Heather Slawny
Ashley Bohrer
PHL 233
May 15 2015
Michel Foucault’s Eurocentric Patriarchy
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality analyzes how gender, sexuality, and power are perceived jointly. He accomplishes this specifically by considering the “repressive hypothesis” and “bio-power.” The repressive hypothesis is the theory that society has been constructed in a way that makes topics like sex and sexuality taboo, unless this discourse is masked in a euphemized, strictly reproductive manner. What follows in the hypothesis is the idea that the only way for humans to be completely liberated is to eliminate the social restrictions on sexual discourse. However, Foucault argues that this repression does not make us less sexually liberated; rather, it makes sexual discourse excitingly dangerous and titillating. In other words, the so-called attempt to completely eliminate sex from discourse led to sex saturating our entire world.
Foucault also believes that while society simultaneously banned and surrounded itself with sex, women fell into their both sexually submissive and hyper-sexualized roles that still plague them today. He calls this the “hysterization” of …show more content…
Sandra Lee Bartky introduces this idea in her article Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. She argues that “Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life” (27). Looking at the tasks women exclusively are expected to complete in order to maintain their appearance and submissiveness while men have none of these expectations, it’s clear that bio-power affects women differently and more strongly than
Ashley Bohrer
PHL 233
May 15 2015
Michel Foucault’s Eurocentric Patriarchy
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality analyzes how gender, sexuality, and power are perceived jointly. He accomplishes this specifically by considering the “repressive hypothesis” and “bio-power.” The repressive hypothesis is the theory that society has been constructed in a way that makes topics like sex and sexuality taboo, unless this discourse is masked in a euphemized, strictly reproductive manner. What follows in the hypothesis is the idea that the only way for humans to be completely liberated is to eliminate the social restrictions on sexual discourse. However, Foucault argues that this repression does not make us less sexually liberated; rather, it makes sexual discourse excitingly dangerous and titillating. In other words, the so-called attempt to completely eliminate sex from discourse led to sex saturating our entire world.
Foucault also believes that while society simultaneously banned and surrounded itself with sex, women fell into their both sexually submissive and hyper-sexualized roles that still plague them today. He calls this the “hysterization” of …show more content…
Sandra Lee Bartky introduces this idea in her article Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power. She argues that “Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life” (27). Looking at the tasks women exclusively are expected to complete in order to maintain their appearance and submissiveness while men have none of these expectations, it’s clear that bio-power affects women differently and more strongly than