Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and Linda Williams
| Dublin Core | PKP Metadata Items | Metadata for this Document | |
| 1. | Title | Title of document | Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and Linda Williams |
| 2. | Creator | Author's name, affiliation, country | Chloë Taylor; University of Alberta; Canada |
| 3. | Subject | Discipline(s) | |
| 3. | Subject | Keyword(s) | |
| 4. | Description | 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. |
| 5. | Publisher | Organizing agency, location | Copenhagen Business School |
| 6. | Contributor | Sponsor(s) | |
| 7. | Date | (YYYY-MM-DD) | 2009-09-07 |
| 8. | Type | Status & genre | Peer-reviewed Article |
| 8. | Type | Type | |
| 9. | Format | File format | |
| 10. | Identifier | Uniform Resource Identifier | https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2635 |
| 10. | Identifier | Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | http://dx.doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i7.2635 |
| 11. | Source | Title; vol., no. (year) | Foucault Studies; Number 7, September 2009 |
| 12. | Language | English=en | en |
| 14. | Coverage | Geo-spatial location, chronological period, research sample (gender, age, etc.) | |
| 15. | Rights | Copyright and permissions |
Copyright (c) 2009 Chloë Taylor This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. |