Dive Right In

Just a little something to get us started.

Knowledge is power is something that you sometime hear during your life time, I've heard it before and never really gave it a second thought until last week when it came up in the week 2 lecture and this is where i want to point the focus of this blog.

Although this is a complex topic I'm going to attempt to summarize with out loosing too much information.

In simple terms knowledge allows for a person to gain power over another, we see it manifesting in our day to day life constantly but often pay no attention to it.This theory of the relationship between power and knowledge has been brought forward by influences of the Structuralist theories and is elaborated more in post structuralism through such theorists as Luis Althusser, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault , in which our social and cultural systems can be understood through the relationships between them and a more powerful ideology. The Structuralist standpoint this was focused more on structural linguistics through the work of Ferdinand DeSaussure, where as Foucault and the post structuralist theories saw this as a social construct of power for example patriarchal society. Foucault discusses this theory in relation to sexuality in the week 2 readings, from his book the history of sex. He discusses the issue of power and knowledge leading to repression.

"Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied and reduced to silence. Nor only did it not exist, it had not right to exist and would be made to disappear." Foulcault 1978.

The way this system seems to work in our society is through the praise and punishment which is referred to as heterosexism where heterosexuals gain privileges in order to repress or discriminate the otherness, as Liam Leonard, Director of Gay and Lesbian Health at Latrobe, suggested in the lecture, compulsory heterosexuality. Our gender sexuality and sex is placed in a hierarchy Liam used the examples of his wedding cake model and of Gayle Rubin's 'Charmed circle' (as pictured below) where you can see the inner circle is widely accepted to be 'normal' and the outer limits are often looked at culturally as taboo and wrong.

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So how did we become so hetero normative in our beliefs? there must have been some advantage for society to believe that hetero sexism is 'normal'. Foucault claims it began in the Victorian Era where sex became unspoken.

"Sexuality was carefully confined it moved into the home, the conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction" 

there is no doubt that the move towards sex, gender and sexuality being only for procreation benefited the Bourgeois state, and by using the Discourse to repress and remain in power we still see the effects in all state apparatus. 

Obviously i could continue on for hours discussing this topic, I tried to keep it short :)

Until next time.