those of the infamous [[Paedophile Information Exchange]]", banned in Britain. At least three Conservative MPs called for the book to be banned (Lord Bernard Braine "simply couldn't believe" that "a reputable publisher could consider printing a book with such views"; Ann Winterton MP was "appalled"; while Dame Jill Knight opined that it was "crucial for the normal development of children that their innocence be preserved"). Meanwhile, Michael Hames, head of Scotland Yard's Obscene Publications Squad, told the ''Daily Mail'' newspaper that people would be "rightly outraged" by the book, which "give[s] comfort to paedophiles".

As usual, its doubtful that any of those quoted actually read the text; or that even if they had, would have been capable of understanding it. In fact, Kincaid is very careful not to present any argument in favor of "pedophilia", partly because he recognizes the speciousness of arguments from morality, and partly because the category itself is a socially-constructed one. He mentions in ''Child-Loving'' that his analysis "does not, of course, naturalize pedophilia, much less justify it. But it does suggest that our resistance to child-love helps ensure the perpetuation of the activity."

It might be said that Kincaid is not so much interested in ''actual manifestations'' of cross-generational intimacy, but rather in the discursive construction of 'the child' and 'child sexuality' that are produced by the stories we tell ourselves. For instance, he observes, with regard to typical arguments focusing on so-called 'power inequalities' involved in intergenerational intimacy, that "the question is not the redistribution of power but its adequacy in the first place, its limitations as a tool for understanding and for living".

Our [[Erotic Innocence|own article]] summarises Kincaid's work.

'''Key texts:'''

*''Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture'' (New York: Routledge, 1992)
*''Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting'' (Duke University Press, 1998)

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category: Queer Theory]][[Category:Gay]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:People]][[Category:People: Academics]][[Category:People: Critical Analysts]][[Category:People: Popular Authors]]

User talk:Legion

2010-01-08T23:50:54Z

Legion: /* THS */

Queer Theory

2010-01-08T23:47:37Z

Legion: (a summarizing Queer Theory)

Queer Theory is a burgeoning field of critical theory, which has only explicitly been named as a distinct discipline since the 1990s. [[Michel Foucault]]'s [[The History of Sexuality]] is often considered a foundational axiom for queer theory. While there are in fact a diverse variety of theoretical approaches to be found among queer theorists (including poststructuralist thought, psychoanlytic theory and gender theory) what these approaches tend to share is a recognition of the need to challenge essentialist understandings of, amoung others, "gender" and "sexual identity" - along with the dominant hegemonic practices (heteronormativity) that shores up such understandings. In the process, it is intended to free up a space in which entirely new trajectories can unfold.

The term 'queer' is therefore employed not so much in the sense of dissident sexualities that might be named, but in the sense of a resistance to containment in such legible identity categories, as "a refusal of every substantialization of identity" ([[Lee Edelman]], ''[[No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive]]'' (Duke University Press, 2004)).

A number of queer theorists are playing an important role in reconceptualizing 'childhood sexualities', and more particularly with agoal of 'queering the child'. As in much queer theory, the term 'queer' is used here precisely for its undefinability. The figure of the queer child could be viewed as "that which doesn't quite confirm to the wished-for way that children are supposed to be in terms of gender and sexual roles. In other circumstances, it is also the child who displays interest in sex generally, the same-sex erotic attachments or in cross-generational attachments." Academics theorizing the queer child aim to "tease out the range of possibilities that exist for child sexuality", while looking to "the dominant heteronarrative to see how normalizing language itself both produces and resists queer stories of childhood sexual desire." (All quotes: Bruhm & Hurely, ''Curiouser'' (University of Minnesota Press, 2004))

Queer theorists are of crucial importance, since their challenge to developmental models of childhood, along with (more broadly), their opposition to biological, medical and psychological reductionism, not only creates possibilities for new narratives, but unsettles all entrenched presumptions relating to childhood, sexual desire and cross-generational intimacies.

Key thinkers (and early influencers) of what has fallen under the general umbrella term, 'queer theory', include:

*Guy Hocquenghem
*[[Michel Foucault]]
*Judith Butler
*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
*Leo Bersani
*[[James Kincaid]]
*[[Lee Edelman]]
*Kathryn Bond Stockton

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Gay]][[Category:Sociological Theory]][[Category: Queer Theory]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]]

User talk:Legion

2010-01-04T13:12:43Z

Legion: /* THS */

Lee Edelman

2010-01-04T13:05:57Z

Legion: (adding page categories)

Lee Edelman is a professor of the English Department at Tufts University. He has become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of [[Queer Theory]].

