| Austin Blanch | 14 October 2011 |
| 090491 | PH 101 sec QQ |
Final Paper Part – Subpart 2
A lot of people understand that sexuality is something that has been repressed idea among us. Michel Foucault disagreed and said that this is not the case. Sexuality has been proliferating, with such discourses on sexuality that tends to multiply. The technology present in the Council of Trent caused a lot of confession about everything. An emergence of a need of experts and the bourgeoisie class or the middle class was born. The reverse psychology system was utilized to draw in and determine peoples’ unconscious sexual activities by informing discretion and prohibition. These started the change from Ars Erotica (truth from pleasure) to Scientia Sexualis (truth from discourse or confession), where all were encouraged to find the need for help from experts and thereby confess their desires. Precisely, sexuality is used as a medium of machinery that identifies everyone, used to control thought categorizing subjects in question.
The Deployments of Sexuality are placed to justify truths about ourselves; we later find that they are a medium operated by medical institutions under the bourgeoisie class who felt threatened with the emergence of sexual deviances which showed power. Thus, controls were placed on sex. Foucault tells a sense of power in the history of sexuality since we were to believe that we were repressed. These filtered what needed to be known and confessed. Foucault discusses the various Deployments: the Hysterization of women’s bodies deliberately discuses the female body as an object of knowledge and desire. The woman’s body was analyzed, qualified, and then disqualified. The people were made to believe that the feminine body was supposed to be subjected to medical attention for it was, in a sense, disordered. The image of the “nervous woman” who was irrational became the most observable manifestation of the hysterization. The mother and her ability to bear children became a concern of society and thus, it had to be regulated by experts in the medical field. The Pedagogization of children’s sex sees the potential in children as sexual beings and determines it as a dangerous concept and so must be abruptly controlled by the society. Sexual acts were uncalled for, they were seen as both natural and contrary to nature at the same time. Children were believed to be preliminary sexual beings or in other words, sexual beings in the making so to speak. Because this state of theirs was a potentially dangerous one, the adults (such as parents, families, doctors, educators, and eventually psychologists) took it upon themselves to supervise and manage the sexual potential of the youth. The Socialization of procreative behavior considers sex as a public concern. Believed to be for the betterment of the society, only procreative sex was permitted; thus, sex was controlled. A couple had to be responsible for the number of children that they had and they had to be aware of the consequences of having the said number of children on the society as a whole. The Psychiatrization of perverse pleasures suggests that abnormal sexual behavior is an illness and studies sex on the context of Medicine and Psychiatry. Experts sought to find “cures” or corrective technology in order to remedy these deviations of sexual instincts from the so-called norm.
Regarding the Hysterization of women, it talks about women being the subjects of medical analyses. Discourses like Psychiatry were induced among women; later on, left more women feeling anxious about them, making them feel inferior to men. According to Reed—a women’s activist—inferiority of women is a myth and were only seen as mothers. This specific role made them different from men which is naturally inferior to them. Reed writes, “It is not nature, but class society, which robbed women of their right to participate in the higher functions of society and placed the primary emphasis upon their maternal functions only.” Women were studied intensively and motherhood was corresponded to a biological difficulty arising from the maternal organs of the woman. The weight of child-bearing was left to the women. Conversely, motherhood was seen as something mystical; beyond the comprehension of men. Soon, a patriarchal society emerges that drives a different societal class where women are seen as inferior to men.[1] Because of the bourgeoisie the problematization of sexuality emerged. They wanted to regulate the individual and the society. According to Malson, there emerged a “necessity for medical intervention in the family”.[2] She talks about a moral element of hysteria and implication of the family attempting to control society through the family. After the “hysterical subject” in the family has been acknowledged, the bourgeoisie has asserted a form of medical authority over the family. An idle woman had to appear as that of a family and assigned conjugal and parental obligations which constituted the “nervous woman”.
