Try as I might, I just couldn't find the information needed to prove the points made in my last post. I even went so far to email my human sexuality teacher for help on my quest, and the help he gave me led me nowhere.
C'est la vie, I suppose. Instead, I offer you a more complete summary of what I half-ranted on earlier.
Welcome to Renee's Grand Summary of the History of Sexuality (mainly through the eyes of Michele Foucault and Ann Stoler):
In the 17th century, the upper middle class- the bourgeoise- were in just the right position to fund the building of ships, and the hiring of men, to sail off into the world and see what they could find. They knew there were savages. They knew there were resources. They knew that there was little variation in resources on the mainland of Europe- and thus, the plan was to find those savages with their bountiful resources and to exploit the people and take their land and bring it home. Which went well, until they realized that the white male workers were breeding with the natives.
When this realization set in, they knew they couldn't simply go in, take the goods, and get out. Human beings are a bit more complicated than that, and a bit more empathetic.
The bourgeoise had to stop it.
But, how does one stop another from sexualizing a people? Well, you have to make the groups different. You have to pervert the culture and isolate your people from the "savages."
At this point, it's interesting to note that the bourgeoise were the ones to ultimately control the institutions that control your perceptions of the world. It's also interesting to note my very conscious mixing of tenses.The upper middle class have, and presumably always will, control the church systems/education systems/judicial systems/etc. from which they can breed a people that follow their rules.
In the 17th century, they needed to sexually separate Europe from the rest of the world. And so sex, as well as pretty much all else in Europe, became a bit more about "truth" and a bit less about pleasure. All of the sexual acts that had never before been considered personally and sexually definitive-meaning they had simply been for pleasure before- were now acts that made you who you are. From this period, we get the extraordinarily taboo natures of beastiality, pedofilial, and ultimately homosexuality (hello marriage laws). Those things just weren't productive to society like heterosexual, conjugal, boring sex. And that was how the bourgeoise got the workers. They changed society as a whole, and so mixing with the natives made you less of a European and you were ostracized. And if you dared do anything "worse" than mixing with the natives, you'd be ostracized, studied, treated and maybe even punished.
In Foucault's A History of Sexuality, he gives an example of a traveler that arrived at a village and saw a culture in which the children of the village would play a game called "churn the milk (or something)"- a game where the children essentially gave hand jobs to the men of the area. And so, one day, this new guy decided to try it. Low and behold, he got caught- which led to him getting sent from doctor to psychiatrist to asylum to jail. And the "game" had been taking place for decades! What happened? He got caught at a time where all acts needed to be understood, analyzed, and quantified.
So- as you may had already asked yourself- how do you do this? You have to start it young. You have to raise children into a world of it until these values become so engrained in society that they're just magically produced on their own. Key word here: produced. To Foucault, our sexualities are not repressed- they're given to us. Nothing is solely "human nature."
I think I'll end it here, this is a lot of information- but I can guarantee this isn't where it ends.
and if you'd like to read it yourself: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/histofsex/summary.html
ReplyDeleteHmm, this is an interesting idea, but I don't entirely agree with Monsieur Foucault. The idea that sex for anything other than reproduction is bad goes back well beyond the era of colonialism. If I were to say that any one thing caused our society to develop as it has sexually, I would say it was the influences and doctrine of Christianity. The bible claims that homosexuality is a sin and that sodomy ( referring to sexual acts deemed unholy (basically anything not for reproduction)) is likewise punishable (just look at Sodom and Gomorrah). During the middle ages (after the fall of the Roman Empire but before the Renaissance), which was before colonialism, any act of self indulgence was considered against god, and many people, especially of the clergy, practiced self-flagellation or other forms of pain infliction as a means of being closer to god. These same clergy swore oaths of abstinence for the same reason.
ReplyDeleteSex has long been a taboo, but I personally feel that the basis for that, at least in our western society, is religion.
And as far as the "civilized" men breeding with the "savages", this happened all the time, and in many situations was expected for men to take mistresses while away from home. The infamous Hernando Cortés had a very well known mistress and still remained a very respected individual (at the time). Generally when a European fornicated with an indigenous person, it was not the European who took the hit socially, but the child who was born with 'mixed blood'.
This is not to say that what you or Michele Foucault say is wrong, this is just to say that this is my opinion and what I've gleened from my various classes of the Americas, middle ages, and Christianity in medieval Spain. My knowledge of North America and the settlement of it is extremely limited, so perhaps there was a difference of societal views with regards to cross culture breeding.