The below is a summary of his major text, ''No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive'' (Duke University Press, 2004). (While Edelman has an interest in psychoanalytic theory, for the purposes of this article only the queer theory aspects are explored.)

'''Reproductive Futurism'''

Edelman invokes the notion of "reproductive futurism" to refer to the idea that all politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative, insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate a social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its Inner Child. That [[Child]] remains the ''perpetual horizon'' of every acknowledged politics, the ''fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention''.

This "fascism of the baby's face" subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself, whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear (e.g. Aryan or multicultural). This is not to say that the difference of those political programs makes no difference, but rather that, as political ''programs'', they aim to reify difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same. The Child marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity; an erotically-charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.

Historically constructed to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody the ''telos'' of the social order and has come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust. In its coercive universalization, the image of the Child (not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children) serves to ''regulate'' political discourse, to prescribe what will ''count'' as political discourse, by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address.

'''The Task of the Queer'''

What would it signify ''not'' to be 'fighting for the children'? How could one take the other 'side', when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take a side ''within'' a political order that returns to the child as the image of the future it intends? Against the pervasive invocation of the Child (as the emblem of futurity's unquestioned value) is a queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such. Queerness is a refusal of every substantialization of identity. ''Queerness'' names the side of those ''not'' 'fighting for the children', the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

Liberal discourse typically strives to disassociate the queer from its figurative place as the social order's death drive (as those who do not reproduce and transmit futurity). Reproductive futurism's trump card is always the question 'If not this, what?' – always the demand to translate the insistence of negativity into some determinate stance or 'position' whose determination would thus negate it. We should withdraw our allegiance from a reality based on reproductive futurism – not in order to suggest that some 'good' will result, but to the contrary.

Rather than rejecting the ascription of negativity to the queer, we might do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of thereby forging some more perfect social order (which hope would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism) but rather to abjuring fidelity to a futurism that's always purchased at our expense. Queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it ''accedes'' to the negative position, and ''accepts'' its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social, while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. The queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance – internal to the social – to every social structure or form.

Edelman recognizes that his project is in some respects paradoxical and even impossible. But it is precisely this impossibility that constitutes the challenge to the social order. The embrace of queer negativity can have no 'justification', if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value resides instead in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.

The future, as Orphan Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is ''always'' a day away. "Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kind on the Net..."

Edelman proposes no position from which queer sexuality might truly 'become itself', as if it could somehow achieve an essential queerness – instead, he suggests, the real strategic value of queerness lies in its resistance to a symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourself in it, clinging to its governing fictions as reality itself.

[[Category:Official Encyclopedia]][[Category:Gay]][[Category:Sociological Theory]] [[Category:Queer Theorists]][[Category:Research]][[Category:Research: Broader Perspectives]][[Category:People]][[Category:People: Academics]][[Category:People: Critical Analysts]][[Category:People: Popular Authors]]

Lee Edelman

2010-01-04T13:02:30Z

Legion:

Lee Edelman

2010-01-04T12:59:31Z

Legion: (new page: summary of Edelman's text: 'No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive')

Lee Edelman is a professor of the English Department at Tufts University. He has become a central figure in the development, dissemination, and rethinking of [[queer theory]].

The below is a summary of his major text, ''No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive'' (Duke University Press, 2004). (While Edelman has an interest in psychoanalytic theory, for the purposes of this article only the queer theory aspects are explored.)

'''Reproductive Futurism'''

Edelman invokes the notion of "reproductive futurism" to refer to the idea that all politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative, insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate a social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its Inner Child. That [[Child]] remains the ''perpetual horizon'' of every acknowledged politics, the ''fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention''.

This "fascism of the baby's face" subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself, whatever the face a particular politics gives that baby to wear (e.g. Aryan or multicultural). This is not to say that the difference of those political programs makes no difference, but rather that, as political ''programs'', they aim to reify difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same. The Child marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity; an erotically-charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.

Historically constructed to serve as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody the ''telos'' of the social order and has come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust. In its coercive universalization, the image of the Child (not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children) serves to ''regulate'' political discourse, to prescribe what will ''count'' as political discourse, by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address.

