Sandusky was hauled in today for failure to post bail. He's been charged with ten counts of child molesting. What's odd is the silence from the Foucauldians. Michel Foucault is the world's most famous theorist and his work bears heavily on rape and child abuse and sex sex sex. Many of our finest thinkers adore Foucault, and you'd think they'd be mounting an enormous defense of Jerry Sandusky using his work, or at least attempting to frame the controversy with Foucauldian thinking. But scanning the web, I can't find anything. Not even a surreptitious Foucauldian defense of Sandusky. Scott McGaha, in the Foucault theory project gives us some penetrating paragraphs to show us how much we're missing without Foucault's minions weighing in on this matter.
"Cahill, in Foucault, Rape and the Construction of the Feminine Body, attacks Foucault’s theory on rape. In a 1977 roundtable discussion of his theories from Discipline and Punish, Foucault proposed that rape was not any different than other form of physical assault. He claimed,
“…in any case, sexuality can in no circumstances be the object of punishment. And when one punishes rape one should be punishing physical violence and nothing but that. …[If rape is punished differently] what we are saying amounts to this: sexuality as such, in the body, has a preponderant place, the sexual organ isn’t like a hand, hair or a nose. It therefore has to be protected, surrounded, invested in any case with a legislation that isn’t that pertaining to the rest of the body. …It isn’t a matter of sexuality, it’s the physical violence that would be punished, without bringing in the fact that sexuality was involved” (Foucault quoted in Cahill, 2000: 43).
Cahill then argues,
“that rape can not be considered merely an act of violence because it is instrumental in the construction or the distinctly feminine body. Insofar as the threat of rape is ineluctably, although not determinately, associated with the development of feminine bodily comportment, rape itself holds a host of bodily and sexually specific meanings” (2000:43).
An article in the American Criminal Law Review uses Foucault’s ideas about punishment to call for legal guarantees of equal punishment for both stranger and nonstranger rape (Shanahan, 1999)
“Foucault asserts that the penalty for a crime should be calculated in terms of its possible repetition; the penalty should account for the future disorder, not the past offense. The penalty should ensure that the particular criminal has no desire to recommit the crime and that the crime does not spawn imitators. …More recent estimates suggest, however, that nonstranger rape may pose the greater risk to women because ‘in most rapes the victim and her assailant were familiar to each other.’ …Foucault’s measure of the injury a crime inflicts upon society supports imposing severe penalties on nonstranger rapists. The current system of punishing nonstranger rape less harshly (if at all) than stranger rape violates two of Foucault’s basic tenets: current rape law neither deters an individual rapist from repeating the crime nor discourages imitators” (Shanahan, 1999: 1375-1376).
Westlund uses Foucault’s definitions of power to examine domestic violence. She claims that women experience both pre-modern and modern forms of power (according to Foucault’s definitions of power), “the former in the primal acts of violence and the latter in contemporary interpretations of her mental health as pathological” (1999: 1045).
“Women discipline their bodies through an elaborate system of self-surveillance; rituals of cosmetics, fashion, hair and skin care, diet, and exercise furnish innumerable examples of how women internalize panoptic relations of power and regulate themselves before and anonymous male gazer….Battered women, I argue, experience pre-modern and modern forms of power side by side: not only do they have to deal with instigation of terror by an all-powerful ‘sovereign’ but they are also often compelled to turn for help to modern institutions of such as medicine and psychiatry, police, courts and so on. These institutions revictimize battered women by pathologizing their condition and treating them as mentally unhealthy individuals who are incapable of forming legitimate appraisals of their situations and exercising rational agency over their lives” (Westlund, 1999: 1045)."
Perhaps there is a deep underground discussion amongst Foucauldians going on. Maybe. You'd think that feminists would be using Foucauld to understand the outrage around Sandusky. But I just haven't seen it. What can account for this silence?
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Ceci n'est pas une post.
