Deviant Sex
moral panic
noun
an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded
as threatening the moral standards of society.
"the moral panic about ‘the tide of filth’ polluting our land"
Prince as an example of someone going against the norm, causing a moral panic.
Theory
What Foucault recognises is Discourse, power, and knowledge are all linked in this hypothesis. On the one hand, those who are in power, the bourgeoisie, control discourse. They decide how sex can be spoken about, and by whom, and so they control also the kind of knowledge we have regarding sex.
On the other hand, this control over discourse is closely linked to their maintenance of power. The bourgeois would want to control and confine sex because it is a dangerous opponent to their work ethic. The desire to control discourse and knowledge about sex is essentially a desire to control power.
Foucault sees this discourse as just a surface manifestation of a deeper will, a will to a certain kind of knowledge and a certain kind of power. His investigation wants to dig beneath the hypothesis itself and find what motivates it.
Is Gender a social construct?
Prince’s considered performances often use costume as a way to subvert traditional depictions of what a black man should look and sound like. As discussed in the previous part, Prince is actively challenging the dominant cultural ideology by making his trademark flamboyant, “femme” clothing including high heels, glitter, lace and mesh. Prince also makes reference to BDSM, bisexuality and other things Foucault would identify as alternative sexual identities.
- find another artist to talk about other than prince.
Theory
Judith Butler is an incredibly important theorist when it comes to discussing gender. In Gender Trouble she talks about the ways in which society tells us, enforces and re-enforces what gender means, and talk about the need to seperate gender and sex - women for example are not more emotional than men, it is a cultural expectation that this is the case.
We can think back to Foucault’s understanding of the dominant class’ wish to control the ways in which we access information which informs Butler’s work. EG - Women being emotional is useful for the upbringing of children, caring for others so are conditioned into showing emotion. This is not useful for traditional male roles -worker, provider etc so frowned upon.
Gender and the boundaries
How does my work fit into these themes?
What am I challenging/conforming to within these themes?
What does the dominant culture look like for me, and how am I addressing this in my work?
What is my privilege and bias - how can I address this in my work?
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