'''The Task of the Queer'''

What would it signify ''not'' to be 'fighting for the children'? How could one take the other 'side', when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take a side ''within'' a political order that returns to the child as the image of the future it intends? Against the pervasive invocation of the Child (as the emblem of futurity's unquestioned value) is a queer oppositionality that would oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such. Queerness is a refusal of every substantialization of identity. ''Queerness'' names the side of those ''not'' 'fighting for the children', the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

Liberal discourse typically strives to disassociate the queer from its figurative place as the social order's death drive (as those who do not reproduce and transmit futurity). Reproductive futurism's trump card is always the question 'If not this, what?' – always the demand to translate the insistence of negativity into some determinate stance or 'position' whose determination would thus negate it. We should withdraw our allegiance from a reality based on reproductive futurism – not in order to suggest that some 'good' will result, but to the contrary.

Rather than rejecting the ascription of negativity to the queer, we might do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of thereby forging some more perfect social order (which hope would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism) but rather to abjuring fidelity to a futurism that's always purchased at our expense. Queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it ''accedes'' to the negative position, and ''accepts'' its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social, while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure. The queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance – internal to the social – to every social structure or form.

Edelman recognizes that his project is in some respects paradoxical and even impossible. But it is precisely this impossibility that constitutes the challenge to the social order. The embrace of queer negativity can have no 'justification', if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value resides instead in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.

The future, as Orphan Annie's hymn to the hope of "Tomorrow" understands, is ''always'' a day away. "Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kind on the Net..."

Edelman proposes no position from which queer sexuality might truly 'become itself', as if it could somehow achieve an essential queerness – instead, he suggests, the real strategic value of queerness lies in its resistance to a symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourself in it, clinging to its governing fictions as reality itself.

Queer Theory

2010-01-04T12:44:09Z

Legion: (Beginning work on summarizing the approach of various queer theorists)

Queer Theorists

[[Lee Edelman]]

Michel Foucault

2009-12-27T13:19:29Z

Legion:

'''Introduction'''

In Volume 1 of ''The History of Sexuality'', Foucault seeks to challenge the popular discourse of 'sexual repression' and to describe the invention of the notion of "sexuality", which is today treated as though it is some sort of eternal and essential fact.

The popular 'sexual repression' narrative runs thus: ''Prior to the seventeenth century, sexual frankness was common. Victorian bourgeoisie moved it into the home; silence and prudishness became the rule. Since the 1960s, we've begun to liberate ourselves from two long centuries of repression – the fact that we are doing so is testament to our progress. Discourse on sexual oppression is filled with the promise of a coming freedom. The effects of liberation from repression are bound to be slow, so we must persevere.''

This common hypothesis – 'sexual repression' – must be re-situated within the general ''economy of discourse'' of 'sex' in modern societies since the seventeenth century; only in this way will it become clear that the 'repression' hypothesis is in fact part of the ''same historical network'' as the very thing it professes to denounce.

By shifting ever-greater focus away from physical interactions and onto ''desires'', during the seventeenth century 'sex' became entrenched as a discourse that embraced everyone. Western man thus has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex. This carefully analytical discourse was intended to yield multiple effects of the displacement, intensification, reorientation and the ''modification of desire'' itself.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification and specification. Such a need derived not from morality or religious sensibility alone, but from ''rationality'': one had to speak of sex not simply as something to be judged, but as something to be ''managed'', inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. 'Sex' was in the nature of public potential: it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytic discourse.

Hence, rather than a massive censorship, what was involved beginning with the verbal properties imposed by the 'Age of Reason' was a regulated and polymorphous ''incitement to discourse''. It is not clear whether the ultimate objective of all the developments was to ensure population, reproduce labor capacity, perpetuate the form of social relations (i.e. to constitute a sexuality that is economically-useful and politically-conservative), but what ''is'' clear is that a reduction in sexual discourse was not the means employed. We are not "sexually repressed". The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have instead been the age of multiplication – the invention and dispersion of 'sexualities', a ''strengthening'' of their disparate forms, a multiple ''implantation'' of 'perversions': our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.

'''The Invention of Sexuality'''

One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of "population" as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, as manpower or labor capacity, balanced between its own growth and resources. At the heart of this economic and political problem was 'sex': it was necessary to analyze the birth-rate, the age of marriage, precocity and frequency of sexual relations, sterility and fertility, the effects of unmarried life, the impact of contraceptive practices, and so on. This was the first time that a culture had affirmed that its future and fortune were tied not only to the number and productivity of its citizens, to their marriage rules and organization, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex. The sexual conduct of the population became both an ''object of analysis'' and a ''target for intervention''. Between the state and the individual, sex became a public issue: a whole web of discourses, special knowledge, analyses and injunctions settled upon it.

