Category: Foucault: History of Sexuality

Spring Fever PANIC! Reading: Sexuality and Resistance as Living Literature             Our philosophical and historical discussion of sexuality in American culture has been informed by renowned and canonized fiction, as well as scientific contexts and personal documents.  This PANIC! reading project is a blend of theories, realities, fictions, and confessions in a theatrical, real-time, literary […]

“Can transvestites be cured?” asked Time in an article reporting on Christine Jorgensen (Peiss, 375). If the article were about Cal, perhaps the question asked would be: Can hermaphrodites be cured? Within these questions lies the assumption that these things – these genders – need to be cured. “In some cases of transvestitism, as in […]

Brother/Sister, Husband/Wife The story that I’ve found most compelling about the first half of Middlesex is that of the narrator’s grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona.  The tale of how their incestuous relationship arose is easily sympathized, their actions rendered justifiable by the circumstances from which they arose.  After all, they were two siblings, orphaned while they […]

Incest, Middlesex, and Intersex Having only read the first two books of Middlesex, I feel this post must be about incest, a topic that Eugenides handles with incredible grace and tenderness. 

Though we had touched on the idea of identity in class before, I am happy that Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex throws us right into it.  The debate of inter-sexuality as an “identity or disorder”, as posed by the Shenker-Osorio article, is a question still relevant today, maybe even more-so.  A person’s sexual identity defines them fully in […]

Weeks ago, we had touched on Foucault’s ideas of bio-power, but I feel it is only this week that these ideas are being played out, in primary sources and fiction.  The last time I talked about bio-power was in relation to WWI and the “Keeping Fit to Fight” campaigns that promoted safer sexual activity in […]

Beyond the Pleasure Principle First, in the document “Policing Public Sex in a Gay Theater, 1995” (Peiss, 454), I found the degree of detail mandated quite interesting.  Not simply “what act,” which would be the only legitimate question in regards to sanitation, but full bodied descriptions, proximity of the voyeur, and the lighting.  If an […]

Response to Angels in America “Roy: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who someone sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that” (Millennium Approaches, Act 1, […]

The way Sula’s community reacts to both her life and death is an interesting realization of Foucault’s idea that where there is power there is resistance.  Sula lives her life with a sense of power.  She sleeps with whomever she wants, refuses to marry, allows her mother to be placed in a home, and lives […]

The opening description of Medallion provides a description of power relations in clear contrast with what we had been discussing during our last class; the physical representation is reversed, since the black residents of Medallion (on a hill) look down on the white residents of the valley below them. When this reverse physical representation is […]