Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization

"In contrast to Oksala and May, McWhorter focuses on Foucault’s studies of sexuality. She’s an informed and lucid guide to the topic, but her book is most distinctive for the way she combines discussions of Foucault with her own experiences as a gay woman. She has a lot to offer in the way of standard analysis and evaluation; for example, her defence of Foucault against critics who claim his studies of power lead to pessimistic apathy in the face of unstoppable domination. She particularly responds to feminists such as Nancy Fraser and Linda Alcoff, who see Foucault’s thought as sapping the life-blood of the fight against oppression. “Foucault was suspicious of norms derived from the human ‘sciences’ that were used as instruments of illegitimate control” But, as she says, her ” primary purpose is not to prove to anyone that Foucault’s philosophical positions are the true and right ones”; her goal is to show how Foucault’s writing “has been able to excite, stimulate, enliven, and empower me for the greater part of my adult life”. This includes an impressive autobiographical account of her struggle with a society that insisted she could in essence be nothing but a homosexual as well as engaging reflections on the pleasures she’s found in gardening and in line-dancing. The idea of what’s ‘normal’ has an important place in biological accounts of organism and in setting standards for life in society. Foucault was, however, suspicious of norms derived from the human ‘sciences’ that were used as instruments of illegitimate control. A simple example is the use of statistical averages to set norms of evaluation. A striking case (not discussed by Foucault) is the way American colleges use student surveys to evaluate teaching. Students rate their professors on their overall pedagogical effectiveness and the results are averaged to provide a criterion that divides the teachers into those that are at or above the average and those that are below average. All this would be just mathematics , but the average is then taken as a norm, setting a standard for good vs. bad teaching. This gives college administrators a useful tool for controlling their faculty. By definition, nearly half their professors will always be “below-average” and so subject to penalties (lower salaries, no promotions) and required training programs. Such misuses of norms are widespread in many schools and workplaces. “After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some became burdened with their inability to overcome various hang-ups” More serious examples arise regarding sex , as, for example, when 19th-century sexologists described various categories of ‘perversion’ that defined various forms of ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour (e.g., homosexuality, nymphomania) as forms of mental illness. Those falling into the abnormal categories were subject to medical treatment (or at least social disapproval) to remedy their deficiencies. Foucault was particularly interested in the process whereby ‘defective’ individuals came to accept and internalise the negative judgment of their behaviour and so become their own guilty supervisors. He also noted that values of sexual freedom could themselves take on a negative normative role. After the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some people became burdened with their inability to overcome various hang-ups, and throw off the shackles of conformity to traditional prohibitions. This, of course, is just a reverse form of normative control. Or, as Foucault put it, “The irony of this . . . is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in balance.”"