Foucault capitalizes that power and knowledge contribute to the discourse of sex; he discusses how people in power controlled this discourse to repress sex entirely. Foucault talks about the repressive hypothesis in his book. The repressive hypothesis states that whoever holds the power, also controls the discourse on sexuality. Specifically, those in power, according to the repressive hypothesis, exercise to repress the discussion of sex. In addition, Foucault comments that knowledge represents power. Whoever has the power can dictate the language of the population, thus this causes powerful people to also regulate the knowledge of the population. Although Foucault does not agree with every aspect that the repressive hypothesis exclaims, he agrees about the timing of when people started to repress sex. With rise of the bourgeoisie in the 17th century, a rise in tighter control about sex also took place. Foucault stated that the discourse of sex remained …show more content…
Compassionate men connect on a deeper level because they show me that they care and they have the capacity to console me when I feel dejected. Men who have compassion also express empathy; they can comprehend the emotions of others. I find this attractive because I know that they can comfort me through my hardships and I can rely on them to understand my feelings. I find that men with the quality of compassion possess sexiness because they have knowledge. Their knowledge and insight on other’s thoughts and emotions gives them power. This power that they possess, because of compassion, exhilarates and frees one’s soul; they can free others from one’s burdens because their power allows a change in attitude and can facilitate an improved mood. In addition, I find a compassion man sexy because they allow me to see a piece of their heart and it reflects in the way that they show a deep soulful connection with me through their kindness and
Foucault and Nietzsche challenge the hidden purposes of historians in their search for origins, demonstrating that an accurate understanding of history rectifies one of any beliefs of moral origins. In this paper, I will elaborate what Foucault thinks an accurate understanding of history regarding punishment truly is. I am going to clarify this concept by focusing on the first chapter of Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish.
In Making Sex by Thomas Laqueur, the author analysis sexual differences throughout the 18th century reviewing physicians, scientist, biologist and how society understood the anatomy and physiology of the human body. Laqueur brig us two sex models; the one-sex model and the two-sex model. He explains who we transition from the one-sex model to the two-sex model. How this two models had impacted our society and created an impact in history had it to do with the fact that a lot of evidence was drawn from science. Laqueur also explains how society constructed sex. He takes this investigation in very detail as he explains and investigates sexual differences.
In the book, “On the Meaning of Sex” J. Budziszewski talks about the meaning of sex. Budziszewski states that the issue of sex is one of the most important issues in our culture since the sexual revolution. Budziszewski opens the book by restating a conversation he once had with a student about the Book, “Brave New World.” The student states that the people are revolting and disgusting. Budziszewski is delighted by this statement. He believes that the student and himself are on the same page. Budziszewski responds to the student by agreeing and saying that there needs to be some meaning to sex. However; the student replies by saying, that the manner in which babies are “born” in the brave new world is disgusting and that sex doesn’t necessarily
According to Foucault, the individual is created and removed from the society by subjecting him to certain norms. This ensures that the individual is created to fit into an already constructed power hierarchy as opposed to creating a society in which individuals a...
Compassion has became something rare in our society, and something that a lot of people lack. The author, Barbara Lazear Ascher, explains to us that compassion is not a character trait, but rather something that we learn along the way with the help of real life situations we encounter, such as the ones she encountered herself. Ascher persuades her audience that compassion is not just something you are born with by using anecdotes, rhetorical questions, and allusions.
You’re sitting alone in the café drinking your coffee and reading the newspaper. You see out of the corner of your eye a little girl sitting with her mom at the table nearby. You keep glancing over and you notice the little girl is staring you down. No matter what you do she continues to watch your every move. You wonder how long she has been sitting there and why she is gazing at you. You are being watched just like the people Michel Foucault describes, people who are simply being under constant surveillance. Foucault's work, "Panopticism," features a central control tower from which all inhabitants are watched while in their surrounding glass-walled cells. The Panopticon creates an atmosphere in which the inhabitants never know whether or not they are being watched forcing them to assume that they are at all times. With this mindset, "the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole" (Foucault). In other words, the people control their actions and take care of themselves appropriately just on the fact that they think they are being watched. "In appearance, [panopticism] is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges" (Foucault). The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton portrays a society that functions much like the Panopticon. Newland Archer and his fellow New Yorkers are part of a very close knit group of people. Everyone knows what everyone else's business and the gossip that surrounds them, which makes privacy a foreign concept. The only way to be accepted is to know the right people, have the right connections and, of course, have money. Once a part of the group, everyone must follow a set of unwritten rules. The society forces everyone to act a certain way, and ev...
