It's a miracle - I blogged before midnight!

I really enjoyed the two Foucault readings. To me, the most provocative and insightful was “The Repressive Hypothesis” which definitely put me out of my comfort zone a bit but I kinda liked that. His explanation of the evolution of the discourse of sex was very clear and intuitive, and the residual influence of religious ideology on sexual discourse today is very obvious.

I have studied the concept of bio-power in France but I focused on how it affected mothers – the implications to their social roles and gender roles, and the institution of ‘puericulture’.  Foucault mentions several times that France began to look at marital intercourse as a tool of economic power and how the regulations of the relations shaped certain conceptions of sexuality. However, women are noticeably absent from this essay. The majority of these matrimonial responsibilities fell upon the women who were regarded as the moral and cultural transmitters of France. Given the Christian ideal mother, the completely desexualized Virgin Mary, the woman was supposed to obtain motherhood without being sullied by sexuality. Foucault mentions that “the severity of the codes relating to sexual offenses diminished considerably in the nineteenth century” but what he does not mention is that the repressed sexuality of women was not alleviated. In the early 20^th century, WWI intensified expectations of the traditional wife and mother, obedient, pure, and fertile. France rewarded families monetarily for having more children, they created the medaille de la famille to women who had given birth to many healthy children, and even created Mother’s Day. Even more pressure was placed on the woman to embody and enforce the principles of the state. So while the ‘peripheral sexualities’ faced less punishment, women faced tougher scrutiny.

Regarding the sexuality of children, I believe that the sexual activities of young girls were of much more consequence than young boys, given this female purity principle, but Foucault doesn’t mention any difference between young girls and boys. He also walks a thin line in making statements like “these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children” and “the children wise beyond their years.” In the first statement, he qualifies pleasures with barely furtive, and adults with simple-minded. Saying an adult is simple-minded minimizes his involvement in the act, and, in my opinion, further enforces the discourse that pedophiles have some kind of mental shortcoming. Furthermore, paired with the alert child, the constructed imbalance in mental lucidity makes it seem like the child is the dominating party. While I don’t doubt that this has happened, Foucault does not convince me at all that this is the predominant case.

            The second statement is problematic for me also, since the fact that they are wise beyond their years implies a certain maturity that may or may not be the case. What is the test for this? I don’t necessarily agree that at a certain age the child is definitively able to engage in consensual sex. 18 seems like a very arbitrary number, and there are certainly cases that fall above and below that limit, however I fully believe that children are more susceptible to enticement; and most often their decision is not based on the knowledge of the consequences of their action, or they misjudge the authentic consequences.