Kinsey's Scientia Sexualis

Within Volume One Foucault draws a connection between the will to knowledge and power. The scientific discourse on sexuality thrives on the human will to knowledge, exploiting it as a medium through which to manifest power. Dr. Kinsey, or at least his character in the film, embodies this drive to scientific knowledge. He measures his success by how much data he has collected; he first gains notoriety for his overwhelming collection of gall wasps. With over one million wasps catalogued he considers himself the authority on the subject. Similarly, his studies on human sexuality aim to be no less exhaustive. While pitching his project to a representative of the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey betrays his trust that hidden inside enormous amounts of scientific data lies the truth. His conversation during dinner in scene 17 shows this dedication to amassing data:
A scientist can only generalize with reliable certainty if he has enough statistical information…that’s why I’ve broken the American population down into 200 major social subgroups. We’ll get anywhere from 400 to a thousand histories from each group for a total of 100,000 give or take a few. It could take 20 years but at the end we’ll finally be able to answer most of the basic questions about human sexuality…

Kinsey’s systematic approach to the collection of data can be seen as a direct parallel to what Foucault would call the will to knowledge. Though Kinsey’s study situates itself within a time the film sees as repressive, Kinsey’s study provides a link to Foucault’s deconstruction of the repressive hypothesis.
Since the end of the sixteenth century, the “putting into discourse of sex,” far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constituting – despite many mistakes, of course - a science of sexuality (12-13).

What Foucault writes on and what Kinsey displays is how power inserts itself into sexual discourse by means of the will to knowledge. Foucault wants to suggest that wherever science claims to offer truth and insight on sexuality one should observe this to be a manifestation of power. If Foucault’s assertion is true, then Kinsey would necessarily develop an insufficient picture of human sexuality based only on cold scientific data. Instead of finding truth, or at least accompanying a discovery of truth, an outsider would observe the controlling mechanisms of power at work in Kinsey’s research. The will to knowledge uncovers only the truths allowed by power, which often are only shades of the whole truth. This paper argues that Kinsey’s love of nature, developed through the encounter, shows that additional insight lies in this encounter – an alternative to scientific discourse.