‘Pleasure spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew out those peculiarities over which it kept watch’ Foucault, The History of Sexuality.

Foucault begins his History of Sexuality by refuting the ‘repressive hypothesis’. This was the idea, incorrect in his opinion, that the Victorian era was defined by sexual repression. The misunderstanding, according to Foucault, stemmed from the idea that simply because deviant sexualities were marginalised, sex and sexuality was repressed (repressed meaning pushed out of existence by a prudish culture which denied the existence of plural sexualities) . Contrary to this, Foucault argues, through the active work of marginalisation, which requires categorical distinctions, the Victorians participated in a proliferation of discourse around sex.

Prior to this period, the management of sex was set through ‘canonical law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law’. Much of these restraints revolved around sex within marriage. This concern reflected the institutional and cultural makeup of pre-industrial Europe. These laws penalised actions in the main because they threatened the institution of marriage, or because they were deemed ‘unnatural’. They had the effect of perpetuating a Christian social order. Hermaphrodites were criminals, homosexuality was illegal, as was infidelity. All were guilty of the same crime, of infracting Christian natural law. There was no distinguishing between sex, sexual acts and desires, no conceptual tools to separate the body, the act and the desiring individual. Sex was a field of actions, and was managed using notions of sin, nature and sanctity.

The proliferation of sexualities occurred as it became the object of a new regime of power which emerged through the industrial revolution. These discourses sought to understand sex at the level of science in order to maximise its utility for industrial ends. It is here where Foucault develops his idea of the ‘will to knowledge’, and the ‘will to truth’. The will to knowledge being the desire to understand things through knowledge, through categories and exclusions. In one of his lectures setting out his key concepts, Foucault describes discourses as being formed through exclusions, through setting out what things are relationally according to what they are not. This is how categories are formed, relationally. The will to truth is the desire to label these discourses as ‘truth’, thereby giving them great power. Discourses around sexuality emerged as the field of medicine, with its intrinsic will to knowledge penetrated it. Medicine, and psychiatry, through methods of interview, medical examination, psychiatric investigation, developed categories of sexuality which for the first time made sexuality something intrinsic, and ‘deeply characteristic of individuals’. No longer did sexuality simply lie in sexual acts, rather sexuality came to be understood as the defining quality of an individual, such that it superseded their other qualities. From being a ‘type of sexual relation’, it became a certain ‘quality of sexual sensibility’, and in this came ways of defining people through their sexual sensibilities; the ‘auto-monosexualists’, the ‘mixoscopophiles’, the ‘presbyophiles’. These people were treated as victims of an affliction, to be pitied but also feared, and therefore confined from the rest of society and subject to treatment.

Foucault says that this will to knowledge and truth was driven in part by the generation of pleasure in uncovering sexuality. The process of examination was pleasurable to the observer as they seemingly uncovered a deep, profound truth, something which was declared private and secrete but fundamental to the individual. This pleasure fed back and led to an intensity of questioning, an almost insatiability to reveal more and more of this murky truth. Pleasure was felt by those doing the recording: Pleasure felt utilising power (power as knowledge and the generating truth. And, interestingly, for the observed: There was a certain pleasure in being the object of such attention and interest. They were, as Foucault says, ‘fixed by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they received’, but also animated by the need to avoid the gaze, to evade power, ‘fool it’, or subvert it. Power provides the categories required for its subversion. Categories are formed through exclusions. These exclusions are subversions and therefore constitute sexual deviance. When he says ‘power asserts itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalising, and resisting’, he is referring to power’s expression through reference to a certain set of categories, even in acts of resistance.

I am interested in what we can learn from this idea within the categories of today’s discourse on sexuality and gender. Within sexuality, a category of resistance to normativity is ‘polygamy’. Is this category, and those adjacent to it, more fixed, and better defined, because they operate within a discursive field dominated by ‘marriage’ and ‘monogamy’? I have had similar thoughts in relation to gender identities. I have sometimes wondered why the claims made by the trans community have not resulted in a greater proportion of non-binary identifying individuals. The central assertion upon which trans-identity rests is that of the construction of gender; that that which we meaningfully call ‘of a man’ and ‘of a woman’ are cultural. That, yes, we could define people by sex, by creating boundaries between certain bodily features but that, firstly, this is not what we mean currently when we call people ‘men’ and ‘women’, and that secondly, sex (those who are inter-sex, for example) across the human race is so varied, that a continuum without such boundaries would more accurately reflect reality.

Upon acceptance of these facts, what needs to happen is a set of terms to describe people who identify with the cultural constructions of gender (cultural men, and cultural women, for example), and a set of terms to define one’s sex (those who possess certain sexual characteristics). Sexual categories would have a separate utility, pertaining to the domains in which physical sex is relevant. This would exclude it from the many cultural-social-professional domains in which it is emphatically not. The binding of sex, and gender sex has resulted in disagreement. On the one hand, people can’t accept that women may have penises, as to be a man is to have a penis. On the other, people only feel truly male or female if they possess the genitalia associated with that gender identity. Yet both are in agreement, both adhere to the same logic. Both agree on the inalienability of one’s sex from one’s gender. It is as Foucault says; within a discourse lies the logic of its own resistance, that Resistance can replicate the logic of the discourse it resists. True acceptance that gender is nothing more than a cultural construction, that we should understand people not according to their genitalia but by the identity they which wish to communicate, would resolve these disputes. The desire to attach sex with gender is the root.