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Periodization assignment 8

Foucault discusses three different technologies of sex in Part 4, Chapter 4: Periodization which how the discourse of sex changed in the 19th century. Moving away from the repressive cycle Foucault attempts to find the origin of sexuality through genealogy and saw two major breaks of its line. First was that sexuality was limited to marriage, and not letting sexuality be exposed by the body, the second break was in the 19th century as these limitations began to loosen up and sexuality was being explored. He argues that there were three technologies that changed the relationships or ideals people had about sex. The sexuality of children, medicine and economics where changed ideals repressed by the church, which Foucault argues were no longer of self interest but were social interest that were exposed and surveilled by the state and society. The technological application of medicine was used to separate sex from the body as a way of being controlled with political intention. The idea that medicine of sex could create a perfect society, free of disease, and with a pure bloodline, was used by the bourgeois as a model to design their society and by the government to regulate marriages, childbirth and population. Also sexuality in psychiatry was used by way of surveillance agencies, like child protective services, to socially control perverse and dangerous children, which ultimately led to racism. Foucault makes another argument that though sexuality is a social construct that was used to censor and repress the lower class and enforced by the elite, it was the elite themselves that practiced the same idealization for a different reason. The bourgeois wanted to maximize their lives by allowing sexuality to empower their social class. These thoughts on sexuality became the hegemonic infrastructure for the bourgeois.