well, it's not dishonest, but your interpretation of foucault is certainly mucked:
An Introduction to Foucault and Poststructuralism in Gary Kinsmen's "Men Loving Men: The Challenge of Gay Liberation" <...>
Foucault was a prominent French intellectual whose work became well known in the 1960s and 1970s. His work was complex and quite diverse and it is not necessary to address all of it here. <...>
One of Foucault's many concerns was to examine the relationship between history, sexuality, knowledge, and power. In The History of Sexuality (1980) Foucault provided a genealogy of power and sexuality. For Foucault, a genealogy is mode of historical investigation which uncovers the ways in which people govern themselves and others through the production of knowledge. Knowledge generates/creates/produces power -- though he does not claim that knowledge is power. The sciences emerged at around the same time as the rise of industrialization and capitalism and are a particularly powerful form of knowledge. We can think here of our discussion of liberalism because it, too, is associated with science. If liberalism suggests that people are innately born with the capacity for reason and freedom, then science becomes an important mechanism through which people use reason to learn about the world. Science was seen as a politically important mechanism for challenging the power of the church and the feudal nobility which had controlled knowledge in important ways. Science was a method or mechanism for discovering the "truth" about how the social and natural world does or does not 'work.'
One of the reasons Foucault is concerned with history is that he wants to challenge the assumption that we have moved from a brutish state of superstition to an enlightened, humane form of social life based on sophisticated and more 'true' forms of knowledge (science). Instead, Foucault sees history as moving in a rather disjointed way from one regime or system of knowledge-based domination to another. We can never escape these regimes of knowledge for this is the only way in which we can live as humans.
This is a disconcerting claim -- a bleak view of the world in contrast to those influenced by the Enlightenment faith in reason and freedom (idealized in science) as the source of human liberation from the constraints of the church and elitist state. Enlightenment liberals, in other words, believe that we can overcome superstition by using science to discover the truth and expose those who base social relations of domination on faulty and untrue claims.
Yet, Foucault's followers maintain that his views are not as bleak as they may seem for to understand the inextricable connection between knowledge and power is to recognize that knowledge and power can always be contested. Hence, there is always the possibility of resistance to accepted regimes of knowledge and power.
The history of sexuality is a history of the rise of a "regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (1980, p 11). For Foucault, discourses on sexuality are a way in which power is wielded; but, he is also saying that these very discourses create new sites of power and resistance. His primary example is that of the so-called repressive character of Victorianism and the science of sexuality which emerged in the Victorian era. He argues that the Victorian era did not simply repress sexuality but actually created discourses on sexuality: classification, specification, quantitative study, causal analysis, and case studies, for instance. The question of sex became a constant preoccupation -- in science, the schools, and in medicine:
We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies
ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only
witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities...never have
there existed more centers of power; never more attention manifested and
verbalized...never more sites where the intensity of pleasures and the
persistency of power catch hold, only to spread elsewhere (1980, p 49)
In medical sciences the question of sexuality was predominant. Foucault sees this history as one that is analogous to the history of Western catholocism and the confessional: Just as people confessed to their priests, they also confessed to their doctors, their psychiatrists, and their sociologists. The sexual confession became cloaked in scientific terms as the process whereby people told the 'truth' about the sexuality and thereby created the notion that they had a repressed sexuality waiting to be released on the analyst's couch.
Foucault thinks that this is an important development in the history of society and science/knowledge. Prior to the 18th century, society sought to control death -- to prevent it and to understand it. But, the rise of the human sciences soon saw the rise of a concern with life -- especially sex. Power over life and sex took two forms. First, there was the "anatomo-politics of the human body," in which the goal was to discipline the human body and its sexuality. Second, there was the "bio-politics of population," in which the object was to control and regulate population growth, health, life expectancy, etc. In both cases, life became "a political object" and sex was central: "Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species" (1980, p 146). Through knowledge of sexuality, society is coming to exercise more power over life itself.
Kinsmen's analysis utilizes Foucault's framework to show how homosexuality was produced during the Victorian era as part of the scientific study of sexuality: its classification, analysis, etc. Scientists maintained that there were normal sexualities and abnormal or deviant ones -- particularly homosexuality. This classification of a hierarchical dualism of normal/deviant, heterosexual/homosexual emerged with the need to control the reproduction of the working populations and as a way to define a bourgeoisie that could no longer rely on feudal familial relations undermined with the French and American revolutions.
Kinsmen, specifies and elaborates Foucault's work by relating each of the processes Foucault identified to specific systems of social, political, and economic control -- particularly patriarchy, capitalism, and compulsory heterosexuality. Kinsmen also utilizes Foucault's insights when he critiques the gay liberation movement's "assertion that gay is just as good as straight" (Kinsmen, p 413). Here, he is also pointing out that by utilizing the dominant discourse of sexuality in attempting to give parity to various sexualities, the gay liberation movement is simply operating within the very terrain that produced the dichotomy between homosexuality/heterosexuality. In doing so, Kinsmen believes that it's challenge to compulsory heterosexuality is not radical enough and may simply be co-opted into the present system of domination and power.
kelley crouse