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41 - Sex, Gender and Babies

from Part V - Reproduction Centre Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2018

Nick Hopwood
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Flemming
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Lauren Kassell
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Michel Foucault’s speculative analysis in the first volume of A History of Sexuality influentially proposed that modernity is characterized by a dynamic relationship between ‘reproduction’, ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality’ involving two apparatuses and four figures. This chapter explores the relevance of this argument to the period 1960–2015. It concludes that the hysterical woman perhaps became the feminist, the homosexual the gay activist, and the Malthusian couple the bearer of legal reproductive rights and agent of planned parenthood, while the masturbating child morphed into the abused, traumatized child, and the core element of the ‘apparatus of alliance’—the production of descendants—was eliminated from marriage. But sex was separated from reproduction at the confluence of three historical currents: campaigns to infiltrate marriage with a contraceptive regime servicing the needs of autonomous women; the mapping of the diversity of sexual activities followed by their widespread normalization as the practices of all; and the analytic, civic and legal victory of ‘gender’ over ‘biological’ sex. The transformation depended on the successes of consumer demands and the mass marketization of devices and desires; movements organized around an archipelago of sexual communities; and the sexual sciences and technologies as integral components of the medico-industrial complex.
Type
Chapter
Information
Reproduction
Antiquity to the Present Day
, pp. 613 - 626
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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