Sexuality is produced by biopower’s discourses, not a repressed secret to decode

Evidence

Foucault never denied that sexuality was “central” to medical discourses and practices from the early eighteenth century onward. But he did dismiss the idea, which was prefigured by Freud and then theorized by “Freudo-Marxism,” that this sexuality was simply denied, repressed, or suppressed; on the contrary, according to Foucault, it gave rise to a whole proliferation of eminently positive discourses that actually allowed power—biopower— to control and normalize individuals, behavior, and the population … “Sexuality” is therefore not a repository of secrets from which one can, provided one knows how to detect and decode them, extract the truth about individuals; it is, rather, a domain in which, ever since the campaign against childhood onanism suddenly began in England in the first half of the aghteenth century, power over life has been exercised in the twin forms of the “anatomo-politics of the human body” and the “biopolitics of population.” — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 293

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the positive-proliferation view of sexuality against the repression hypothesis — core biopower vocabulary.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s scaffold for biopolitics and necropolitics readings that follow in the Islamophobia module. — connects to: Biopolitics governs populations through statistics, not individuals — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 261; Identity is constructed through discourse and dialogic interaction, not self-creation — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 23; Gender is a social power structure rather than a genetic trait. (+4 more)

Related

• Sexuality as an object emerged from the crossover of jurisdiction and veridiction (similarity 0.79)
• Disciplinary and biopolitical power are co-constitutive, not separate theories (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Gender is a social power structure rather than a genetic trait. #epitomizes (0.80)
• Identity is constructed through discourse and dialogic interaction, not self-creation #expands (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 23
• Martinican homosexuality arises in Europe as a livelihood rather than neurosis #expands (0.78) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 1015