Sexuality and Power

Finally, the analysis centers explicitly on power. Foucault criticizes the common view that power is synonymous with control, asking “why are the deployments of power reduced simply to the procedure of law and interdiction?” (86). Luckily for those holding that view, Foucault provides a thorough exposition on power within History. Within a few pages he describes what power is and what it is not. From these key characterizations themes are isolated that become relevant for the analysis of films that follows. First, power does not locate itself in a central point of control. Rather, its influence comes through multiple sources. Further it does not describe an ability to control that is gained or lost by a ruler: “Power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations” (94). Here Foucault begins to undermine common ideas of ruler and ruled. Soon he outright condemns them.
Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix – no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body (94).

Understanding that Foucault’s power distances itself from ruler and ruled, oppressor and oppressed, is elemental. Recalling Nietzsche’s description of the “non-place,” Foucault writes more about power’s location. If it cannot be found within a ruler or a central source then it must be dispersed within relationships. “Relationships of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter” (94). Here Foucault describes sexual relations as one realm in which power manifests itself. It is one of the many relations in which power is “both intentional and non-subjective” (94). Foucault here allows for purpose but removes a causal agent. In addition, resistance to power cannot escape its immanence: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95).
The point of this summary and Volume One is to show that sexuality has become an area of assertion for power; it has become so through an explosion in discourse driven by the will to knowledge’s insistence that within sex is hidden truth and identity. To summarize and solidify these ideas, this chapter closes with the story of Herculine Barbin before the next chapter looks at sexuality in film. Herculine Barbin was a 19th century hermaphrodite, or a person born with both male and female sex organs, Foucault introduces her memoirs, in which her sex changes from female to male. In her case, this change stemmed from medical examinations. Foucault compares this, an intervention by society to determine one’s true sex, to the approach taken in the Middle Ages.
In the Middle Ages…it was the role of the father of the godfather (thus of those who ‘named’ the child) to determine at the time of baptism which sex was going to be retained…But later, on the threshold of adulthood, when the time came for them to marry, hermaphrodites were free to decide for themselves if they wished to go on being of the sex which had been assigned to them, or if they preferred the other (vii-viii).

Thus during that time period the individual of a reasonable age had the authority and the autonomy with which to make such a decision. For Herculine Barbin, society would decide her sex. “From the legal point of view, this obviously implied the disappearance of free choice. It was no longer up to the individual to decide which sex he wished to belong to, juridically or socially” (ix). Barbin’s case represents the operations of power that Foucault characterizes within History. The individual no longer stands in position to determine his or her sexuality, upon which the determining society places so much weight. Not only does the individual lack control over his sexuality but power simultaneously prompts the individual to see that sexuality as the place of truth and identity. The individual then is precluded from determining for himself or herself an identity. As Foucault writes, there was a “moral interest that inhered in the medical diagnosis of the truth sex” – an interest that “promises us at the same time our sex, our true sex, and that whole truth about ourselves which secretly keeps vigil in it” (ix, xi). Bearing in mind power manifested in sexuality, the next chapter investigates two films that take sexuality as their focus and offers a viewing that Foucault may have shared.