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Assignment 8

Sexuality was defined by all of our senses, by what people said in their confessions, by what they heard and by what they saw in the physical body of others. The discourses developed from the knowledge people gained from all those observations impacted their behavior. Foucault uses class to help us understand what he calls “a technology of sex”. He argues that people were the utensils or machines to develop the knowledge of sex. As the production of new discourses was processed and modified people started to applied them in their families and children. He wants to prove that humans are the creators of all the concerns about sex. Foucault explains that a group of people during the mid-eighteen hundreds were occupied “with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexualization of its body, the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and the body”(1978:123). The bourgeois dedicate themselves to apply key principle to secure their power and self-affirmation to pass on to future generations. Its was important to for them to maintain their sexual principles clear because they wouldn’t want their wealth to be distributed to other classes. By the bourgeoisie willing to keep a health and clean physical appearance the outcome will be beneficial for them but it will exclude other people. People are mostly driven by the superficial appearance and foucault uses this example to prove his point of how sexuality is a cluster of economical, political and physical factors that molds the sexuality of people. Also, we can see the limitation sexuality keeps having from having norms to prevent people to talk about sex to having divisions within a group of people were sex is highly manipulated and restrained from the poorer class.