There are two very broad similarities that I have noticed about both Foucault and Butler. 1) They both focus on the way language and some particular words are restricting, inexhaustive and limiting. 2) They both seem to focus on their particular sex without much discussion, if any, of the other. In particular I would like to focus on how Foucault's whole discussion on the discourse of sex could have been made stronger and potentially a bit complicated if he focused on more than just male sexuality.
In my opinion, Foucault's main point in part 2 of his book The History of Sexuality, is that in order to control/manage sexual pleasure and desire, people have created discourses with which to discuss it. Over time these discourses become more varied and particularized. However, these discourses should not be viewed as a freeing and or liberating of sexuality. Instead, these discourses have repressed sexual pleasure even more and have re appropriated the ways in which one gains sexual pleasure from before, being focused on the sexual act, to now were pleasure is derived from discussing sex. By forcing people to discuss sex and to discuss it using a very controlled language and manner the pleasure of the sexual act has been repressed. Sex was taken away from the discourses of silence and was given a new formal verbal discourse:
It was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in
a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain
different results. Silence itself- things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is
required between different speakers- is less the absolute limit of discourse.... There is no binary division
between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not
saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak them are distributed, which type of
discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many
silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses (27).
Here, to me, Foucault seems to feel that silence is a more liberating less restrictive way to discuss sex as opposed to the formalized language that develops. My question, though, is how do women fit into this? Historically speaking, the Victorian era and the latter ages were more restrictive on women then they were on men in terms of sexuality. While men were given a new verbal discourse in which to talk about sex, female sexuality was virtually ignored until Freud decided to discuss it in the early 1900s, but even then, that was a male discussing female sexuality in a highly scientific manner.
By completely leaving out the gender differences in the way sex is discussed Foucault lost out on several great examples for how discourse is limiting and missed a few other ways the sexual pleasure was taken away from the sexual act.Women, in general, are not supposed to discuss sex, or at least never to the same degree men are able to, and are often expected to practice sexual modesty or be sexually naive. Not only are women not supposed to discuss sex in detail if at all, often times their knowledge of it was restricted as well. In this way women delt with sex in the way Foucault may describe as a silent discourse, but was this really more freeing or placing more pleasure in the sexual act. I argue that they dealt in the silent discourses, not only because their speech and knowledge of sex was limited, but that they were often viewed as the objects of sex, not the subjects, viewed as the ones giving pleasure rather than receiving it. I believe this somewhat complicates Foucault's claims, or at the very least woman's sexuality is an important avenue he ignored when discussing his thoughts on the history of sexuality and in particular how it is repressed.
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