Some musings, flashbacks to Gender, and hope for the future - Kelly

This will be a romp through some of what I found to be the more intriguing quotes from this week's readings:

"For the State to function in the way that it does, there must be, between male and female or adult and child, quite specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy."

Undoubtedly, we here in the US are watching the re-working of these relations of power as manifest in this century's "culture wars." The anxiety regarding gay marriage, divorce rates, and single parenthood stems directly from the fear of the dissolution of male-female-two-parent household and the implications that has for other "entrenched" structures of power. If Dad isn't in control, who is? The mere idea that there are "specific relations of domination which have their own configuration and relative autonomy," speaks to the convincing power of a discourse of "naturalized" power relations. Naturalized, of course, because they are found within actions carried out between two bodies (sex and procreation).
It will be interesting to watch the fear of upsetting ingrained ideas regarding family and gendered relations of power run rampant, should Hilary Clinton win the 2008 Democratic nomination. (I bet the Germans have on long word for the phrase "the fear... rampant").


"[...]the set of relations of force in a given society constitutes the domain of the political, and that a politics is a more-or-less global strategy for co-ordinating and directing those relations"

Constructions of gender, family, sexuality and the messy way in which relations of force directs the hierarchies of power in those relationships. Politics is created by each of those relations of force and simultaneously created to direct them. Two questions: 1) How then does one direct change without the entire system coming to stamp out the trouble-maker? Or - how and why did things like the civil rights movement work and can we ever do it again? And, 2) How do each of you see this analysis of power, politic, and family (implicitly gender) playing out in your work?

What exactly does Foucault mean by "a positive economy of the body and of pleasure?" (190)

And does his assessment of West = medicalization of sex, East = sex as art, ring true? (calling Amanda as our non-Western historian....). I have a hard time buying that the repression of sexuality in "the East" only an a western imperial import. Medicalization of sexuality I'll buy (God knows, we read enough about that in Gender last quarter), but restrictions on sexuality and sexual practices seemed fairly common in both the Indian and Chinese context. He talks a good amount about the representations of sex and sexuality in both cultures, and undoubtedly the depiction of sexuality adorns some Hindu temples, but there is always a gap between representation and reality. Do more frequent cultural depictions of sex and sexuality necessarily correspond to a more open sexuality? Or, are Europeans really less hung up about sex because they show bush on TV? I think so, but can we talk about this more deeply in terms of Foucault's theory as to why.

Finally, a shout out to Foucault's appropriation of White:
"I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or 'manufactures' something that does not as yet exist, that is, 'fictions' it. One 'fictions' history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one 'fictions' a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth"

Or: "All history is myth" - Jeff
"It seems to me that the post-moderns tell us not how to do history, but how to write history." -Buck Sharp
See, history does have the power to change the future. And I'll get on it right after another cup of coffee and after I finish just one more book...