HIS 302 Fall 2001
History and Theory Professor Sayegh

 Reading Questions, The History of Sexuality

 

PART I

  1.  In the first few pages, Foucault says "so the story goes," "we are told," and we are informed."  Why does he use this language?

  2. Why is it easy to maintain the discourse on repression when linked to the seventeenth century? (5)

  3. What is the "economic factor" and what two scholars does he link to it? (7)

  4. What are three doubts to the repressive hypothesis? (10)

  5. What is the object of his study? His main concern? His central aim?

 PART II

Chapter 1

  1. What does Foucault mean by the phrase "institutional incitement"? (18)     

  2. How did discourse enter into confession and penitence? How did it digress from traditional penance? (20)     

  3. What is the justification for sharing sexual narratives? (22)     

  4. What is the purpose of putting sex into discourse? (23)     

  5. How was the discursive technique "relayed by other mechanisms"? (23-30)     

  6. What does Foucault mean by "'population' as an economic and political problem" and how did this tie into discourse about sex? (25)     

  7. Why are silences "an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses"? (27)    

  8. What is the significance of the story of the dimwitted farmhand? (31-2)    

  9. Why did discourses on sex serve as the "very space and as the means of [power's] exercise?   

  10. Explain the last sentences of the chapter.

Chapter 2

  1. What three codes governed sexual practice before the nineteenth century and what did it center on? How did it change? (37-8)     

  2. Why did matrimony begin to be separated from sexuality?     

  3. What does he say that with repression and sexualities things are unclear? (40-1)     

  4. What are the four operations involved in the function of power? (41-7)     

  5. How are pleasure and power interlocked? What is a "gaze"? (44-5)     

  6. How did the family, schools and hospitals function under spirals of power and pleasure?     

  7. What does he mean when he says "nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' society…was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion"?     

  8. Why is the "implantation of perversions…an instrument-effect"?     

  9. What, then, is the relationship between pleasure and power?   

  10. Why does Foucault say that we need to abandon the idea that modern society has increased sexual repression?

 PART III

  1. Why is it significant that science emerged in the discourse about sex?     

  2. How did medical practice bind itself to history, biology and racism? (54)     

  3. What were the two orders of knowledge into which sex was separated?     

  4. Why was sex a problem of truth?     

  5. What are the procedures for producing a truth of sex and what societies do they come from? (57-59)

  6. Who possesses the "agency of domination," the speaker or the listener? Why? (62)     

  7. What are the five ways the sexual confession was constituted in scientific terms (65-7)     

  8. What is "sexuality" (according to Foucault)? How did it emerge?     

  9. Why must the history of sexuality first be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses?   

  10. What does Foucault mean by 'subject'? (70)   

  11. What is the significance of situating the understanding of a discourse on sex in historical inquiry? (72-3)

PART IV

  What are binary oppositions and how has 'the West' used them? (78)

 Chapter 1

  1. Why is power "always-already" present with desire (and anything, for that matter)? (81-2)     

  2. What is the difference between a theory and an analytics of power? What are the principle features of the latter? (85-4)     

  3. How does power affect the subject? (84-5)     

  4. What is the paradox of power's effectiveness? (85)     

  5. Why does power need to 'mask' itself? How is it connected to law? (86-88)     

  6. Why does he talk about power in terms of a juridical monarchy?     

  7. Why is it incongruous with "new methods of power"?     

  8. Why does Foucault say that "we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code"?

 Chapter 2

  1. What does Foucault NOT mean by power? How must power be understood? (92)     

  2. Explain what Foucault means when he says that power is produced from one moment to the next.  Why is it everywhere? (93)     

  3. What is his list of five propositions concerning power?     

  4. What does he mean that power is not the result of willing it?     

  5. Why is resistance always 'inside power'?     

  6. Is resistance a polar opposite to power? (96)     

  7. How do discourses on sex fit into his idea of power relations? (97-8)     

  8. What are the four rules to follow? (98-102)     

  9. What school of thought do you think that Foucault critiques on page 100 when he talks about dominant discourses?   

  10. How does discourse serve as instrument and effect of AND hindrance to power? What examples does he provide? (101)

Chapter 3

  1. Why is sexuality described as a linchpin? (103)     

  2. What are the four unities surrounding power and why were they targets for the will to knowledge? (103-5)     

  3. Why must sexuality NOT be thought of as natural? Why is it a "historical construct"?     

  4. What is the deployment of sexuality and why was it constructed? (106-7)     

  5. On page 107, Foucault says we are compelled to accept four hypotheses that reject the repressive hypothesis.  What are they?     

  6. Explain this quote: "'Sexuality' was taking shape, born of a technology of power that was originally focused on alliance."     

  7. To whom does Foucault refer when he says 'the most famous ears of our time'? (112)     

  8. Why does Foucault abandon the argument of sex for labor capacity? (114)

 Chapter 4

  1. What new technologies of sex emerged at the end of the eighteenth century? (118)     

  2. How did medicine regarding sex tie into eugenics?     

  3. What role did psychiatry play at the end of the century?     

  4. At which class were the most rigorous techniques of repression aimed? (120)     

  5. Explain the 'idle,' 'nervous' and 'vaporous' woman. Explain the concern over the 'onanistic youth.'     

  6. How did the mechanism of sexualization penetrate the working classes? (121-2)     

  7. Was there a unitary sexual politics?     

  8. How can sexuality be seen as the self-affirmation of one class? (p. 123: NB: this is a very important page.  Please read it carefully)     

  9. Why was the bourgeoisie obsessed with creating a specific body based on sex? (124)   

  10. What, then, was bourgeois hegemony linked to? How was imperialism connected to this?   

  11. What did it take for the proletariat to be granted a body?   

  12. Why does Foucault say that there are class sexualities? Shouldn't "sexuality" be universal? (127)   

  13. Why can the history of the deployment of sexuality serve as an archaeology of psychoanalysis?

 

PART V

  1. What is the right of death?     

  2. Why are wars now waged? What is at stake in these wars? How has warfare transformed in the modern world?     

  3. How did the power over life evolve from the seventeenth century? (139)     

  4. What mechanisms were needed for the development of capitalism?     

  5. How did western man's recognition of the world change political life and what were the consequences? (142)     

  6. What do bio-power and bio-history mean?     

  7. Explain the politicization of sex. (146)     

  8. How does the thematic of blood tie into racism and sexuality? (149)     

  9. Why does Foucault talk about fascism? What is the relationship of psychoanalysis to fascism? (150)   

  10. On page 154 Foucault talks about sex as both signifier and signified.  What does he mean?   

  11. Is sex independent, superior or subordinate to sexuality? (155)   

  12. Why must we break away from the agency of sex? (157)    Explain the last line of the book with relation to the last 35 years.