Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and <i>Scientia Sexualis</i> in Foucault and Linda Williams

Authors

  • Chloë Taylor University of Alberta

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i7.2635

Abstract

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences in terms of the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities within a disciplinary system of power.

Author Biography

Chloë Taylor, University of Alberta

Chloë Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. She works in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, philosophy of sex and gender, animal ethics, and philosophy in art and literature. She is the author of The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Genealogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (Routledge 2008) and is currently working on a book on sex crimes from a Foucauldian perspective as well as a project on Foucault and food.

Downloads

Published

2009-09-07

How to Cite

Taylor, C. (2009). Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and <i>Scientia Sexualis</i> in Foucault and Linda Williams. Foucault Studies, (7), 18–44. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i7.2635

Issue

Number 7, September 2009

Section

Articles

License

Authors retain copyright to their work, but assign the right of the first publication to Foucault Studies. The work is subject to a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, but despite these restrictions, authors can take for granted that Foucault Studies will permit articles published in Foucault Studies to be translated or reprinted in another format such as a book providing a full reference is made to Foucault Studies as the original place of publication.