Foucault News

Moore, Alison Downham (2019). The Historicity of Sexuality: Knowledge of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Sexual Science. Modern Intellectual History, 1-24.

DOI:10.1017/S147924431900026X

Open access

Abstract
From the very moment the concept of sexuality emerged in nineteenth-century European medical and psychiatric thought, it became a topic of historicization. This historicization formed a consistent habit of thought in many of the medical and psychiatric texts that first enunciated sexuality as a distinct field of meaning. Dialogue between doctors and the first historians of sexuality informed the emergence of both sexology and of the historiography of sexuality. This dialogue suggests a need to rethink the origins of sexual historiography, situating current historians within a continuous genealogy, rather than as transcendental observers marked by epistemological rupture from earlier biological theories of sexual evolution.

Dominic Hewson, ‘All the time watched’: an analysis of disciplinary power within the Irish Direct Provision system (2020) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1844001

Abstract
Initially launched as a temporary measure, Direct Provision is two decades old and home to 7,400 asylum seekers. Since inception, it has been the target of internal and external criticisms along with academic scrutiny documenting the system’s functions and failings. This article builds on these analyses to examine the crucial role fulfilled by disciplinary power in maintaining the system and conducting its residents. It draws upon Michel Foucault’s ideas regarding the application of power in carceral institutions to examine common experiences of observation, normalisation, hierarchisation and examination as related by Direct Provision residents. Their testimonies detail aspects and effects of a complex system reliant on discipline to conduct conduct at the ‘street level’, while also working alongside other modalities of power to influence broader strategies of population management and governance.

Author Keywords
Asylum seeker; Direct Provision; Foucault; Migration; Power

Moore, Alison Downham “Temporal Layering in the Long Conceptual History of Sexual Medicine: Reading Koselleck with Foucault”, Journal of the Philosophy of History (2019): 1-23

doi: 10.1163/18722636-12341428

Abstract
This paper reflects on the challenges of writing long conceptual histories of sexual medicine, drawing on the approaches of Michel Foucault and of Reinhart Koselleck. Foucault’s statements about nineteenth-century rupture considered alongside his later-life emphasis on long conceptual continuities implied something similar to Koselleck’s own accommodation of different kinds of historical inheritances expressed as multiple ‘temporal layers.’ The layering model in the history of concepts may be useful for complicating the historical periodizations commonly invoked by historians of sexuality, overcoming historiographic temptations to reduce complex cultural and intellectual phenomena to a unified Zeitgeist. The paper also shows that a haunting reference to ‘concepts’ among scholars of the long history of sexual medicine indicates the emergence of a de facto methodology of conceptual history, albeit one in need of further refinement. It is proposed that reading Koselleck alongside Foucault provides a useful starting-point for precisely this kind of theoretical development.