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

The Paradoxical World of Foucault 25
consider themselves wronged and inhumanely treated. The modern age takes
that defense away with its medicalization of deviance and its transformation
of punishment from an open and public act to one that is hidden from view.
In volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Foucault pushed the time-line forward,
but the basic argument remained quite similar. Premodern European
society, like many other traditional ones, was engaged in a "deployment of
alliances." For example, marriage was based on status, kinship ties, and oter
non-individualist linkages between partners. Among the dominant classes,
marriage was mainly a vehicle for transferring the family name and property.
The eighteenth century superimposed on the old pattern a new apparatus,
which Foucault called "the deployment of sexuality. " The monogamous, heterosexual
marriage, expected to be based on love and affection, became the
new norm. It was imposed first upon the bourgeoisie and then gradually on
the working classes.
Foucault held that these patterns, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, had far-reaching ramifications for modern Western societies
because they penetrated and controlled the body and constructed new definitions
of sexuality in an increasingly detailed way. These included four techniques
of sexualization, which corresponded to four types of abnormalities:
(1) within medicine, the "hysterization of women's bodies" as thoroughly
saturated with sexuality (Foucault 1978a, 104); (2) the prohibition of masturbation
by children; (3) the regulation of fertility and the construction of
pseudoscientific statements about blood, heredity, and colonized peoples;
(4) the psychiatrization of the societal response to perverse pleasure . As a result,
the family's role was "to anchor sexuality and provide it with permanent
support, " thus becoming an "obligatory locus of affect, feeling, and love"
(108).
Foucault showed perceptively how the new "family" could not bear the
straitjacket imposed on it and was gradually opened to the scrutiny of medical
doctors, priests and ministers, and psychiatrists . Suddenly, a whole range
of" abnormalities" was discovered. The new field of psychology took it upon
itself to remold individuals to fit back into "normal" life patterns. Here, he examined
the workings of disciplinary power as "bio-power. " The new medical,
psychiatric, penal, and pedagogical discourses monitored, classified, channeled,
molded, and "treated" individual behavior. They established new normative
distinctions: legal/illegal, healthy/sick, and normal/abnormal . Hence,
what seemed to be liberating-more talk about sex, more openness in sexual
relations, and the removal of traditional restraints on sexual practices-was in
fact not so Iiberatin since the new discourses were involved in constructing
new forms of "deviance." In sum, Foucault's new perspective was aimed at