The History Of Sexuality, Volume 1, By Michel Foucault

In Part V of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Michel Foucault documents the historical shift from a sovereign power concentrated in death to a normalized, institutionalized regulation of life focused in part on the control of sexuality. He argues that this movement marks not only a reconceptualization of the living subject as a valuable source of both labor and production but also a new political interest in sex as a site of surveillance, classification, and management. Individuals in the contemporary social order define themselves and are defined through their relation to sex and sexuality, so while sex might feel â€Å"taboo† and thus appear to subvert social control, it in fact operates within a hegemonic system of meaning and thus†¦show more content†¦Sex, then, represents a significant locus of power because: â€Å"It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the body. But it gave rise as well to comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.† (146) The movement from â€Å"a symbolic of blood to an analytics of sexuality† (148)—from a power concentrated in death to one concentrated in life—resulted in an increased concern with naming and documenting individual presentations of sexuality, in part because sex provided, and continues to provide, a way to access both the life of an individual and the life of a population. In contemporary society, power operates not only through the surveillance and categorization of sexualities, but also through a valorization of the act of sex as a key component to identity formation. Though Western culture often conceives of sex as â€Å"natural,† and thus divorced from the politics of power, Foucault argues that â€Å"sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power† (155). 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