I know I said I wouldn’t, but I did: here are a few questions to guide your reading of the Foucault essay for Thursday. It’s rough sledding, but we’ll make sense of it in class.

Hi all,

Looking forward to meeting you in ENGL 306 tomorrow. We’ll take a few minutes to do a quick survey (really just your name and email) to help me get you enrolled in our website. If you want to get ahead of the game, here it is:
https://goo.gl/forms/0CEWz9bGl3ovcY6U2

Best,
JA

In English classes, we have traditionally (for 100 years at least) invested our attention overwhelmingly on THE TEXT, meaning special kinds of writing that are deemed especially beautiful/innovative/profound/relevant/resistant. What is changing, both in the discipline and the technological ecology in which we practice it, to refocus our attention? Who or what are we supposed to be paying attention to, if not (say) Bartleby, the Scrivener? What are some ways that this course itself moves in the direction Liu alludes to?

With the introduction of technology the value of the text has changed. No longer will we be focusing on how beautiful/innovative/profound/relevant/resistant a text my be. Technology has made it so that everyone may become an author and everyone may be involved in the creation of THE TEXT. The modern use of technology i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Vine, etc. thrives on the voice of the people. Its success comes from everyone being able to comment and give an opinion about issues and hot topics. Our focus then changes from the quality of the text and instead just focuses on the bases of the texts. As Alan Liu mentioned in his article, technology is moving a direction where the lines between author and reader are non existent. We are evolving so that a text becomes more of a dialogue or communication between groups rather than a simple text with an author and reader.

I’ve always found it very unusual to witness people posing for photographs, and especially in public.
When I get to observe this kind of thing, I want to note that it generally involves more than one person. The act of the selfie deserves extensive mention, but I’m going to skip over it here. Instead, I’d like to paint the image of a group of people huddled proximate to one another; there is that second or two of motion as every makes their last minute adjustments, bodies shift, faces moving. If you let your eyes fall slack on this act of preparation, you can feel it in the momentary delerium as the image tightens up, focuses, and becomes Correct.

The weird feeling arises out of an understanding that I am participating in a voyeuristic double act, watching someone prepare themselves for visual consumption. That isn’t to say there is anything weird about wanting to look a certain way in the photographs you take. At the same time, the reflexivity present in posing is one that has marred the whole span of my life, as I recall every instance of squinting and squirming among family members at some restaurant gathering (to appease a grandfather, whom out of a simple filial love, I allow to undergo another present act of photographic geneology). But to be on the outside of this whole shenanigan inflects the act with a peculiar kind of mental funk.

This whole event is even weirder when we think of the selfie as the new dominant mode of self-photography. The lens has seldom ever been turned onto us in the way that it is now. In antiquity, one would pose in front of it (the lens, the gaze). But now, with the selfie, photography is not just the gaze turned inward but the mirror too, in whose reflection constitute our selves; Lacan, I think, would have a field day.

What I think makes this more interesting is when we bring in the work of Walter Benjamin, the 20th century media critic, whose seminal text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction”, struggled with the implications of what it meant for images to be easily reproduced and disseminated in the media after the advent of photography and film. Beyond Benjamin’s world is the one we live in now, where technological reproduction has been accelerated to breakneck velocities and the concept of Virality is precisely a gauge of that sort of thing. Our Infosphere, where people can release their image into this arena and watch it spore, leaves me wondering how that affects our conception of ourselves, where we no longer deliberate our image as a singular instance outside of ourselves, but as one specifically manufactured for an anticipated level of reproduction, distribution, and consumption.

When “homosexual” first became a term in 1870 that one was defined by. It gave a name to sexual desires, labelling what one “is” instead of what one “does.” To Foucault, sexuality is entrenched in power and politics. Although the Victorian era is today seen as sexually repressed, according to Foucault it was anything but. In this era, around the time when the term “homosexual” first came into use, there seemed to have been a painstaking attempt to turn sex into discourse. The church started shaping and pushing the discourse of sexuality in a new direction, attempting to turn the banal, passing thought into a sin that must be confessed. Foucault sees this as a state apparatus attempting to control thought and power.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more laws were passed limiting sexual behavior and criminalizing “devious” sexual acts. What once lived in the realm of fantasy, now became something that was intimately connected to who and what one was, and thus, must be governed. Because of the increasing discourse being discussed around sexuality, fringe sexuality was turned into the discourse. Science began quantifying it, the government began to study it, and categories were constructed based upon one’s sexual behavior. Naming this behavior turned a thought into a thing.

