GSWS 316 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Intersex Surgery, Biopower, Biopolitics
15 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
The idea that since the victoria era, we"ve all been sexually repressed and no one is supposed to talk about sex. When we do talk about sex, we"re doing something transgressive. Foucault says no , in fact we"ve all done is talk about sex: we talk about how to not have sex, make it the understandings of truth and identity. Since the 18th century, whole disciplines, institutions, and technologies have emerged around naming sex, regulating it, inciting it to speak. These institutions just did not name sex. They created, organized, and deployed it as a system of measuring and managing bodies. Sex is intersection of political technologies of life, where the mechanics of bodies and populations meet. Historic shift in organization of social, political, and economic life beginning in the 17th century in europe: sovereign power vs. biopower, when resistance happens against power, emergence of things like norms.
