Deconstructing

Sexuality:
discipling
practices, power,
and Pornography
Janelle McLeod
University of Manitoba
Department of Sociology
The Confession
 modern compulsion to speak and confess incessantly about
sex (Foucault, 1977:69).
 we demand that sex tells us the truth and in turn tells us our
own truth
 free the body and soul of an enforced silence.

“The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many

different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no
longer perceive it as the effects of a power that constrains
us; on the contrary, it seems to us
that truth, lodged in our most
secret nature, ‘demands’ only to
surface; that if it fails to do so, this
is because a constraint holds it in
place, the violence of a power
weighs it down, and it can finally
be articulated only at the price of a
kind of liberation” (Foucault,
1978;60).
 confessions play a central role in the production of modern
sexuality.
 it is the technique for exercising power over the pleasures
that we seem to be “free” to confess, and it operates through
various relational power relations such as medicine, law,
psychoanalysis, and pornography.
 It is through these power relations that sexuality is
constituted.
“It is no longer a question of saying what was done-the sexual
act-and how it was done; but of reconstruction, in and around
the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that
accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of
the pleasure that animated it. For the first time, no doubt, a
society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting of
individual pleasures.” (Foucault, 1978:63)
 Confessions have become so deeply ingrained we no longer
see it as the effects of a power that constrains us.

“The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many

different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer
perceive it as the effects of a power that constrains us; on the
contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret
nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is
because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power
weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price
of a kind of liberation” (Foucault, 1978:60).
 In one year, the American porn industry will have produces
10,000 - 11,000 films, in comparison to the 400 films that
Hollywood makes (Williams, 2004: 36).
 In analyzing the proliferation of pornography and modern
sexual discourse I refer to Foucault’s relational model of power
that replaced the idea that power is substance that subjects can
possess.
 power is exercised through disciplinary practices that are
impelled by institutional and cultural forces.
 Power is found in the relationships that people have with
these forces (Foucault, 1977:130).
 Disciplinary practices increase the power of the individual as
it transforms them into docile bodies. The human body
becomes subject to a gradual coercion focused on the economy
and efficiency of the body’s movements, gestures, and attitudes
(Foucault, 1977:136).
 These methods of coercion, called ‘disciplines’, focus on the
process of the activity rather than the result, and are exercised
within a specified time and space.

 What was then being formed

was a policy of coercions that act
upon the body, a calculated
manipulation of its elements, its
gestures, its behaviour. The
human body was entering a
machinery of power that explores
it, breaks it down and rearranges it
(Foucault, 1977:138).
 The result is a body that is gradually disciplined in the
practices of pornography, producing a new sexualized body that
is stripped of any essential sexuality and replaced with a docile
pornified sexual body.
 Pornography acts as the vehicle for disciplinary practices that
transform human bodies into sexual bodies that are mere
representations of pornography.
 If discipline is successful, coercion is minimized and
economized, to generate the maximum effect of control through
the minimum expenditure of force, but that force never
disappears completely.
 When society is saturated with pornographic representations
as a normative standard, which in turn operates as an ideal to
which people ‘voluntarily’ aspire, it is only because of the
operation of this efficient economy of force, which goes mostly
unnoticed.
 sexuality is instead a social construct in which all of the
body’s movement, gestures, and attitudes are manipulated, and
thus obedient to a pornographic ideal of sexual experience: a
‘pornified sexuality’.
 With this new form of modification, the aesthetics of
pleasure is no longer emphasized on mastery of a self-
disciplined body that leads to the production of greater pleasure,
the exercising of one’s freedoms and forms of power, or finally,
the access of truth.

The questions I ask is,

whose ‘truth’ is being
confessed in hard-core
pornography?
 As the subject practices the disciplines of pornography,
either by watching or reading pornographic material and then
engaging in pornographic acts with a partner, power is created
as the docile body learns to be a master in the reproduction of
pornographic images and texts.
 Through the slow and repetitious exposure to pornographic
images, the body becomes the focus of a coercive force that
reshapes all of its movements, gestures, and attitudes. Every act
is broken down temporally and spatially to produce sexual acts
that places emphasis on the process versus the result.
 The sexual body is trained, practiced, and empowered
through the very act of consuming and replicating pornography.
The result is a form of sexuality that is intricately connected to
various devices of power.
THANK YOU