By structuralizing and codifying the once-mundane, our thoughts are named and turned into measurable structuralized categories: homosexual, heterosexual, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, cis-gender, queer, etc. It is if by uttering our thoughts, we essentially box ourselves into a category from which there is no getting out of. Speaking these thoughts, then, gives away our free agency to someone more powerful than us, like the government, a priest, or the analyst. We are turned into a number, or assigned a role, rather than seen as individual. Further, as we confess and give this information away to others, we are also gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves. This perhaps leads to self-censorship and self-restriction, at the behest of state apparatuses seeking to control our behavior.

In her book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick delineates the difference between sex, gender and sexuality. Often, many of us confuse these terms and use them interchangeably, for example, particularly in the use of “sex” and “gender,” which are then inherently linked to sexuality. This is not so. For Sedgwick, while sex, gender, and sexuality are related, they are three separate parts of our identity. Sex, as she explains, references “chromosomal sex” and is differentiated by the XX and XY chromosomes, as well as the genetic traits that come with each—genitalia, bodily hair distribution, hormonal distribution, etc. (2470). Gender, is more fully “dichotomized,” and socially constructed, as social roles are often defined based on our chromosomal sex. Sexuality, Sedgwick says, relies on desire, and is inextricably linked to gender, because “each can only be expressed in terms of one another” (2478), and sexuality is often linked to gender—if one is a male he/she, under a heteronormative viewpoint, should be attracted to women and vice-versa. Because gender is often thought of as the male/female binary, this binary gives way to other binaries that effect sexuality like heterosexual and homosexual. Out of the three, sexuality is most constructed by social norms, and can be defined as “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them.” All three, when spoken of together, become the basis of identity not just for the self but for the outside world, who seeks to name the individual.

When we think about these binaries, it is important to think of those that fall outside of them, like transgendered individuals or others who consider both their gender and sexuality to be fluid. These people are neither homosexual/heterosexual nor are they gendered as male or female. This is especially true of intersexed individuals who cannot readily be identified along the XX/XY, male/female or homosexual/heterosexual binaries. An intersex individual is one that is born with genitals that are ambiguous and unable be identified as male or female at birth, which creates a problem for the child. Because of our societal notion that a child must be defined as male or female both chromosomally as well as in a gendered sense, the parent or doctors decide whether that child will be male or female. The child has no say in this, as they cannot tell their parents if they feel more masculine or feminine, or what sex they identify as. Because of this, many doctors and parents make the decision at birth to surgically alter the child to fit the image of a male or female. Hormones are then often given to these children to ensure their growth into their decided sex.

Because of their genitalia and our societal definitions regarding gender, the binary that they are forced to fit into is both constricting and destructive to the individual. As the intersexed child grows, he or she may feel decidedly more male or female, or perhaps may feel both male and female. However, they will never be able to explore either side of their sexuality because they have been pigeonholed into sex/gender/sexuality binaries without their consent. Oppression and power, then, as we can see, springs out of the need to force the individual into these boxes and binaries in order to control what may fall outside of the heteronormative point-of-view.

In excerpts from her book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler discusses “gender performativity” and the relationship between performativity and sexuality. She also implies that gender should not be seen as binary, but rather as fluid. She states that genitals need not apply when speaking about gender and sexuality as one should not, and do not, have anything to do with one another. The dominant ideology, or heterosexual illusion, is that someone with a penis, will cause one to sexually identify as a man and will cause one to be sexually attracted to women.

