ABSTRACT
In the conclusion to La Volonté de savoir [The Will to Knowledge] (1976), the first volume of Histoire de la sexualité, Michel Foucault speaks of a change in the relationship of power to the body that began during the Enlightenment. Power no longer focused on death (the power to take or spare life) but rather on the body. There arose a bio-politics of the population, an entire regulative discursive formation ‘relève des disciplines du corps: dressage, intensification et distribution des forces, ajustement et économie des énergies’ [tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies] (p. 191; p. 145). Part of this bio-politics was the classification of sexualities, the codification that would lead to the coining of the term ‘homosexual’ in medical discourse. Another part of this bio-politics was the attempted regulation of the ‘perversions’ in juridico-legal discourse in documents such as the Criminal Law Amendment Act, under which Wilde was tried and imprisoned. ‘Le sexe est accès à la fois à la vie du corps et à la vie d’espèce’ [sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species], Foucault writes, and ‘c’est pourquoi, au XIXe siècle, la sexualité est poursuivie jusque dans le plus petit détail des existences’ [this is why in the nineteenth century sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences] (p. 192; p. 146). During the period,
sex also becomes ‘thème d’opérations politiques, d’interventions économiques [...], de campagnes idéologiques de moralisation ou de responsabilisation’ [the theme of political operations, economic interventions [...], and ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility]:
The body found itself the site for a series of engagements, both positive and negative, both expressions of the individual’s freedom and their subjection, and both related to the individual and, through them, the wider body-politic. Wilde’s body is emblematic of this process: for much of his life a statement of a certain discourse, a language or sign of affirmation, his body would then find itself subjected to another discourse: it found itself ‘disciplined’ in the most extreme fashions, through incarceration and penalization.
