Truth through Confession: An analysis on Rousseau and Foucault How do we know the truth about ourselves and how do we communicate it? Foucault explores these questions in The History of Sexuality where he poses the “repressive hypothesis” that repressing sex in society caused the opposite effect. There occurred a proliferation of sexual discourse where sex became part of every sector of society entering spaces such as education and medicine. The confession is the primary means of discourse, in other words how information and power are disseminated in society. To Foucault the confession is a mechanism that produces truth; through confession we are creating a truth about ourselves.
“the desire for physical contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent” (Goldman, A., 1977, p 40). This minimal criterion, according to Goldman, is both necessary and sufficient to qualify normal desire as sexual. The mentioned above “repression argument” is grounded on a critics of the paradigms of ‘morality’, ‘naturalness’ and ‘normality’. They distort the concept of sex per se by ascribing external goals to it, such as reproduction, expression of love or other communicative intentions. These judgments and biases are allegedly intrinsic to sex itself, but they can only be justified through arguments non-related to the sphere of sexual desire.
There is a statistic that gets thrown around a lot regarding how much of human communication is intimately tied to body language. When humans talk about gender and sexuality, speech becomes especially embodied, a performance for others to interpret, internalize, or judge. But if this is true, the speech-action dichotomy falters. Pornography, one of the ways humans communicate about gender and sexuality, is both action and speech. Catharine A. Mackinnon’s article Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech is arguing for access to legal recourse to those who have been harmed by the pornography industry.
Rubin (1984) stated that “The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequalities, and modes of oppressing” (p.267). Sexuality is full of repression. She indicates sex hierarchies to point the sex have been good and bad, but it is not that dualistic indeed. Masturbation is one of the example that can show society always control sex strictly. Masturbation In “Sex and Society: Generations”(2009), Cavendish indicates that masturbation is the act of stimulating genitals and point of orgasm.
However, with the recent development of Queer Theory, the body and the complex relationship between sex and gender began to progressively receive special attention. In this context, the notion of sexuality and gender has been destabilized against the notion of self and what is considered to be natural. Psychologists like Sigmund Freud began to question this idea in the early XX century. Freud not only challenged the nature of homosexuality (inversion) but also the nature of heterosexuality. Then, this idea of nature would be changed by interpretations of particular historical moments and relationships of power.
In his analysis of Western discourses, language helps Foucault to detect social limits of existence. His concept of transgression, i.e. events resulting in the crossing of limits into formerly forbidden zones, explains the re-discussion as well as re-evaluation of such limits in discourses. To him, the language of sexuality is the primary factor to determine the limits of law or, in other words, taboos. In contemporary Western civilizations, however, Foucault perceived that the process of sexual discourse has developed into profanation, i.e.
The themes of sexuality, power, repression, knowledge and the mergence of religion and science have been thoroughly addressed, presented and exchanged between the movie Augustine and the writings of Foucault in the History of Sexuality. This notion presented by Foucault that sexuality is almost everything and anything is strongly conveyed through the movie. Throughout the movie, we can almost see that sexual desire is the good and the bad, the trap and the escape and last but not least, it is the problem and the solution. Having read between the lines that the sexual relationship between Dr. Charcot and his wife is quite anemic, it seemed as if his search towards knowing the truth behind sexuality is what substitutes what he is missing in terms of fulfilling his sexual desires at home. When asked by a colleague why he studies hysterics, Charcot does not say that he wants to cure them; he replies that his need is to "know”.
In Butler’s theory ( cited in Felluga, 2001), ideology create compelling illusion of sexuality which lead men and women to perform the gender in certain ways. This process of “performativity” is the result of the disciplinary power and repeating stylization of the body (Butler, 1990). Children grow up and learn the gender performance in a direct instruction from adults such as boys are given toy cars rather than bobbies, while they also implied in a potential way such as the influence of this photo: it already records the traditional gender relationship and the conventional standard of gender
They hypothesize that men`s motivation for sex and the motivation for domination and control are ‘functionally integrated in the sexual psychology of men as a result of evolution by selection’, to control a women`s sexuality to control paternity.” However, today, there could be different, more, or less types of rape than in the past. Three patterns of rape are described in the present day western culture: power rape, the expression of conquest and control, often to compensate for perceived inadequacy. Anger rape, the expression of hostility, and sadistic rape, expression of eroticized anger and power, often characterized by intentional maltreatment and enjoyment of victim suffering. How does evolutionary psychology account for the seemingly differently motivated acts? The power rape may be most closely related to rape used to increase copulation.
This means that sex education aims to develop one’s personality with regards to his/her insights about sexuality. Moreover, Fontanilla (2003) enumerated the three major reasons for having sex education today such as the sexual adjustment, human’s distorted view of life through mass media and the false information coming from different sources. Through this, one’s sexual nature could be understood, positive human relationships and personal feelings are emphasized, and misconceptions about human sexuality are