thanks for posting this stuff.

That sexual desire is an aspect of a person’s identity, I wouldn’t want to dispute. But why does sexual desire occupy such a privileged place here? Desire and pleasure in general are enmeshed between physiology and psychology, but nobody makes people who prefer savory things to sweet things out to be another species of human being.

Katie: Right–Foucault here is saying nothing about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of “homosexual desire.” What he says is that the notion of sexuality itself (in all its innumerable variations) was invented and deployed as part of an overall strategy of power. Some people have picked up that notion, that whole discourse in fact, and redeployed it within a their own counter-strategy. As Foucault says, “The importance of this critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not outside or against it” (p. 131). The tactic is successful because it speaks the same language as its opponent. But for Foucault, for the very same reason, the tactic will never succeed in dismantling the original power. Which is why (if I’ve read in between the lines of this book properly) Foucault would ultimately advocate a form of resistance that breaks with the whole discourse of sexuality. Sure, his critique is probably more troubling (or more questionable) for those committed to speaking of homosexuality as “abnormal,” but it’s explicitly directed against those who have adopted the discourse while imagining themselves to be fundamentally undermining its original purposes.

The question, I guess, is whether Foucault’s just asking for too much. If a tolerable position can be reached using the same language, who cares? But I find all this interesting as a metaphysical question almost, or (eventually) as a theologico-anthropological one, rather than just as a pragmatic or political question. Foucault probably wouldn’t care about that at all.

I think that Foucault’s theory would actually be much scarier and more difficult to accept for those who wish to keep homosexual desire from being seen as normal than it would be for gays and lesbians themselves since, at its root, it calls into question the legitimacy or reality not of homosexual desire, but of the “common sense” notion that homosexual desire and then by extension homosexuals themselves are categorically different than heterosexual desire.

What I take from Foucault is the reality of the link between sex and power. Sexual identity is construed to confer power (not just by heteros over homos, but men over women, white over black etc etc etc) and in turn it is a way for homosexuals to assert power in turn. So yes, many gays and lesbians use (consciously and not) the notion of sexual identity as a way to legitimize themselves and all that.

So, yes, sexual identity is a big power play–but this is true also (perhaps especially) of heterosexuality.

To identify the roots of our understanding of (homo)sexuality in the “Victorian program” is, on its own, insufficient to show the falsity of that understanding. To do that, we would have to also know that the Victorian program is wrong (and specifically wrong in its assertions of sexual identity). Otherwise we are merely (arbitrarily) privileging the “ancient…codes” over the modern ones.

I think we would also need to specify more exactly what it would mean for something to be an “essential and all-affecting part of each human person.” If the thesis in question is that sexuality is constitutive of identity so that identity is reducible to sexuality, then clearly the thesis is wrong. But, given that sexual desire is inextricably enmeshed in between physiology and psychology (if I can be given as much), it would seem that sexual desire (as a broad category including orientation) would be a non-negligible aspect of identity.