What was involved in these strategies was the very ''production'' of sexuality. ''Sexuality must be regarded as a historical construct''; a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, and the strengthening of controls, are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.

Prior to the eighteenth century, there were undoubtedly deployments of alliance (a system of marriage, fixation of kinship ties, the transmission of names and possessions) which was build around a system of rules (a licit/illicit binary) and tied to the economy due to the role they could play in the transmission or circulation of wealth. But the new apparatus of "sexuality" created and deployed by Western societies from the eighteenth century engendered a [i]continual extension[/i] of areas and forms of control. It was linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which is the body, the body that produces and consumes. Whereas the deployment of ''alliance'' had the function of maintaining the social body as a whole, the deployment of ''sexuality'' has its reason for being in proliferating, innovating, annexing and creating individual bodies, and controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

Particularly since the nineteenth century, this concatenation has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests which have tapped into both the analytical multiplication of pleasure and the optimization of the power that controls it. ''The growth of 'perversions' is not a moralizing theme; it is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures.''

The type of power brought to bear on the body and 'sex' acted by multiplication of singular sexualities; it did not set boundaries for sexuality but rather created and extended forms of sexuality. ''This deployment of power produced and determined the sexual mosaic''. A proliferation of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimization of the power to which each of the newly created sexualities provided a surface of ''intervention''.

'''The Role of the Sciences'''

Intervention was tied to the fact that this deployment of power, this creation of sexualities, demanded constant, attentive presences for its exercise: it proceeded through examination and insistent observation, and required an exchange of discourses between 'experts'.

The growth of the human sciences was correlative with the entrenchment of power-knowledges that produced sexualities. Medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy began to solidify all the aspects of sexuality; recording, classifying. In the nineteenth century, the most singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves within the norms of ''scientific'' regularity. The medicalization of sex was both effect and instrument of the deployment of sexuality.

The medicalization of the discourse meant that the sexual domain was no longer accounted for by notions of sin or excess, but was placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological. Sex would derive its meaning and necessity from medical intervention. Thus, for instance, the new focus on childhood masturbation was not an evil to be eliminated, but was instead an excuse for the ''multiplication'' of power branches. The body of the child was now placed under permanent and minute surveillance, surrounded by a watch-crew of parents, nurses, educators and doctors.

Since the eighteenth century, 'sexuality' has had its privileged point of development in the nuclear family, hence sexuality is 'incestuous' from the start. (If the West has displayed such a strong interest in the prohibition of incest, perhaps this is because it was a means of self-defense against the expansion and implications of this deployment of sexuality that had been set up.) The family cell made it possible for the main elements of the deployment of sexuality (the four 'great strategies' which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult) to develop along its two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parent-child axis.

The contemporary family form must therefore not be understood as something that excludes/restrains sexuality; on the contrary, its role is to anchor the notion of sexuality and provide it with permanent entrenchment. In the nuclear family, parents became the chief agents of a deployment of sexuality which drew its outside support from doctors, educators and psychiatrists. The nuclear family is the crystal in the deployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sexuality which it only reflected and diffracted. The family cell could hence be combined with the 'scientific knowledges' to produce and proliferate hegemonic discourses.

Our societies have thus equipped themselves with a science of sexuality. More precisely, they have pursued the task of producing "true discourses" concerning sex. ''The society that emerged in the 19th c (bourgeois, capitalist, industrial society) put into operation an entire machinery for producing 'true discourses' concerning sex. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so, it also set out to formulate a uniform Truth of sex. It was essential for this society that sex be inscribed into an ordered system of knowledge.''

In this question of sex, two processes emerge, one always conditioning the other: we demand that sex speak the truth (but reserve for ourselves the right to reveal its truth via science) and we demand that it tells us ''our'' truth. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us about that truth; it tells us our own, by delivering up that part of it that escaped us. From this interplay has evolved a 'knowledge of the human subject', of that which determines him, and importantly, causes him to be ignorant of himself. Through the tactics of power immanent in the discourse of sex, the newly-formed subject requires scientific discourse – biology, psychiatry, medicine – to lift him from his position of ignorance.

