"Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed form the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43).
One wants to quibble: this is apt, but a little loose. It's not apt to be the sodomite but sodomy that's the "temporary aberration." A major aspect of prejudice against homosexuals involves considering it unnatural; part of that involves considering it non-genetic--a rather absurd discussion, as most of the nature-nurture debate always was, but an interesting one: it's clearly designed to allow peer-groups to regard homosexuality as at once a moral choice freely and consciously taken, unnatural, and a state of being. One has to sympathize with Foucault's choice of species, inaccurate as it is, because it renders something of the habit families have of disowning their homosexual offspring.
"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the overall and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, a pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power . . . " (45).
Deserves examination -- the actions and institutions Foucault names are extensively involved in sadomasochistic games and fantasies he talks about, so it would be ridiculous to suppose the related feelings would not be regularly invoked during their administration. Furthermore, since the violence administered by such institutions is not pretend even when the motives may be, the institutions must propagate sadomasochism throughout any of the population directly impacted. But when he insists that "These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45), he denies the reality of castigation and ostracism. Oppression appears as only a game because repressors and oppressors game each other; oppression becomes hallucination because its victims become crazy.
There follows a rather amusing perspective on, among other things, Freudianism.
" . . . the family, even when brought down ot its smallest dimension, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities. To reduce them to the conjugal relationship, and then to project the latter, in the form of a forbidden desire, onto the children, cannot account for this apparatus which, in relation to these sensualities, was less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying mechanism" (46).
Foucault continues Freud's sexualization of children's desire for their parents, sadly. One can, of course, consider any most any desire sexual or not simply by redefining the area of human interaction that one calls sex<./em>. But tabus around heterosexual copulation have practical motives, so many will continue in some form. To call prepubescent sensuality sexual even though it does not constitute a desire for copulation or orgasm blurs important distinctions and invites the repression Foucault seems to speak against.
I find Arthur Janov's response to this set of ideas more useful: "The polymorphous is the infant's; the perverse is Freud's." With respect to infants, I'd say that the sexuality belongs strictly to Foucault. Freud may have only been able to conceive of the intensity of infantile sexuality and desire in ways that relate to sex, a word used to describe copulation, but this reflects more on the Dr. than the patient.
By the same token, Foucault's observation that the powerful project "forbidden desire" onto children describes rather neatly the psychoanalytic ideologies that have grown out of Freud's retreat from trauma theory.
" . . . it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated odes of conduct" (48).
Interesting, but most of us actually do want to copulate with the opposite sex and to do so in ways that actually do tend to relate to reproduction even when one tries to avoid that. A heterosexual male finds himself much more enslaved to entrenched social power because he creates children, but to presume he does so because the church discourages buggery and circle-jerks seems to follow a minority case.
The minority case does certainly exist, however, and this appraisal of the power relations may be worthy.
Foucault's working hypothesis (see 69), that 19th century Europe did not repress but objectify and examine sex, runs somewhat skew to positions Foucault has spent much of his introduction criticizing. The social insistence (of some) that we examine "our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (69) IS the repression: it replaces ,em>feel with to know about.
