After The History of Sexuality

German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault

Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, Dagmar Herzog, Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, Dagmar Herzog

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Michel Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault's richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

SECTION III

The Politics of
Sexual Ethics

Foucault consistently taught his readers and listeners to be skeptical of programs for emancipation. He pointed out that struggles styling themselves as liberatory frequently set up new norms and ideals; incitements, he noted, could also be strictures. For those uncomfortable with the sexual revolution that swept the West from the 1960s and 1970s on, it became easy to invoke Foucault for moral authority when one did not want to sound like an old-fashioned stuffy moralist who simply had qualms about other people’s freedom (or one’s own). By the turn of the millennium, advocates for sexual freedom—whether they were proponents of reproductive rights or the civil liberties of gays and lesbians or of the rights of the disabled or of adolescents—could count on being put on the defensive in a wholly new way. No longer was it only critics from the right complaining that hedonism was selfish and shallow and freedom was dangerous and destructive—or, in the more sophisticated variant, borrowing from feminism to declare that the sexual revolution had been sexist. Now also left-leaning or politically moderate intellectuals, wielding Foucault, delighted in accusing sexual rights advocates of participating—either naively or coercively—in the same ever-spreading “sexualization” of society that the sexual revolution had set in motion.

Revisiting the development of conflicts over sexual rights and sexual freedoms in twentieth-century Germany provides a salutary corrective to reductive accusations that the notions of rights and freedoms are not only hopelessly imbricated with relations of power but thus somehow also dispensable. All of the essays gathered in this section take Foucault’s cue in carefully historicizing ethical problems rather than assuming that ethics are time-transcending; all concern themselves with the work of either experts or activists. All are centrally concerned with investigating the multiplicity of rhizomatic interconnections between sex and power, and between the personal and the political. Some work to explicate the remarkable effectiveness of the opponents of sexual rights and sexual freedoms; some grapple with the difficulties encountered by those seeking to make ethical arguments on behalf of sexual rights and sexual freedoms. All use Foucault but also reach beyond him to borrow and adapt insights from other theorists of sexual culture, politics, and ethics—whether returning to Freud or moving sideways to Gilles Deleuze or forward to Bruno Latour. Yet while remaining firmly grounded in their respective past moments, all the essays deal with ethical problems in and around the topic of sex that also have resonance in our present—whether those ethical problems have to do with efforts to separate sex from reproduction (Matysik, Huneke) or with issues of gender-role behavior and sexual orientation (Pretzel, Mildenberger, Perinelli), whether they deal with questions about the relationships (or lack thereof) between sex and love (Matysik, Huneke, Perinelli) or with the relationships (or lack thereof) between the pursuits of sexual happiness and social justice (Matysik, Pretzel, Perinelli).

Two of the essays do emphasize the normativity potentially implicit also in liberalizing projects (Huneke, Perinelli); three analyze the writings of either medical or juridical authorities bent in some way on restricting sexual expression (Pretzel, Mildenberger, Huneke); and three explore the impasses encountered and imaginative efforts undertaken by advocates for sexual rights (Matysik, Pretzel, Perinelli). Read with and against each other, these essays spanning the twentieth century remind us both how extraordinarily vulnerable sexual rights and freedoms have been and yet also how stubbornly their importance has reasserted itself. All the essays gathered here also provide warnings and resources for future struggles; they make inescapably clear that developing and defending sexual ethics will be an ongoing project. As Matysik notes in her opening essay for this section, it was Foucault himself who pointed out shortly before his death (in his commentary on Immanuel Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?”) that there can never be any ethics without freedom. Freedom is the very condition in which ethics become possible.

Dagmar Herzog

CHAPTER 12

Beyond Freedom

A Return to Subjectivity in the History of Sexuality

TRACIE MATYSIK

Recent years have seen an important development in the history of sexuality in central Europe and beyond, a development that could be described as a modification of the Foucauldian project. As early as 2005, Edward Ross Dickinson and Richard Wetzell identified a shift underway in their review essay in German History. According to Dickinson and Wetzell, Foucault’s influence, which once inspired historians to detect the disciplinary mechanisms that worked on and shaped—even “colonized,” in their words—the modern subject, has given way to a focus on the wiggle room that subjects have had in their negotiation of those disciplinary mechanisms.¹ In their assessment of the field, they gave considerable attention to Harry Oosterhuis’s work, Stepchildren of Nature, as an example of the new emphasis, highlighting its attention to the narratives that the patients of the famous sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing told of their own experiences. While Foucault had seen sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing as quintessential practitioners of the taxological methods that enabled disciplined identity formation, Oosterhuis’s return to the patients and their narratives was supposed to depict the ways in which subjects’ desires and self-formations could not be contained entirely by disciplinary mechanisms. As Oosterhuis notes: “The historian should be cautious in accepting medical rhetoric at face value, in privileging medical theory over practice, and placing the scientific enterprise of doctors above the actual treatment and the existential experience of patients. Life as concrete experience will inevitably be trapped within the contradictions of constraint and choice, similarity and diversity.”²

