Long, useful summary of History of Sexuality

D. Travers Scott has posted a long and detailed summary of the whole of History of Sexuality, Vol 1.

Scott is a Ph.D student at USC and writes it all up in an easy, contemporary style.

Devices of sexual saturation – Institutions and systems call out, map, segregate based on, delineate sex — all of which calls it into being. [Think of the naming of perversions in John Waters’ A Dirty Shame, or how plushies and furries are constituted by Rick Castro, Real Sex, and other documentaries on them. Talk shows, reality shows.] Power is productive, not repressive. “Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.” p. 47

Foucault concludes with a summary on pp. 48-49, all eminently quotable. “This concatenation, particularly since the eighteenth century, has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests which, with the help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography, have tapped into both this analytical multiplication of pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it.”