'''Biopower'''

The emphasis on 'the body' should undoubtedly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of bourgeois hegemony – not because of the market value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the 'cultivation' of its own body could represent politically, economically and historically for the present and future of the bourgeoisie.

Thus it was the body of the bourgeoisie that underwent the initial changes – it was a long time before they offered the proletariat a body and a sex. Conflicts became necessary (epidemics, venereal diseases) for the proletariat to be implanted with a body and a sexuality; economic emergencies had to arise (heavy industry, the need for a stable and competent labor force, the obligation to regulate population); there had to be established a whole technology of control which made it possible to keep this new body and sexuality under surveillance – schooling, housing, public hygiene, institutions of relief, the general medicalization of the population; an entire administrative and technical machinery which made it possible to safely import the deployment of sexuality into the working classes.

'Biopower': Foucault's concept for that which brought ''Life'' and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made power-knowledge an age of transformation of human life. Law always refers to the sword, but a power whose task is to take charge of ''life'' needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms; it effects distributions around ''norms''. ''A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on Life.'' We should not be deceived by all the constitutions framed, codes written and revised, continual and clamorous legislative activity: these were merely the forms that made an essentially ''normalizing'' power acceptable.

'Sex' was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of Life. On the one hand, it was tied to the disciplines of the body (harnessing and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies); on the other, it was applied to the regulation of populations. 'Sex' was means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.

Thus in the nineteenth century, 'sex' was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences, tracked down in behavior, pursued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood; it became the stamp of individuality – simultaneously what enabled one to analyze, and make it possible to master, 'individuality'.

It was in the nineteenth century that 'the homosexual' was first invented as a personage with a past, a case history. Sodomy was no longer an aberrant act, but the perpetrator was now an ''identity''. Nothing that went into his total composition was not affected by his 'sexuality'. The homosexual became a ''species'', as did all the minor perverts entomologized by psychiatrists: 300-philias were created, producing more and more species. The machinery of power did not aim to suppress such identities but rather to give them an analytical, visible and permanent reality: they were implanted in bodies, made into principles of classification, established as a 'natural order' of disorder. The thousand aberrant sexualities were disseminated in order to strew reality with them and incorporate them into the individual.

All along the lines of attack upon which the politics of sex advanced, one sees the creation and elaboration of an idea that there exists something ''other'' than merely bodies, organs, functions, sensations and pleasures; something else and something 'more', with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: the contemporary notion of "sex". The deployment of sexuality established this new idea of "sex", which made it possible to group together – in artificial unity – anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures, and enabled this fictitious unity to be used as a causal principle, an omni-present meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.

''"Sex" is not some autonomous agency which produces various effects of sexuality. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, ideal and internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.''

Through a reversal, we have arrived at the point were we expect our intelligibility and identity to come from what was earlier perceived as an obscure and nameless urge. Hence the importance which we have come to ascribe to "sex", the reverential fear with which we surround it. In creating the imaginary element that is "sex", the deployment of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: desire – the desire to have 'sex', to access it, to discover it, to liberate it in discourse, to formulate it as truth.

It is this desirability of "sex" that makes us think that in clamoring for 'rights', we are affirming rights ''against'' power – when in fact we are merely fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from within us a sort of mirage in which we think of ourselves as reflected. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality therefore ought not to be a 'right to sexual desire' or to a 'sexual identity', which merely reiterates the very discourses that have produced the contemporary utilization of "sex" as a strategy to control and limit, but rather bodies and pleasures.

'''Conclusions and Moving Forwards'''

The history of sexuality outlined by Foucault demonstrates that what we consider as 'natural', 'essential' or even 'genetic' – notions of "sex" and "sexuality" – are in fact purely ''contingent, discursive strategies'', utilized since the eighteenth century as part of a project of the body's optimization; turning the human body into a well-regulated machine by means of breaking down its movements into their smallest elements and then building them back into a maximally-efficient whole.

Any 'sexual liberation' based on the discourse of 'sex' or 'sexual identity' thus plays into the hands of this biopolitical project of control and regulation. For example, psychiatric-medico-jurisprudential discourse of the nineteenth century created 'the homosexual', but homosexuality then began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories, by which it was medically disqualified. It was not thus 'liberated', but rather entrenched the power-processes that had invented it.

