According to Michel Foucault, “biopower” emerged as the deployment of alliance and its complementary sovereign power over death (to allow or disallow life) shifted to the deployment of sexuality and accompanying power over life on the individual bodily level and on a larger population level (138-139). Foucault continues with that this power over life uses […]
After finishing The Scarlet Letter and this week’s selection of readings, like Colby, I noticed the similarity between Hester Prynne’s situation and the argument Nancy F. Cott makes in “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology 1790-1850.” Plus, from last class, the fact that The Scarlet Letter is a story about Puritans through a Victorian […]
This week’s selections of readings played off each really well. From the historical excerpt of Massachusetts’s colony’s laws on sexual offenses, the overarching message is death is result of any sexual deviances away from heterosexual and martial sex in colonial America. However, that is not always the case (or even rarely the case) as evident […]
The past (two) week’s class was very helpful in cementing the main points of Foucault’s concepts about power (hooray for charts). During the same week, in a gender and society class, I was introduced to intersectional theory via the text, “Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter” by Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins. […]
“Where there is power there is resistance” (Foucault 95). After reviewing my notes from our previous class, and doing Internet research on my own to clarify terms we discussed in class, I would like to discuss this quote. I will address what it means in terms of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, as well […]
After taking some time to digest all of the Foucault that we’ve taken in over the past few weeks (I must admit I’m still working on a lot of it) I’m particularly interested in the final section: Right of Death and Power Over Life. I am most interested in the way that this section helps […]
This week’s reading was definitely heavy with concepts. I keep on restarting this posting and then chucking it because I decide to change what to focus on… Strangely enough, I found the second part of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality easier to digest (probably due to the way he was structuring the text). A […]
After tackling the second half of Foucault and reading through Weeks’ and Norton’s essays, I feel convinced only that there are multiple approaches to the study of sexuality. There seems to be a general agreement that understanding the history/development of the social understanding of sexuality is key, but when the subject slips into biology and […]
I enjoyed the introduction of new material this week, and especially the way Jeffery Weeks’ “The Social Construction of Sexuality” went along nicely with Michel Foucault’s section, “The Deployment of Sexuality.” Whereas Foucault focuses on power constructing sexuality, Weeks goes at from a societal perspective. I found Weeks easier to understand most likely because he […]
