History of Sexuality

"There is something in surveillance, or more accurately in the gaze of those involved in the act of surveillance, which is no stranger to the pleasure of surveillance, the pleasure of the surveillance of pleasure, and so on."
-Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 186.

In other words, there is a voyeuristic impulse involved in the panoptical view. We ought to talk about that tomorrow; even though it was an unrehearsed comment, it seems pretty problematic to me.

What I'm really interested in this week's reading is the fact that I now think Foucault overcompensated in his attempt to get away from traditional history and into geneaology. What I mean specifically is that world-historical processes, everything bound up with "modernity," were at the heart of his analyses of power-structures (what he calls in this chapter "politics.") The very-short version of my comment here is that much of his writing would be less obscure if he would just talk about the state once in a while, and not only that, but specific states.

That said, he indicates in a few places that he regards all of his investigations as inchoate, and the suggestive quality of obscure prose has led a lot of gender and colonial historians to write on the specifics of state-sponsored regulations of sexuality, so maybe he was just trying to be provocative.

Finally, I will note that I really need to read History of Sexuality. I'm intrigued by Foucault's conclusion here that we would all be better served by "desexualizing" our understanding of pleasure, that sex should not be linked to every connotation of pleasure or enjoyment.

-Chris