One implication of this for those who identify as 'child-lovers', 'BLs', 'CLs', or 'pedophiles' is that the adoption of an identity and a sexuality, even as a minority discourse, collaborates with the self-same power relations that operate to endlessly classify – and so control – populations. Claims of 'human rights', 'sexual rights', 'freedom from governmental intervention' – in participating with the illusory model of 'power' as a limit set on freedom, and in their failure to understand power as something that produces – equally serve merely to reproduce the 'repression/liberation' delusion.

Foucault's analysis suggests that we must create new narratives, new ways of understanding bodies and their interactions. First, this requires a refusal of all "sexual identities" and the very notion of "sex". In order to produce these replacement narratives, however, we will have to move beyond the limitations of Foucaultian analysis. Possible trajectories will be the subject of subsequent articles.

Michel Foucault

2009-12-27T13:01:01Z

Legion: (New page: summary of Michel Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality: Volume 1')

[u]Introduction[/u]

In Volume 1 of [i]The History of Sexuality[/i], Foucault seeks to challenge the popular discourse of 'sexual repression' and to describe the invention of the notion of "sexuality", which is today treated as though it is some sort of eternal and essential fact.

The popular 'sexual repression' narrative runs thus: [i]'Prior to the seventeenth century, sexual frankness was common. Victorian bourgeoisie moved it into the home; silence and prudishness became the rule. Since the 1960s, we've begun to liberate ourselves from two long centuries of repression – the fact that we are doing so is testament to our progress. Discourse on sexual oppression is filled with the promise of a coming freedom. The effects of liberation from repression are bound to be slow, so we must persevere.'[/i]

This common hypothesis – 'sexual repression' – must be re-situated within the general [i]economy of discourse[/i] of 'sex' in modern societies since the seventeenth century; only in this way will it become clear that the 'repression' hypothesis is in fact part of the [i]same historical network[/i] as the very thing it professes to denounce.

By shifting ever-greater focus away from physical interactions and onto [i]desires[/i], during the seventeenth century 'sex' became entrenched as a discourse that embraced everyone. Western man thus has been drawn for three centuries to the task of telling everything concerning his sex. This carefully analytical discourse was intended to yield multiple effects of the displacement, intensification, reorientation and the [i]modification of desire[/i] itself.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification and specification. Such a need derived not from morality or religious sensibility alone, but from [i]rationality[/i]: one had to speak of sex not simply as something to be judged, but as something to be [i]managed[/i], inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an optimum. 'Sex' was in the nature of public potential: it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytic discourse.

Hence, rather than a massive censorship, what was involved beginning with the verbal properties imposed by the 'Age of Reason' was a regulated and polymorphous [i]incitement to discourse[/i]. It is not clear whether the ultimate objective of all the developments was to ensure population, reproduce labor capacity, perpetuate the form of social relations (i.e. to constitute a sexuality that is economically-useful and politically-conservative), but what [i]is[/i] clear is that a reduction in sexual discourse was not the means employed. We are not 'sexually repressed'. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have instead been the age of multiplication – the invention and dispersion of 'sexualities', a [i]strengthening[/i] of their disparate forms, a multiple [i]implantation[/i] of 'perversions': our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.

[u]The Invention of Sexuality[/u]

One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of '[i]population[/i]' as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, as manpower or labor capacity, balanced between its own growth and resources. At the heart of this economic and political problem was 'sex': it was necessary to analyze the birth-rate, the age of marriage, precocity and frequency of sexual relations, sterility and fertility, the effects of unmarried life, the impact of contraceptive practices, and so on. This was the first time that a culture had affirmed that its future and fortune were tied not only to the number and productivity of its citizens, to their marriage rules and organization, but to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex. The sexual conduct of the population became both an [i]object of analysis[/i] and a [i]target for intervention[/i]. Between the state and the individual, sex became a public issue: a whole web of discourses, special knowledge, analyses and injunctions settled upon it.

What was involved in these strategies was the very [i]production[/i] of sexuality. [i]Sexuality must be regarded as a historical construct[/i]; a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, and the strengthening of controls, are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.

