Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

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Olivia

Fashioning the Body

10/12/07

Concept Rhyming Essay #1

1)                  Information and skills gained through experience or education.

2)                  The total of what is known.

3)                  Awareness gained by experience of a fact or situation.

The Oxford English Dictionary states it pretty clear on what the word knowledge

 means, but does it compare with Foucault’s definition of the term?  Before we start to analyze and break down what knowledge meant to him in this book, we need to first gain an understanding of where he was personally during this time frame. 

Foucault, a well known philosopher in his day, wrote numerous books before ‘The History if Sexuality’.  He had written about insanity, clinics, prisons, human sciences, and so on.  In all of his books, you can see how his mind was working to unravel all the reasons behind the behaviors of where people were coming from.  But, when he sat down to write about sexuality, I believed he poured his heart into the words as well as his brain.  As a homosexual in the mid-twentieth century, times were rough.  He had to endure criticism and judgment from all angles of society, and this type of behavior had gone on for many centuries before his lifetime.  They told him he was a freak, and that being attracted to the same sex only meant that he had a serious illness.  Disturbed by this constant attack from people, his brain started spinning a web of ideas based upon the knowledge of what was out publicly from other philosophers, what was

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considered normal in society, and finally of his own ideas and experiences he had cultivated within his life about sexuality.

            The word knowledge is abundantly splashed all over his book, but he refers to this word in a lot of different contexts.  In my essay, I will be addressing the top two phrases that he wrote about the most. The first phrase that was most commonly used was ‘the will to knowledge’.  Compared to all the other phrases, that one was written down eight times.  Why did he want to make such an emphasis about the will?  On pages eleven and twelve he writes, “And finally, the essential aim will not be to determine whether these discursive productions and these effects of power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that truth, but rather to bring out the ‘will to knowledge’ that serves as both their support and their instrument”.  Here, he is writing about exposing essential facts on sexuality to everyone- regardless if it shocking.  And now that it had been revealed, he leaves it for the reader to decide what to think.  I love that about Foucault!  You know exactly where the man stands, but he puts the choices on a plate for you to decide.  He doesn’t condemn the facts, he is simply exposing it with what he has collected, which then puts his own spin on it to confess that thinking about sex in different ways is not necessarily taboo.  And not only does he lays all the facts open for the reader to formulate their own thoughts, he goes on to write that because of this new knowledge of sexuality, it can become more powerful as an tool because we all know about it now. 

Comparing how he has used his definition of the term in his book from the definition of the Oxford dictionary, I think he stayed on the same mindset.  His point to

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the reader was to bring a new awareness about sexuality.  It was only when he put ‘will to’ in front of the word for the reader to give that choice for them to accept this new knowledge or not.

            Foucault also enjoyed clumping the words knowledge and power together to make one hyphenated word.  By doing this he was able to show that knowledge and power shared equal importance of strength. And by linking them together made the term even stronger than if they were each on their own   The two accounts of ‘knowledge-power’ in the book were written when he was discussing his thoughts upon the confession within the church and courtroom.  From the time of the Victorian era, people were very reserved to say they enjoyed sex, let alone even talking about it.  You were thought to be a pervert if you had any of these feelings, and sharing them would only bring exploitation of you within society.  He wanted to emphasize that making a confession has its advantages and disadvantages- a double edged sword if you will. 

There can be high risk involved when you admit your innermost feelings and desires with a person- especially if it someone who has authority within the church or judiciary.  On one hand, letting the truth be known can actually bring normality amongst communities if enough people came out and share their similar feelings on sexuality.  On the other hand, if it wasn’t considered ok, there could be high costs for the confession.  Authorities could deem you sick or insane which then could lead you to be the object of scientific study for the rest of your life.  By confessing his own sexual desires, Foucault was influencing power to the knowledge he was writing about.  So when he was writing about knowledge-power, he was wanted to show the reader that they can have this same

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strength with their own confessions.  This pattern could then potentially start to reshape what is determined normal within societies.  When I again compare his term of knowledge to the one in the dictionary, I still see the same definition.  He just made it stronger when he hyphenated the word to emphasize his point.

Foucault took special care in writing ‘The History of Sexuality’.  It not only involved the thoughts that were stewing about in his mind, but it also involved his heart to put feeling into the book.  When he combined both heart and mind, his term of knowledge became much more powerful than by just writing from the knowledge only in his head.  The term knowledge in itself carries the meat for the definition, but when Foucault added his phrasing of the term, it was like adding vitamins to the meat for that extra boost of nutrition.

In conclusion, because Foucault brought his own personal desires to the book as well as the knowledge he collected, he was able to execute his theory with success.  It may have shaken up the thoughts within the reader’s mind, but all in all, he brought his debate to the surface in the hopes of other people standing up and speaking out about their own beliefs.