Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons

Pre-marital sex was unthinkable for Victorian women who were assumed to have no sexual appetite. They had to learn how to please their husbands during their honeymoon.

 The honeymoon did the difficult cultural work of sexual reorientation: for women, from a female body indicatively singular, virginal, and asexual to a body perhaps desiring and legibly sexual. (Michie 234)

Sex, Honeymoon, and Geography

Upper-middle-class honeymoons often involve a journey away from familiar landscapes to a place that thematized otherness in its very terrain (Michie 234). Honeymoon in a landscape that does not evoke the Victorian ideals of rationality, sexual restraint, and moral propriety (Rome, Istanbul)

Michel Foucault: on power, capitalism, and sexual repression in the 19th century
From The History of Sexuality (1978) and The Foucault Reader by Paul Rabinow

Foucault: Pleasure and power overlap

Repression is the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age.

Sexual Repression Coincides with Capitalism

Banish unproductive sex, casual fruitless pleasure Sex should be utilitarian and reproductive Dont use for labor capacity for pleasure!

Economically useful + politically conservative sex

ensures population, reproduces labor capacity, Maintains Victorian morality

It is in the nature of power to repress:

useless energies the intensity of pleasures irregular modes of behavior

Acts contrary to nature were against the law

Sexual irregularity as a mental illness Hermaphrodites were criminals Courts could condemn homosexuality, incest, sodomy, infidelity

Segregation: Establishing Public order

17th century created houses of confinement. Beggars, unemployed, and insane were confined Making individual normal and useful to society: They are released when they can follow ethics in society and be normal.

Segregation and Capitalism

The confined people were subject to forced labor. They contributed to the prosperity of the nation by providing cheap manpower. First houses of confinement in England were established in the most industrialized parts of the country. Confinement masks poverty

From workhouses to asylum: maintaining social order-morality

Asylum enables the continuity of social morality Asylum reduces differences, represses vice, eliminates irregularities. presents bourgeois ethics as universal

Foucault on Freud
Some progress was made by Freud.

Freud demystified all the other asylum structures. But Foucault points out the normalizing function of psychoanalysis as well (Other 5)

Panopticon: architecture and surveillance building, as a prison, hospital, library, or the like, so arranged that all parts of the interior are visible from a single point.

Presidio Modelo in Cuba (constructed in 192628)

Panopticon provides:

surveillance, observation security, individualization and totalization, isolation and transparency at the same time.

 In the 1830s, the panopticon became the architectural program of most prison projects. It was the most direct way of making architecture transparent to the administration of power.

Inmate is visible to the supervisor alone-cut off from any contact.

 The power apparatus works even if there is no guardian present. The inmate cannot see whether or not the guardian is in the tower, so he must behave as if surveillance were perpetual and total. If the prisoner is never sure when he is being observed, he becomes his own guardian. (Paul Rabinow)

 The panoptic on also includes a system for observing and controlling the controllers. Those who occupy the central position in the panoptic on are themselves under surveillance. (Rabinow)

Panopticon illustrates Foucaults theory of power:

Power is not totally entrusted to someone who would exercise it alone, over others, in an absolute fashion; rather, this machine is one in which everyone is caught, those who exercise this power as well as those who are subjected to it