Abstract
While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power.
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Notes
Butler originally makes this argument for the ‘gendered body’, but it also readily applies to the sexed body.
One could also look to David Evans (1993) for a broader discussion of sexual citizenship and the ‘further social construction of sexualities within…well established material parameters’ (p. 8).
Hunt argues that Sade is a precursor of Foucault based on three suppositions: (1) Sade's exposure of the arbitrary nature of sexual relations is akin to Foucault's belief that sex holds no hidden essential truth; (2) Foucault holds that, for Sade, sex is ‘subject to the unrestricted law of a power which knows no other law than its own’, and this reflects the Foucauldian notion of power as ubiquitous; and (3) the exercise of power in the sexual relations that Sade portrays anticipates Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Nancy Love, Samuel Chambers, John Christman, P.J. Brendese, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments through the many iterations of this paper. Previous versions of this paper were presented at conferences: ‘Critical Theory in Dark Times’ at The University of Minnesota, April 2004, and ‘No Boundaries’ at The Pennsylvania State University, February 2006. I am very appreciative of the comments I received at these occasions as well.
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Egan, K. Reason's Bondage: On the Rationalization of Sexuality. Contemp Polit Theory 6, 291–311 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300283
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300283