I saw Angels in America performed last year and reading the plays has been an entirely new experience. Reading the plays as literary pieces has opened up opportunities to carefully examine the many meanings within lines or within single words. This course has influenced my perceptions about a number of things, but Foucault’s discussions of […]
I am familiar with Foucault’s writings on post-colonialism, but this is my first introduction to his ideas about sexuality, and I find them to be fascinating. Foucault successfully identifies a shift in sexuality during the Victorian era, where sex was relegated to a reproductive function and pleasure in any form was disapproved of.
In the third part of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault introduces the concepts of scientia sexualis, or “telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power,” and its counterpart, ars erotica, or telling the truth of sex from “pleasure itself” (57-58). Foucault argues that Western civilization has adopted the scientia […]
On Foucault’s, The History of Sexuality, I first have to mention how much I liked his style of writing. I feel that so many philosophical writers become entirely too entangled in their own “brilliant” opinions, and they fail to convey not only the overarching message of their insights, but also the relevance of those insights. […]
