English 2200F/G Chapter : Week 11 - Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler

• School: Western University
• Department: English
• Course: English 2200F/G
• Professor: Matthew Rowlinson

Document Summary

Foucault developed an influential account of the interconnections between power, knowledge, and the subject. Foucault"s rejection of the repressive hypothesis in the history of sexuality. Power is traditionally seen as repressing behaviours that it finds unproductive, threatening, or otherwise undesirable. Before an act is prohibited, it is not singled out as something separate and identifiable or perhaps even desirable. The enunciation of the category and the law both creates certain actions as crimes and affords them a heightened presence. In keeping with his historical argument that modern power operates through continual classification, surveillance, and intervention, foucault goes further, proposing that such power names actions as crimes and perversions precisely to increase its opportunities for intervention. This is why he insists that modern society is in actual fact, and directly, perverse. it produces the very desires and behaviours it claims to abhor, relying largely on discourse.