Date: 4 Aug 00 09:56:13 MDT From: Phil Thomson <philthomson-AT-usa.net> Subject: Re: [A few definitions needed.] "Jason W. Cowling" <BreathingX-AT-email.msn.com> wrote: I'm reading Foucault's _History of Sexuality vol.1_ He mentions a few terms I cannot find, nor define (because of my poor language background). mixoscopophiles presbyophiles zooerasts I'm reading Robert Hurley's translation, if any help (p 43). Jason. I wrote: if i remember the passage your talking about, he's just demonstrating the obscurity of some of the terms that began to be used to describe various kinds of sexual perversion with the inauguration of sexological and psychoanalytic discourses on sexuality. You're not supposed to know what those terms mean, although im sure we could have some fun by guessing what the terms mean. (mixoscopophiles has something to do with liking to look at something ("phile"=love, "scopos"=look at); presbyophiles are probably sexually attracted to presbyterians (ha ha); zooerasts are probably people who perform what we would now call bestiality.) At any rate, he's just demonstrating how these new discourses cooked up all kinds of new terms to describe sexual conditions that hadnt had much attention paid to them before. Not only were these new discourses inventing new names for things which "entomologized" the pervert (Foucault's wonderful analogy), but they were busy reconceiving these conditions as results of psychic disturbances, bad childhoods, case histories, etc. It's kind of like when Foucault remarks famously, "the sodomite had been a temporary abberration, the homosexual was now a species"; the same kinds of sexual behaviours had always been around and had always being known about, but there was a paradigm shift in the way they were described and conceived. am i making sense? phil ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
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