Foucault states that to first subjugate something, one needs to first control the language about that thing. Sex became something that needed to be constantly put into discourse. For instance, in confession, everyone sin must be told; more than this, every sexual thought or desire must be account for, watch over, by the individual. Likewise, the criminal or sexual deviant must account for his/her crimes by putting them into words. Sex also became a thing to be analyzed and studied in “demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism” (33). It is considered in architecture too, the rooms into which various people will be put and the separators to be placed between them.
In seeking to control sex, Foucault suggests, those in power “acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration” (47). In naming, identifying with the body, and bringing to discourse sexual acts and sexuality, they caused sexuality to profiler. This, he says, “is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures: (48).
Key Term
- “Silence…is less the absolute limit of discourse…than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relations to them within over -all strategies…[W]e must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. These is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses” (27).