Power Relations Of Sexual Addiction Essay

In Foucault’s work “The Body and Sexuality” Foucault suggests, power no longer asserts itself as a deduction, as a "right of death." The primary interest of power now is

Unlike sex, the history of sexuality is dependant upon society and limited by its language in order to be defined and understood.

Intercourse, one of Andrea Dworkin’s most revealing novels on sexuality in an exploitive ethos, poetically argues that male hegemony and female inequality are manifested in the somatic action of heterosexual intercourse, a “sexed world of dominance and submission”. This world, simply titled, “Amerika” is, the world that exists within the contemporary American. In “Amerika,” sex is healthy and enjoying it is morally right [59]. It is furthermore, distinctly regarded in the context of vaginal penetration by man. In which women are

Every day, hundreds of people experience the overwhelming effects of addictions. Individuals can become addicted to virtually any action or item. If individuals use addictive substances, there will be serious medical repercussions. This paper will focus on the idea of addiction through the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and how these fields have benefitted this prominent issue. Addictions are currently being researched by various social scientists in an attempt to fully understand their causes and cures.

There is a war being wage here in America. No, it is not a civil war, nor is it the war on terrorism. This war is an effort to fight drug abuse and addiction; however, America is losing this battle. Doweiko (2012) reports that more than 15% of a state’s budget is used to fight and maintain this war (p. 2). Ruiz (2014) reports that the Ohio state Attorney General Mike DeWine says Ohio has 47 counties out of 88 with an epidemic of heroin use and associated crimes. Likewise, she (2014) reports that Ohio is as well losing this war and Ohioans are dying from overdoses. These figures for Ohio have risen from

have looked at the history of sexuality since the 18th century in what Foucault calls

Kurt Vonnegut is known for his dark humor, wit, and imagination. He is consistently listed among the great American authors of the later twentieth century and his novel’s such as Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five are considered modern classics. In this essay, I will focus on two of Vonnegut’s short stories “Welcome to the Monkey House” (1968) which takes place in a dystopian future where everyone is required to take pills that take all the pleasure out of sex and “Miss Temptation” (1959) which takes place in a small east coast town by looking at them through a feminist lense. Both stories come to the same ultimate conclusion that over-moralization of human sexuality is pointless and harmful but they come to this conclusion in very

Sexuality has an inherent connection to human nature. Yet, even in regards to something so natural, societies throughout times have imposed expectations and gender roles upon it. Ultimately, these come to oppress women, and confine them within the limits that the world has set for them. However, society is constantly evolving, and within the past 200 years, the role of women has changed. These changes in society can be seen within the intricacies of literature in each era. Specifically, through analyzing The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, one can observe the dynamics of society in regards to the role of women through the lens of the theme of sexuality. In both novels, the confinement and oppression of women can be visibly seen as a result of these gender roles. Yet, from the time The Scarlet Letter was published to the time The Bell Jar was written, the place of women in society ultimately changed as well. Hence when evaluating the gender roles that are derived from sexuality, the difference between the portrayals of women’s oppression in each novel becomes apparent, and shows how the subjugation of women has evolved. The guiding question of this investigation is to what extent does the theme of sexuality reflect the expectations for women in society at the time each novel was written. The essay will explore how the literary elements that form each novel demonstrate each author’s independent vision which questions the

Another important aspect of the novel is that of sexuality and of same-sex desire. Froehlich states that, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,

In The Introduction to the History of Sexuality, Foucault explains how during the 19th century with the raise of new societies, the discourse or knowledge about sex was not confronted with repulsion but it “put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning sex” (Foucault 69). In fact, this spreading of discourse on sexuality itself gives a clear account of how sexuality has been controlled and confined because it was determined in a certain kind of knowledge that carries power within it. Foucault reflects on the general working hypothesis or “repressive hypothesis,” and how this has exercised power to suppress people’s sexuality. It has power on deciding what is normal or abnormal and ethical or unethical

Throughout history, definitions of sexuality within a culture are created and then changed time after time. During these changes, we have seen the impact and power one individual or group can have over others. In the Late Nineteenth Century into the Early Twentieth Century, we see multiple groups of people and or authorities taking control over the idea of sex and how they believe society is being impacted by sex. At this point in time, society had groups of people who believed they had the power to control how society as whole viewed and acted upon sex. Those particular groups and ideas changed many lives and the overall definition of sexuality within that culture.

Both Foucault and Butler claim that sexuality is not what makes us who we are, that it is simply a social construct. In addition, they both believe that by submitting to the mechanisms of power and categorizing ourselves sexually, we are giving impetus to our own subjugation. While they hold similar beliefs in many ways, and much of Judith Butler's work is building upon work done by Michael Foucault, Judith Butler does diverge from Foucault's ideas. The reason Butler revises Foucault is that his concept of biopower leaves no room for resistance to power. For Foucault, a shift in the 17th century from a top-down monarchial model of power which focused on the individual gave way to a political technology for controlling entire populations.

In the case of Spargo’s interpretation of Foucault the hegemonic ideal sexual subject is that of a straight man, who is presumably white and middle class. According to Foucault the category of homosexual emerged in the 19th century out of the development of the field of sexology, when medicine replaced religion as the primary producer of discourse on sexuality, and enforcer of (hetero)sexual norms . Foucault argues that despite their relative position individuals categorised as homosexual were able to create their own discourse (or counter-discourses) to the narrative on unnaturalness promoted by sexology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thus finding agency within constraining discourses . In this way sexuality and sexual subjects are constructed, understood and questioned through the discourse produced by those individuals and institutions with access to power.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, social theorist, philologist and literary critic whose work had a tremendous impact on several disciplines. He was not a sociologist by training, but he worked diligently on sociological issues and otherwise had significant influence on the work of other sociologists. One of his most famous works is the The History of Sexuality, in which he examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life. According to Foucault, the idea that everyone has a sexuality is relatively a recent development in the West. In Volume 1, Foucault discusses the relationship between sex and power in a historical context. He states that the ways in which humans think about sexuality is primarily shaped by the "repressive hypothesis," which claims that Western society had suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century, and this was due to the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois society. There are several key concepts in this book that will be discussed in this paper include repressive hypothesis, sexuality, power, and discourse. This paper will seek to show the ways in which sexuality is a discursive object, and how sexuality was linked to power throughout history.

Before one can begin to understand the complexities of sexual addiction it must be adequately defined. The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity has defined sexual addiction as “engaging in persistent and escalating patterns of sexual behavior acted out despite increasing negative consequences to self and others.” (Herkov) It is important to note that this means that sexual addiction isn’t just the desire to have sex more than normal but also that the addict engages in activities regardless of and consequences. The addict must also escalate their behaviors over a period of time in order to be considered an addict. This doesn’t mean escalating it to illegal actions but merely increasing the rate at which they engage in the