Answer

Week 3 Informal Reading Notes

Stoler, A. L. (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Duke University Press.

• Colonial approaches to sexuality and power, especially those of Foucault are flawed because they incorrectly argue that European sexuality in the 19^th century was hidden, silenced, and repressed.
• Foucault’s silence on the intersection between race, sexuality, and power implies that his narrative about sexuality in the 19^th century is strange.
• There are various interconnections between the concepts of sexuality, power, and biopower with racism and sexuality explicitly linked to each other.
• Foucault’s explanation of sexuality on the modern state and the emergence of racism as opposed to explaining the historical genesis of the intersect been race and sexuality.
• Foucault’s readings normalize power and the technologies deployed by the biopolitical state to silence the discourse about races.
• Issues of racial identity and class distinction existed in the colonial times in patterned ways and any explanation of modern sexuality should be cognizant of such a fact.
• Whereas the conversations surrounding citizenship and national identity focused on European polities, the use of the principle of national belonging means that race was the centre of it all.
• The bourgeois discourses of racism, sexuality, and nationalism were the basis for the definition of a state’s moral authority.
• Children’s sexual and power relations were a discourse that emerged in the 18^th century as vantage points for race-making and nation-making.
• Did Foucault’s text correctly identify and discuss the various intersections of sexuality, especially during the colonial era?
• What can we draw from Foucault’s history of sexuality and how does it relate to the contemporary views on the same?
• Has the current discourse on sexuality aligned with Foucault’s ideas on sexuality or has it challenged them?