foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Foucault, Gender, and Male Homosexualities 145
in the dassical Greek period, Foucault singled out the rituals of love associated
with a small group of elite, Athenian, male citizens and lamented the
gradual loss of these rituals by the time of the Roman Empire.
Foucault argued that certain rituals of courtship were observed in the relations
between adult men and adolescent boys and that these rituals constituted
the first recorded ethics of love in the Western world. These rituals
were followed because Greek society had a problem. Boys were expected to
take their place as adult citizens of the state and their reputation as adolescents
would affect their future status. The Greek ethics of male love revolved
around how to treat the boys as sexual objects without reducing them to the
low status of women. Foucault was aware that this ethics of love was practiced
in a society where misogyny was overwhelming. Throughout the text
and elsewhere, he pointed to the subordinate position of women as well as
the ethics of male love, but ultimately failed to relate the two issues in a coherent,
systematic way. His ethics of love was dearly in a dialectical tension
with the pervasive Greek male contempt for women and a taxonomy that
relegated women, slaves, and noncitizens to the bottom rungs of the social
ladder. As we shall see, Foucault recognized the fact that the Greek concepts
he so valorized-the models of ethicality, moderation, self-mastery, and even
health and diet concerns-were all built on a gendered subtext. Nonetheless,
he dismissed the ramifications of this link for his H aesthetics of existence." We
may therefore legitimately ask: Is the new space that Foucault created between
the old and the new worlds hospitable to feminist concerns?
The Economy of Marriage
According to Foucault, sex in the ancient Greco-Roman world was seen as
neither bad nor a sin.6 In fact, it was the most natural activity, restoring men
to the highest state of being (Foucault 1985). The Greeks drew a distinction
between sex according to nature (between a man and women for procreation),
and sex that was against nature and for pleasure. But in a society that
prided itself on Htriumph over nature, H going against nature was not necessarily
equated with immorality. 7 Propriety and ethics in sex were defined by two
other Aristotelian concepts: (1) According to the principle of moderation, sex
was a natural desire, similar to that for food or drink. One partook of it to
satisfy a need; more than that was excessive and hence improper. (2) According
to the principle of position, there was a significant distinction between
the active adult lover, the erastes, and the passive adolescent boy, the paidika.
Hence, "for a man, excess and passivity were the two forms of immorality in
the practice of the aphrodisia" (Foucault 1985, 47).