Yet as Foucault and his readers have long maintained, the distinctive element of modern forms of discipline is not their ability to control or manipulate their subjects, but rather the participation of subjects in the regulatory framework. Indeed, one could say that the shift from Discipline and Punish to volume 1 of The History of Sexuality was marked precisely by Foucault’s shift of interest from a Nietzschean focus on the subject as a product of internalized discourses and mechanisms of social regulation to a focus on the importance of individuals’ desires in the production and reinforcement of regulatory practices—the source of their effectiveness, so to speak. Many in German historiography have drawn attention precisely to this dimension of inciting and mobilizing sexual desire, including most prominently Dagmar Herzog in her work on National Socialism and its memory, Scott Spector’s attention to sexual self-formation in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and Philipp Sarasin’s work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (although these contributions are by no means limited to the working out of a Foucauldian paradigm).³

With all this attention to subjects and their desires, however, it is worth dwelling for a bit on just what kind of subject we historians might be talking about when we talk about the history of sexuality, and what dimensions of subjectivity we might be well served to reconsider in a new light. Indeed, Foucault himself became somewhat weary of his own insights shortly after he completed volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, in which he seemed to have painted the desiring individual into a corner that, if accurate, left little room for self-determination. Signs of his theoretical self-criticism began to emerge in the second and third volumes of his study in the history of sexuality, in which he began exploring ideas of the “care of the self” and creative ethical practices.⁴

One of his more lucid articulations of his own shift came in an interview entitled “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In this interview he did not renounce his earlier understanding of the subject as a product of discursive disciplinary networks. Rather, he explained, he was simply shifting emphasis from the passive subject as the entity on whom those disciplinary mechanisms work, or whom they produce, to the active subject who reflects on and negotiates those mechanisms. Yet he now stressed that the active subject—again, still a product of discursive mechanisms—can nevertheless make choices about how the self will situate itself in relationship to any particular disciplinary practice. While the subject cannot remove itself from a network of disciplinary practices, it can choose to affirm or reject specific practices as meaningful for the self. In this regard, Foucault strongly insisted on a rhetoric of freedom over liberation or emancipation, noting that the ontological condition of ethics is freedom.⁵ Indeed, it is not surprising that Foucault was also returning to Kant in this period of his work, most notably in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” While that essay focused on the modern subject’s capacity for self-reflexiveness, one could see the moral argument forming along Kantian lines as well. Where Kant would understand moral freedom as the ability to do other than follow natural desires, or to do something other than obey the laws of nature, Foucault would seem to be understanding moral freedom as the ability to do other than simply follow the laws of disciplinary expectations. A free subject for Kant is a part of nature and yet demonstrates the ability to be more than nature, and a free subject for Foucault is a product of discourse and yet bespeaks something more than discourse—the ability to reflect on and negotiate discursive demands.⁶

In the next few pages I want to turn to a historical figure whose work might be said to be anticipating the Foucauldian practice of ethical freedom while also going beyond it. The figure in question is Helene Stöcker, a leading sexual-emancipationist active from the 1890s into the 1930s. She became most famous for her role in the 1904–05 founding of the League for the Protection of Mothers, an organization through which she advocated for women’s reproductive rights on all fronts: the right to reproduce within and outside of marriage, and the right not to reproduce—including the right to sexual education, contraception, and abortion. With the outbreak of war in 1914, she turned her energies to internationalist pacifism. Throughout the 1920s she continued to concentrate on internationalist pacifism, fusing her understanding of international relations to her support for individuals’ sexual autonomy. In 1933 she had to flee Nazi Germany, migrating through Switzerland, Sweden, and Russia to the United States, where she finally died in exile in 1943.

Stöcker is a particularly interesting figure for thinking about subjectivity in the history of sexuality in large part because she was engaged with so many of the turn-of-the-century discourses on those matters that subsequently became important for later twentieth-century theories of both subjectivity and sexuality. At the same time, we can see her as some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction. After The History of Sexuality? Periodicities, Subjectivities, Ethics
• I. When Was Sexuality? Rethinking Periodization
• II. Whose Sexuality? Subjectivity, Surveillance, Emancipation
• III. The Politics of Sexual Ethics
• Postscript. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index