Prior to the eighteenth century, there were undoubtedly deployments of alliance (a system of marriage, fixation of kinship ties, the transmission of names and possessions) which was build around a system of rules (a licit/illicit binary) and tied to the economy due to the role they could play in the transmission or circulation of wealth. But the new apparatus of "sexuality" created and deployed by Western societies from the eighteenth century engendered a [i]continual extension[/i] of areas and forms of control. It was linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which is the body, the body that produces and consumes. Whereas the deployment of [i]alliance[/i] had the function of maintaining the social body as a whole, the deployment of [i]sexuality[/i] has its reason for being in proliferating, innovating, annexing and creating individual bodies, and controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

Particularly since the nineteenth century, this concatenation has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests which have tapped into both the analytical multiplication of pleasure and the optimization of the power that controls it. [i]The growth of 'perversions' is not a moralizing theme; it is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures.[/i]

The type of power brought to bear on the body and 'sex' acted by multiplication of singular sexualities; it did not set boundaries for sexuality but rather created and extended forms of sexuality. [i]This deployment of power produced and determined the sexual mosaic[/i]. A proliferation of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimization of the power to which each of the newly created sexualities provided a surface of [i]intervention[/i].

[u]The Role of the Sciences[/u]

Intervention was tied to the fact that this deployment of power, this creation of sexualities, demanded constant, attentive presences for its exercise: it proceeded through examination and insistent observation, and required an exchange of discourses between 'experts'.

The growth of the human sciences was correlative with the entrenchment of power-knowledges that produced sexualities. Medicine, psychiatry and pedagogy began to solidify all the aspects of sexuality; recording, classifying. In the nineteenth century, the most singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse of truth concerning themselves within the norms of [i]scientific[/i] regularity. The medicalization of sex was both effect and instrument of the deployment of sexuality.

The medicalization of the discourse meant that the sexual domain was no longer accounted for by notions of sin or excess, but was placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological. Sex would derive its meaning and necessity from medical intervention. Thus, for instance, the new focus on childhood masturbation was not an evil to be eliminated, but was instead an excuse for the [i]multiplication[/i] of power branches. The body of the child was now placed under permanent and minute surveillance, surrounded by a watch-crew of parents, nurses, educators and doctors.

Since the eighteenth century, 'sexuality' has had its privileged point of development in the nuclear family, hence sexuality is 'incestuous' from the start. (If the West has displayed such a strong interest in the prohibition of incest, perhaps this is because it was a means of self-defense against the expansion and implications of this deployment of sexuality that had been set up.) The family cell made it possible for the main elements of the deployment of sexuality (the four 'great strategies' which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult) to develop along its two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parent-child axis.

The contemporary family form must therefore not be understood as something that excludes/restrains sexuality; on the contrary, its role is to anchor the notion of sexuality and provide it with permanent entrenchment. In the nuclear family, parents became the chief agents of a deployment of sexuality which drew its outside support from doctors, educators and psychiatrists. The nuclear family is the crystal in the deployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sexuality which it only reflected and diffracted. The family cell could hence be combined with the 'scientific knowledges' to produce and proliferate hegemonic discourses.

Our societies have thus equipped themselves with a [i]science[/i] of sexuality. More precisely, they have pursued the task of producing "true discourses" concerning sex. [i]The society that emerged in the 19th c (bourgeois, capitalist, industrial society) put into operation an entire machinery for producing 'true discourses' concerning sex. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so, it also set out to formulate a uniform Truth of sex. It was essential for this society that sex be inscribed into an ordered system of knowledge.[/i]

In this question of sex, two processes emerge, one always conditioning the other: we demand that sex speak the truth (but reserve for ourselves the right to reveal its truth via science) and we demand that it tells us [i]our[/i] truth. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us about that truth; it tells us our own, by delivering up that part of it that escaped us. From this interplay has evolved a 'knowledge of the human subject', of that which determines him, and importantly, causes him to be ignorant of himself. Through the tactics of power immanent in the discourse of sex, the newly-formed subject requires scientific discourse – biology, psychiatry, medicine – to lift him from his position of ignorance.

[u]Biopower[/u]

The emphasis on 'the body' should undoubtedly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of bourgeois hegemony – not because of the market value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the 'cultivation' of its own body could represent politically, economically and historically for the present and future of the bourgeoisie.

Thus it was the body of the bourgeoisie that underwent the initial changes – it was a long time before they offered the proletariat a body and a sex. Conflicts became necessary (epidemics, venereal diseases) for the proletariat to be implanted with a body and a sexuality; economic emergencies had to arise (heavy industry, the need for a stable and competent labor force, the obligation to regulate population); there had to be established a whole technology of control which made it possible to keep this new body and sexuality under surveillance – schooling, housing, public hygiene, institutions of relief, the general medicalization of the population; an entire administrative and technical machinery which made it possible to safely import the deployment of sexuality into the working classes.