Who needs Foulcault when America's streets are aswarm with Algerians?
Alger was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1832, and entered Harvard College at age sixteen. At seventeen he became a professional writer with the sale of a few literary pieces to a Boston magazine. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an assistant editor for a Boston magazine before teaching in New England boys' schools for a few years. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, wrote in support of the Union cause during the American Civil War, and accepted a ministerial post with a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts in 1864. He left the church in 1866 following an internal investigation regarding sexual misconduct involving two teenage boys of the parish. He denied nothing, and relocated to New York City.
In 1864 Alger published his first boys' book Frank's Campaign, and in 1865 his second boys' book Paul Prescott's Charge. His third boys' book Charlie Codman's Cruise was published in 1866. His literary niche was made secure in 1868 with his fourth boys' book Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. The book was a great success. His many boys' books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured a series of stock characters – the valiant youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil squire.
Why is it that the Unitarians during the Civil War had so little difficulty spotting Alger as a child molester and drumming him out of their corps? Why was he allowed to write and publish books that ultimately made Sandusky's situation inevitable?
"Foucauldians. Michel Foucault is the world's most famous theorist and his work bears heavily on rape and child abuse and sex sex sex"
Nobody in the real world gives an F about Foucault.
Just so you know.
Nobody in the real world gives an F about Foucault.
Isn't he the guy with the pendulum?
;-)
Foucault is the most cite scholar in the Humanities. We shouldn't be ignoring his attempt to make sex into a purely physical act and to take the sacred and the communal aspects out of it. It's a head-on assault of the religious dimensions of marriage and love, and is an attempt to replace it with a completely secularized materialism. Many people today think sex should be a protected covenant between consenting adults, and that it should foster intimacy, caring, and community. Foucault seemed to think it was a purely physical act like hitting someone over the head with a brick.
Wiki says Eco was a close friend of M. Foucault. The pendulum Eco wrote about was devised by L. Foucault, apparently no relation, a century ago. Eco also wrote The Island Of The Day Before in the same year that Pynchon wrote Mason and Dixon. Both books feature a ship filled with clocks involved in the quest to create a device for measuring latitude.
Stu/Brett:
People living in and accustomed to a flood of shit never question from where the shit comes. They assume it was always there.
They couldn't recognize the fountain of shit if they saw it--they don't have the tools.
So it doesn't matter if no one "in the real world" gives an "f about Foucault," his ideas continue to have concrete implications.
Okay, longitude. You need a sextant with a pendulum or plumb bob to measure latitude and a reliable clock to measure longitude. Mason and Dixon made an effective team because one was an astronomer and the other a surveyor. Finding the north pole and establishing a system for precise determination of longitude were both long term projects that took about three centuries. All you need now is a cell phone with a GPS device. For sociological and psychological purposes the north pole is about eighty miles north from the middle of the Mason-Dixon line.
Foucault is only known in academia. And while a nasty creature, I don't think he advocated rape (as did ...Nietzsche. See Geneaology of Morals). But really Kirby , for a surrealist yr rather a prude. All rather tame compared to the....Marquis de Sade.
Much as one tries to respect catholic tradition, where are the catholics protesting Sandusky, Paterno and the entire scandal? Just as guilty as any apologists for Foucault (a big bust of a respected RC priest for molestation went down in NorCal a few days ago). The DeSadean tradition has some honest nihilists and creeps (one likes to think). The priestly or preacherly chester on the other hand just deceives people--and children-- to get his candy
I'm more Lutheran than surrealist. I've been thinking of changing the title of the blog to Surrealist Lutheranism, but it's too late, and doesn't sound bloggy enough.
I'm a total prude. Love should only happen within a context of lifelong fidelity. Jesus thought that, too.
I know what you mean by the Sadeans.
Later Breton got very prudish. He didn't like the surrealists having affairs and threw them out of the group if they had affairs, esp. when it was with each others' wives.
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