Foucault

There are a bunch of complex ideas in here, and I'm not certain I really understood them all.

I'm really drawn to the idea of people being defined by their societies. A common theme through this course seems to be that people act the way they are expected to act, and see what they expect to see. The mainstream conception of reality in fact creates and reinforces that reality. If you believe in witchcraft, suddenly there are a bunch of witches everywhere, and conveniently they all display the same characteristics. The idea also has something of the tabula rasa in it. People are products of their environment, their culture.

It's also pretty interesting the way power changes over time. Or rather, the way that power is used changes. The form of absolute control ("Discipline") being exercised in prisons and other institutions probably is a much greater display of power than physical punishment. What greater power is there than to change a person's definition of themselves? Naturally, this emphasis on discipline arose in parallel to the modern bureaucratic state, that is capable of wielding greater power than ever before.

I feel that there's something really profound in the claim that society created homosexuality in the 19th century, but I'm having trouble getting a grip on it. Maybe writing this out will help. Obviously same-sex relations happened before that. Probably there is a biological basis to same sex attraction. But the image of the "homosexual" includes a lot more than simply same-sex sex, doesn't it? The idea that a person can be defined by who they are attracted to is probably significant. Why should a person's personality have anything to do with who they want to have sex with? Why are gay men perceived as feminine? (Two sexual roles: dominant and submissive, active and passive. If you are not one, you must be the other.)

Everything comes down to power in the end.