User:RD/9k/Sexuality is discursive (Q39,65)
Main entry
- Sexuality is a discursive production (Foucault) [1] [2] -> I don't know what the
that means. guess it's time for my 2,000th vocabulary lesson. - Sexuality is a discursive production (Foucault) / Power operates through discourse to produce sexuality as a hidden truth (Foucault) / The discursive production of sexuality within regimes of power and knowledge is not the same as an attempt at an authoritative definition (Foucault) / Sexuality cannot be an essential human attribute because it is the effect of power to produce available cultural categories rather than the object on which power operates (Foucault) -> what does discourse/discursive mean? what does authoritative mean? what does produce mean? it's like deciphering the grammar and syntax of an ancient language.
when I comb through all these sentences like puzzle pieces the clearest proposition that comes out is "Sexuality cannot be an essential human attribute because it is the effect of power (to produce available cultural categories) rather than the object on which power operates". this seems... it seems like a deepity of some kind; it feels like it's defining something that leads to something else as not being that something else. you're saying a category like "gay" is produced because people interact and they have differing amounts of power. this seems to be a really fancy way to say "sexuality categories are a social construct and powerful people made them up" — which is not immediately a bad thing given that it doesn't simply appeal to some kind of Libertarian Free Will and actually includes a basic causal description of how categories are constructed. but I don't see how you can get around that problem of people interacting in order to stop categories from being made. the real problem here is that people interact. without much existing difference in power, the moment people are different one group of people will start building compatibility or incompatibility with the other group. to me the historical intolerance of queer people in Third-World Marxist movements is a good example. in a Third World workers' state that has just been formed everyone has a comparable amount of power up to and including a significant fraction of the central party, it's only a few really talented experts in the central party that will have noticeably greater power (ex. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng Xiaoping). but among the most ordinary people in the body of a town, the moment you get a gay person in Cuba and a straight person in Cuba the actual observable differences in people's behavior will cause those people to create compatibility and form together or create incompatibility and one group of people expel the other based on perceived fittingness to local culture or two groups of people expel each other in opposite directions based on perceived fittingness to each other.
on a basic level, other people's behavior is not a social construct to you because you have no way of constructing it. so to say "I am standing in the middle of a discursive process that manufactured sexuality categories" doesn't seem to me like it has a lot of value by itself in actually stopping that process.
Related
- Sexuality is a discursive production (Foucault) -> ... in a Third World workers' state that has just been formed everyone has a comparable amount of power up to and including a significant fraction of the central party ...
- The concept of totalitarianism is harmful to anarchism / (9k)
- Chouette (2021) / (9k) -> what Chouette is to owl-autism Q39,65 is to real-world sexualities
Ideologies or fields
- ES / Foucauldianism