Butler questions this assertion, asking if this really is the “natural” structure of our environment, or whether sexual identity is socially constructed based upon our genitalia as a way of classification and restriction. To her, our sex and sexual desires are not linked, and do not comprise our identity. The falsity of this link can be seen when we examine other cultures and historical eras, when sex and sexuality were not inevitably interrelated (like Roman, Greeks, etc.) like they are in today’s western society.

Butler essentially undermines the distinction between gender and sexuality, arguing that gender is not an “inner truth” or a core part of our identity. Rather gender is a construction borne out of a “stylish repetition of actions,” or in other words, a performance. This performance includes acting out our everyday behaviors: the way we walk, talk, move, dress, and act both publicly and privately. This behavior “congeals” over time, making us think that the gender effect is an inner-truth or part of our identity, when it is in fact a by-product of social construction. Gender is not inevitable, then. It is fluid and free-flowing, and we can change the way we perceive it by “reclassification.”

Judith Jack Halberstam describes an interesting phenomena in their essay “Female Masculinity,” in which, in a de-industrialized age, many men perceive their masculinity as fragile and powerless. As the perception of “manliness” changes due to a rise of women in the workplace, or a rise in the acceptance of homosexuality, a desire is produced in many males to reaffirm his “maleness,” or straight-white-male dominance, over the female body. When we look at this “crisis of masculinity” in the real-terms, we can see how it applies to our social and political world.

If we watch the news, or pay attention at all to politics, we’ll often hear the term “war on women.” This is a term that refers to an effort to restrict women’s rights, particularly in regards to her health decisions, her workplace, her sex-life, and her sexuality. Abortion, seems to be an especially divisive subject, in which many people either lean towards the “pro-life” or “pro-choice” side. In regards to political viewpoints and politicians, and while both sides are ultimately pandering to their base, democrats are often on the side of “choice,” stating that women should be able to choose whether or not to have children. Republicans—a party that is primarily represented by older white men in congress—on the other hand, are often “anti-choice,” stating that the life of the unborn child is their primary concern. It is curious, however, that the life of the mother is never a part of the Republican conversation about access (or lack thereof) to abortion. They never speak of whether or not a child would harm the woman physically or mentally; or whether the woman wants a child; whether she has goals and dreams that a child may interrupt; whether she’s been raped or sexually assaulted. In these discussions, her role is relegated to that of an incubator, and her life is unacknowledged and unappreciated.

By not addressing these issues, Republicans prove that their goal isn’t to save babies or promote Christian values, it’s to control the woman and keep her in her traditional role—to that of the housewife and mother. When women are kept in their traditional roles, men are kept in theirs. Their maleness is kept intact, crisis averted. Further, if their true goal were to save babies, one would think that contraception would be used as an answer to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. However, this is not the case. Many of those who seek to restrict abortion access also seek to restrict contraceptive access, a further attempt to control women’s bodies. We can see this with Congress’ attempt to repeal the Obamacare mandate that insurance companies provide free birth control to all women, as well as the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby, who sued to prevent birth control coverage for their female employees because of the company’s religious beliefs (never mind that corporations cannot, by definition, have religious beliefs). A few years ago, when congress called a “religious freedom” hearing to talk about contraception and the Obamacare mandate, not one woman was called to testify.

Contraception and abortion threatens the male in the way that women are able to, without their partner’s input, decide when they wish to have children. Prior to unrestricted access to contraception and abortion, men were able to dictate when the woman got pregnant, how many children they would have, etc., effectively choosing when a woman’s independent life would end. She would be confined to the home with little choice in the matter, as her only job was to bear children and take care of her husband. This made her dependent upon the male, and women were chattel, in this way. Men not only had social control over the female body, but economic control as well.

With the advent of contraception and legal abortion, women were finally able to make their own choices. It seems as if many men in power idealize this era—they wish for a woman’s place to be in the home, and for their power to go unchallenged and unsurpassed. So it is unsurprising, then, that attempts to restrict abortion and contraception access has been experiencing a resurgence in recent years. It seems as if it is almost a last ditch effort of a dying generation, who experienced the sexual revolution and the de-industrialization of labor, to reassert their male dominance over an entirely new generation of women. They are still experiencing a crisis of masculinity, their fear attempting to dictate our bodies.