According to Steinbrugge’s book, “The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment”[3], the distribution of sensory and cognitive capacities between the sexes had a social character from the very beginning. Furthermore, it argued that a woman possessed less indifference and more judiciousness than a man due to her physical arrangement. These differences and bodily functions were corresponding to social functions that were better fitting for a specific gender than it was for the other. The ancient theory that the female body was derived from that of the male’s body. “In relation to man, woman is regarded either as a lack, an excess or, in a more developed theory, as an inversion.” This leads one to assume that based on what was said, the male body is to be perceived as the norm and that the female body was a deviation from this norm. The lack of knowledge regarding the female reproductive organs only intensified the belief that the woman was a “deficient man” even further. Enlightened physicians also described the female genitals as internalized and only partially developed forms of the male organs. But Roussel[4], who developed the first systematic female physiology in 1779 disagreed with the previous statement, saying that biological differences do exist between men and women and these differences bring about the complimentary functions in reproduction. In his opinion, the woman’s membership in the female sex shapes her entire physical and psychic makeup, which is different from a man’s in all respects. A woman is naturally endowed with whatever she has to perform her role in society beyond mere childbearing. To Kita, femininity was no longer an anatomical attribute, but a principle within the anthropological system as a whole. “It was probable, then, that the arrangement of those parts which compose a woman’s body is determined by nature itself, and that it serves as the foundation of the physical and moral character which distinguishes her from man.”[5]
One more key point to talk about the hyterization of women is that they are placed in an organic communication system such as a social body. There are so many expectations that the society wants them to be. Such as, their fecundity to produce, the potential reproductive capacity of an individual or population. They are demanded to give birth for individuals that will be vital and essential for the city. Blaming the woman for not being able to produce a healthy child was only normal. There are cases that women who produce children that cause burden to society are condemn from the city. According to the Book 2 of the Second Sex[6], one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. It clearly states a differentiation between sex and gender. It is one thing that being born physically female and quite another to be shaped by one’s culture into what an ideal woman is—a female with feminine qualities. This is an individual that does things men can not do, and expresses her totally as one’s feminine nature. It should be established that being a female is a biological matter, and becoming a woman is one other thing.
Mother—does not refer to a simple biological act uniting women across history and geography. Rather, it represents a shifting identity and a way of designating various social relations. Looking at late-18th and early-19th century medical, educational, political and fictional texts, the ways in which maternal bodies were differentiated and integrated into medical expertise, tied to family space and children through practices of breastfeeding and education and made to appear natural in domestic fiction, creating a domestic mother whose work and energy invisibly upheld the liberal political state delineated by authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
“Working towards several over-arching goals: recovering the fraught and complex formations of the term "mother"; revealing the significant impact that debates over midwifery and female education had on redefining motherhood; challenging the dominant view relegating motherhood to a private sphere distinct and separate from the public sphere of politics; clarifying the political differences inherent in motherhood as articulated by radicals, liberals and conservatives; and suggesting that modern liberal politics in the West depend upon the definition of the domestic, reproductive mother put forth at the turn of the 19th century.” [7]
[1] Reed, Evelyn. Problems of Women's Liberation. New York: Pathfinder press, 1970.
[2] Malson, Helen. The Thin Woman: feminism, post-structuralism, and the social psychology of anorexia nervosa. New York: Routledge, 1998.
[3] Steinbrugge, Lieselotte. The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
[4] "Book Review: Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. By Linda Gordon. New York: Grossman/Viking, 1976, $12.50 hardcover." Critical Sociology 8, no. 1 (n.d.): 71-72. Sage Journals Online, EBSCOhost (accessed September 30, 2011).
[5] Kita, Joe. "Body of Evidence." Men's Health (10544836) 18, no. 3 (April 2003): 140. Academic Source Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed September 30, 2011).
[6] Inessential woman problems of exclusion in feminist thought. 5. [Dr.] ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
[7] "Former Research." Danielle Conger. http://danielleconger.organiclearning.org/formerresearch.html (accessed October 3, 2011).
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