The Stubborn Drive: Foucault, Freud, Fanon

Abstract

The obsessive thematization of sexuality and sexual identity in the late 1980s and 1990s, in particular since the AIDS crisis, seems to bear out precisely what Foucault decried as the deployment of sexuality in late capitalism. This is a time, he wrote in 1976, ‘in which the exploitation of wage labor does not demand the same violent and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century, and where the politics of the body does not require the elision of sex or its restriction solely to the reproductive function; it relies instead on a multiple channelling into the controlled circuits of the economy’ (HS, 114). In other words, the continuing discursive production of ‘sexual heterogeneities’ (HS, 37), in Foucault’s words, or, as some say, of neo-sexualities, and the multiplication and proliferation of sexes and sexual identities since the 1990s reverse the picture of ‘a sexuality repressed for economic reasons’ (HS, 114) to that of a sexuality that is produced for economic reasons. These are, of course, no longer the reasons of bio-power and bourgeois class hegemony that Foucault attributed to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather the economics of transnational capital and labour in the postcolonial world market (sex tourism from the US and Europe to Asia, sex workers imported and exported across the globe, international networks of paedophiles on the Internet, and so forth).

Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality¹