Lecture 13 - Sexuality Flashcards
What is normal sexuality?
Controlling the Who, How, When and Where - how do we engage with various aspects of sexuality
Why do we care about sexuality? Alexander Liazos
Alexander Liazos
* The sociologists of deviance are obsessed with “nuts, sluts, and deviated perverts.”
* Sociologists should be engaged with more serious issues
* Should focus on more useful issues rather than this unproductive learning.
* Taboo that is of interest.
* Gives us information about who we are.
* Porn + sexual fantasies = release valve for Durkheim
United states today?
- How gender and sex are central to political discourse. Revolves around sexuality.
- Sexuality and reproductive rights - how do we control our body and birthing.
- Reproductive issues - must look into sexuality and how it is constructed.
Deviant sexuality is at the top of all deviant behaviours in terms of labelling and stigmatizing other people.
- Interesting issue to engage and understand why and how it changes. Who gets th power to say with whom, how, how many times a week
- Who establishes the social norms.
The Bible and sexuality?
The Bible: Sexuality is one of the most controlled topics in religion.
Who you must NOT have sex with? A lot of attention on who you cannot have sex with
- Another man’s wife (adultery)
- Mother
- Sister
- Daughter
- Father’s wife
- Mother-in-law
- Daughter-in-law
- Father’s sister
- Uncle’s wife
- Brother’s wife
Who you must NOT have sex with?
- Animals
- Other men
- Yourself (masturbation)
Your wife:
- Before you are officially married
- While she is menstruating (week before and week after)
- Non-vaginal sex (“sodomy”)
- If it’s not specifically for procreation
- Positions? (“the missionary position”)
Mentions it many times (premarital sex and adultery is mentioned multiple times in the bible)
Repression and Liberartion of sexuality
- Taboo around sex = not much space to explore this topic
- We are living in a society that still represses sexuality, and talking about sexuality is still a taboo
- Depends with who…peers vs parents
- Generational gap
- It is getting better…more progressive but still repressed.
Today we are more liberated with regards to sex then in the 1950s ???
- Are we truly more progressive now? And what does it mean?
Repressive Hypothesis - Foucalt
Published in 1976 - at the heart of the sexual revolution
- Growing feminism movement
- Unrest and events → state of frenzy
- Psychoanalysis was becoming popular
The idea that Western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society
* We were free at some historical point (before capitalism, before the catholic church).
Our natural sex urges were repressed and censored.
* We are slowly and painfully liberating ourselves from the oppression to connect to our natural sexual desires and to be happy
* We had natural sexuality in the past, and then institutions came to censor it and repress it.
* Now, we are slowly talking and learning about it by adding more sexual practices into our daily routines. We are liberating ourselves and eventually will lead to the liberation of authentic true self that used to exist.
Silvia Frederici explanation of witch hunt
one of the reasons for witchhunts was a way to establish submissive and create a new form of female obedience. Submissive sexuality - only for reproductive means.
The victorian era
- There is an incredible amount of sex talk going around (intellectual circles in France)
- We now talk about sex in ways that are informed by authoritative discourses (not as a taboo but now as informed individuals).
- We engage in analysis and self-analysis
- Experts that can tell us what is normal
- Sexual liberation: normal to have sex, healthy to communicate about it
- We taxonomize our sexualities, giving ourselves ever more refined sexual labels
- We see sex as a health issue
- We measure it
- Experts: the safe space to have a truly honest conversation about sex is a conversation with a certified professional with whom
How are we so repressed if there is this conversation about sex going on at all times?
What are the questions to ask?
- Why have we in fact spoken so much about sex and about sexual repression in the last few centuries?’
- ‘Which institutions prompted people to speak?’
- ‘How was sex spoken about?’
- ‘What was said?’
- ‘What kind of knowledge was developed about sex?’
- ‘What sort of power effects has this knowledge had?’
Repressive hypothesis
- Repressive hypothesis assumes that there is a power in repressing sexuality - church came and supressed people’s sexuality and oppressed us - particularly workers, women (based on different approaches)
- Repression of sexuality does not happen through silencing for Foucalt
- The act of power is in the ways we talk about it.
- Not one clear authority that we can point to (we cannot point out the repressors). Power will always be there and diffusive (and present everywhere). Does not work in a neat pyramid.
- We are free because we have more talk aout sex…not the case because we are repressed by new forms of what is expected and allowed.
Censorship or repression did not negate or silenced sexuality. They created new forms of it.
Does repression mean silence?
Church
* Counter-Reformation - compulsory technologies of sexual confession
- People were forced to confess. Confess your sins and then become liberated.
* 16th century –mandatory confessions are introduced and forced
* Over generations the habit of confession forms
* No one wanted to go in the beginning - a lot of resistance.
* Pushed into it with violence.
* Discipline : a practice that is forced on you becomes a habit you desire
Confessions
- Transgression is in the stirrings of desire
- Matters of soul
- Sex became something complicated
- We need an expert to help us: priests and later medical experts, therapists, life coach
- Need someone that is trained and educated to help with this
- Give you solutions
Victorianism (19th century)
- Transition from state, what do governments do with their people, how do we create cities that function
- Demography – State needs data. Need to understand what the nation is such as info below:
- How many children were being born within national borders?
- How many are “legitimate” and how many are “illegitimate”?
- Who is raising them?
- Are people using birth control?
- What groups of people are having the most children?
- How many children are people having on average?
- Start to see the first surveys to see and understand your society better.
- Rather than repressing talk about sex, the victorians introduce conversation to try and understand it.
- Idea of sexuality becomes important for control
Why is sex dangerous?
- For individuals : diseases and unwanted pregnancies
- For populations: the wrong people reproduce.
- Scientists, demographers, doctors, lawyers: produce data about people’s sex life.
- Rather than erasing sexuality it becomes a prominent topic in conversation.
Talking cure?
- Detailed confession with our doctors about sex becomes a norm: what is normality?
- Freud and Breuer: act of patients confessing led to them being cured of their psychological and hysterically physiological ailments
- Confession to psychotherapist served as ‘chimney sweeping’,
Bete d’aveu
Bete D’aveu: we are transformed into being a projector of every intimate thing about us into society
* Transformation of the Western subject into a bête d’aveu
- Now you can have degrees in sex
- Need to exhibit constant engagement in sexual behaviour becomes normal (documented, surveilled and gathered)
* Change in how we talk to doctors and lovers
* Transformations in literature, politics, philosophy and, ultimately, human subjectivity.
* Compulsive self-reporting
* Reality television,
* Confessional talk shows
* Facebook
* Instagram
* Tweeter
Taxonomy of deviance
- Previously normal acts are classified as sexual deviance
- Sexual deviants are handled by doctors (not police)
- Medical tests and reports
- The objective of scientists was not so much prohibition but understanding and categorization
- Sexual acts are interpreted as an expression of our essential being
- The act of sexuality becomes identity. It says something about our whole identity and being.
- Creates more categorization and more limited experiences
From doing to being
- ‘Implanting’ and ‘incorporating’ perversions into individuals
- ‘[t]he sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’ (p. 43).
- Scientists start labeling individuals according to their so called perversions
- We have sexualities
- These sexualities characterize us in significant ways?
- Labeling theory
The power to know
- Sexual liberation movement misunderstands the relation between sex and power as repressive
- The sexual liberation movements incites us to speak up’, ‘break the silence,’ to tell the secrets of our sex.
- Breaking the silence about sex is not an act of resistance to power it is an extension of power (allowing people to know more and more about you)
- Sexual comings-out- are exactly what needed to take place for power to take hold of our bodies and the population