'Biopower': Foucault's concept for that which brought [i]Life[/i] and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculation and made power-knowledge an age of transformation of human life. Law always refers to the sword, but a power whose task is to take charge of [i]life[/i] needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms; it effects distributions around [i]norms[/i]. [i]A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on Life.[/i] We should not be deceived by all the constitutions framed, codes written and revised, continual and clamorous legislative activity: these were merely the forms that made an essentially [i]normalizing[/i] power acceptable.

'Sex' was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of Life. On the one hand, it was tied to the disciplines of the body (harnessing and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies); on the other, it was applied to the regulation of populations. 'Sex' was means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.

Thus in the nineteenth century, 'sex' was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences, tracked down in behavior, pursued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood; it became the stamp of individuality – simultaneously what enabled one to analyze, and make it possible to master, 'individuality'.

It was in the nineteenth century that 'the homosexual' was first invented as a personage with a past, a case history. Sodomy was no longer an aberrant act, but the perpetrator was now an [i]identity[/i]. Nothing that went into his total composition was not affected by his 'sexuality'. The homosexual became a [i]species[/i], as did all the minor perverts entomologized by psychiatrists: 300-philias were created, producing more and more species. The machinery of power did not aim to suppress such identities but rather to give them an analytical, visible and permanent reality: they were implanted in bodies, made into principles of classification, established as a 'natural order' of disorder. The thousand aberrant sexualities were disseminated in order to strew reality with them and incorporate them into the individual.

All along the lines of attack upon which the politics of sex advanced, one sees the creation and elaboration of an idea that there exists something [i]other[/i] than merely bodies, organs, functions, sensations and pleasures; something else and something 'more', with intrinsic properties and laws of its own: the contemporary notion of "sex". The deployment of sexuality established this new idea of "sex", which made it possible to group together – in artificial unity – anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures, and enabled this fictitious unity to be used as a causal principle, an omni-present meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.

[i]'Sex' is not some autonomous agency which produces various effects of sexuality. On the contrary, sex is the most speculative, ideal and internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasures.[/i]

Through a reversal, we have arrived at the point were we expect our intelligibility and identity to come from what was earlier perceived as an obscure and nameless urge. Hence the importance which we have come to ascribe to "sex", the reverential fear with which we surround it. In creating the imaginary element that is "sex", the deployment of sexuality established one of its most essential internal operating principles: desire – the desire to have 'sex', to access it, to discover it, to liberate it in discourse, to formulate it as truth.

It is this desirability of "sex" that makes us think that in clamoring for 'rights', we are affirming rights [i]against[/i] power – when in fact we are merely fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from within us a sort of mirage in which we think of ourselves as reflected. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality therefore ought not to be a 'right to sexual desire' or to a 'sexual identity', which merely reiterates the very discourses that have produced the contemporary utilization of "sex" as a strategy to control and limit, but rather bodies and pleasures.

[u]Conclusions and Moving Forwards[/u]

The history of sexuality outlined by Foucault demonstrates that what we consider as 'natural', 'essential' or even 'genetic' – notions of "sex" and "sexuality" – are in fact purely [i]contingent, discursive strategies[/i], utilized since the eighteenth century as part of a project of the body's optimization; turning the human body into a well-regulated machine by means of breaking down its movements into their smallest elements and then building them back into a maximally-efficient whole.

Any 'sexual liberation' based on the discourse of 'sex' or 'sexual identity' thus plays into the hands of this biopolitical project of control and regulation. For example, psychiatric-medico-jurisprudential discourse of the nineteenth century created 'the homosexual', but homosexuality then began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories, by which it was medically disqualified. It was not thus 'liberated', but rather entrenched the power-processes that had invented it.

One implication of this for those who identify as 'child-lovers', 'BLs', 'CLs', or 'pedophiles' is that the adoption of an identity and a sexuality, even as a minority discourse, [i]collaborates[/i] with the self-same power relations that operate to endlessly classify – and so control – populations. Claims of 'human rights', 'sexual rights', 'freedom from governmental intervention' – in participating with the illusory model of 'power' as a limit set on freedom, and in their failure to understand power as something that produces – equally serve merely to reproduce the 'repression/liberation' delusion.

Foucault's analysis suggests that we must create new narratives, new ways of understanding bodies and their interactions. First, this requires a refusal of all "sexual identities" and the very notion of "sex". In order to produce these replacement narratives, however, we will have to move beyond the limitations of Foucaultian analysis. Possible trajectories will be the subject of subsequent articles.