Problems with Foucault: Historical accuracy (empiricism vs. Structuralism)-- Thought and discourse as reality? Can we derive intentions from the consequences of behavior? Is a society without social control possible?
(Rabinow 8) Foucault argued that people can rise to power using discourse, “Discourse has the ability to turn human beings into subjects by placing them into certain categories.” (Rabinow 8) These categories are then defined “according to their level of deviance from the acceptable norm.” (Rabinow 8) Some examples of such categories are the homosexual, the insane, the criminal and the i.e. a rabbi now 8). By the above method, called “dividing practices,” people can be manipulated by socially categorizing them and then comparing them to norms.
The establishment of houses of confinement, evaluated according to their functional value, were not successful. Early in the nineteenth century houses of confinement as places for accepting the poor vanished all over Europe and this fact permitted their absolute collapse. Foucault (1988) aptly describes them as "a transitory and ineffectual remedy, a social precaution clumsily formulated by a nascent industrialization" (p. 54).
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
There is no such thing as a less superior race or the other because even though we are created differently as man and woman, we are still created equally, of which we deserve to be given equal opportunities in order to attain our full competence as human beings. In time, with the growing feminist movements striving for gender equality, women will no longer be seen and treated as the weaker gender and being a man will no longer be the norm anymore. Society will learn to accept how women are created with their own set of capabilities and their contributions as both men and women are needed in society because characteristics that are lacking in men are said to be present in women and vice a versa. We need one another as we are created for a purpose to complement one another and to continue on improving society for the better.
Sexuality gained a connection to the truth. This results into the idea that sexuality is a part of identity and a key aspect in understating who we are individual. And all of this is only possible due to the discourse of sexuality, which is determined by social culture and time. However, the idea that sexuality objectively defines who you are is false, because the idea where this is based on, the “repressive hypothesis” also is
This essay will analyze and critique Michel Foucault’s (1984) essay The Use of Pleasure in order to reveal certain internal weaknesses it contains and propose modifications that would strengthen his reading of sexuality as a domain of moral self-formation. In order to do so, it will present a threefold critique of his work. Firstly, it will argue that that his focus on solely the metric of pleasure divorced from its political manifestations underemphasizes state power as a structuring principle of sexuality. Secondly, it will posit that his attention to classical morality privileges written works by male elites and fails to account for the subtexts that would demonstrate other forms of morality. Finally, it will argue that the nature of actors’ resistance to moral codes, explicated through Butler’s concept of iterability and signification, is an important factor that should also be considered. As a result of this critique, this essay
The prevalence of sexology literature and scholarship was and remains to be a topic of discourse when questions to the origins of a ‘homosexual’ identity arise. In today’s society, one usually points to the New York City Stonewall Riots in 1969 as the beginning for the recognition of homosexual love and identity. Indeed, this event remains to be an important marker in queer* history, but there are many scholars in various interdisciplinary fields who would instead argue that emergence of homosexuality as an identity stemmed from medical and psychiatric research carried out by German psychiatrists and doctors.
Some of the most controversial issues in society have historically revolved around matters relating to gender and sexuality. As gender plays an integral part in how we function in society, we quickly learn what is expected of us through our gender roles at a young age and our sexual scripts as we get older. We are expected to conform to our respective gender roles of femininity or masculinity depending on the sex we were assigned at birth. We learn that certain characteristics and expressions are attributed to each gender but are never taught that gender is fluid but instead it is binary. We also become subjected to assumptions of our sexual desires and attraction based on our sex and our gender and are expected not to deviate from it. We become