Thoughts+on+sexuality

Sean—Thoughts on Sexuality—10/4/07 Troubled by how to treat Foucault’s //Introduction to Sexuality// I perused my ever growing library of STS related material. This practice didn’t avail me of any inspiration, but my old science fiction that maintains back burner status on the bottom shelves was enlightening. Perhaps due to the work of Foucault many of these authors, Heinlein, LeGuin, and Butler among others, create worlds where sex, gender and sexuality are reinterpreted in alternative social structures. The implicit and explicit tensions that these authors create around sexuality appear as useful and avenue for exploring sexuality and biopower as any direct analysis of the //Introduction//.

Octavia Butler’s Dawn series strips down the taboo described by Foucault by positing alternative conceptions of sexuality. In this case the human characters are confronted not only with tri-copulation but also with extending themselves beyond the species constraints imposed by normative visions of human sexuality. The former is reminiscent of the United States Federal Government threatening the state of Utah’s chance of obtaining statehood due to their implicit acceptance of [|polygamy] among the [|Mormon population] (for a [|history] of and surviver stories of [|exmormons], pretty freaky stuff). Even as I write this I have a subconscious aversion to the practice and yet I know that this emotion is founded on nothing more than the “uniform truth of sexuality” that has been embedded in my psyche (69). For Butler, humans are explained to be inherently flawed as hierarchically minded, with consequences of tension and violence among human cultures. While similar to Foucault’s power discourse. It seems that Foucault would diverge from this perspective in maintaining that power and hierarchy do not manifest themselves primarily from the biologic contingency of human existence. Rather, the power hierarchies that the humans, in the midst of alien worlds, attempt to recreate are directly associated with the social biopower cognitively embedded within each individual from their past lives on Earth. As a result, similar tensions develop within the small surviving population of humans as they attempt to recreate the web of power that they are used to even in the face of the more utopian alien communities that they are surrounded by. In a less playful manner Heinlein, in //The Moon is a Harsh Mistress//, creates dual societies of Earth based humans and those that have colonized—or been imprisoned on —the Moon. Removal from Earth based mores relieves the individuals from the controlling mechanizations of the state. As a result polygamy, promiscuity, and playfulness in sexuality abound. Visiting from Earth each tourist, prisoner and soldier is confronted with this blatant confrontation to prior rules about sexuality. The costs Foucault envisioned are present in a complete dissociation from historical past and oppression (5). The society that develops on the Moon is both less diverse in terms of the universal acceptance of the new norms (potentially a new type of social control), but strangely more open in the variability of existence within the community. This stream of sexual discourse is present in many of Heinlein’s works that create opposing cultures of western control and “alien” alternatives. In //Stranger in a Strange Land// a child survivor from a conspicuously sexual trip to Mars comes back from Mars changed from a typical human to something else. His [|escapades] in his Earthy home create tensions due not only to his promiscuity, but more importantly to the mechanism he employs to help his apostles break free from the manner in which they think. To manage this feat, each is forced to learn an entirely new existence and language before they are capable of following in his divergent path. He leaves them infantile in their experience, much as Foucault attempts to give birth to an analytics of power (82-3), rather than a fully formed theory. Foucault and Heinlein are aware of the unknowable possibilities of existence that develop when applying these techniques of inquiry and consequently leave opportunity for the reader to critique the “polymorphous techniques of power” in as unconstrained a manner as possible (11). As Foucault maintains, “In short, we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge. As far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to constitute the ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge (73).”

For Joan Scott "Fantasy is more or less synonymous with imagination, and it is taken to be subject to rational, intentional control; one directs one's imagination purposively to achieve a coherent aim, that of writing oneself or one's group into history, writing the history of individuals or groups.[|6] The limits of this approach for my purposes are that it assumes exactly the continuity--the essentialist nature--of identity that I want to question." The sci-fi/fantasy authors that I have come to love attempt to disengage the continuities that we, in our cultural constraints, attempt to recreate. In so doing identities, in the form of life or sex for my purposes, become more transparent.

Thanks to Gareth's notes on Haraway: "Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places. Determining what constitutes each dimension takes boundary-making and maintenance work. In addition, many empirical studies of technoscience have disabled the notion that the word technical designates a clean and orderly practical or epistemological space. Nothing so productive could be so simple (68).”