Sex scandals, racial domination and the systemic correlation of power-modalities in Foucault

Abstract

This essay explores relations between discourses of sexuality and race in US society today through an analysis of recent sex scandals, in a manner informed by Foucault and provoking further critical development of his theory. Sex scandal narratives demonstrate how sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics currently combine to form a systemic correlation of power-technologies. This power matrix, in turn, enables strategies of racial domination through the war on terror, immigration control, and economic crisis management. Sex scandals both help bring these racial power-dynamics into view and reproduce them by fortifying the concatenation of power-modalities on which they rely.

Keywords:

• sex scandals
• sexuality
• race
• biopolitics
• Foucault

Notes

1. Following the Spitzer scandal and the publication of my co-edited volume Public affairs: politics in the age of sex scandals (Apostolidis and Williams, 2004), the New York Times and then multiple other media outlets contacted me to comment on the Spitzer affair and subsequent sex scandals. My remarks about the media’s individualistic framing of conflicts in sex scandals are based on my conversations with roughly twenty reporters from several different countries (mostly the US) during 2008-2010.

2. Meanwhile, this analysis complements critiques of ‘sexual citizenship’ in the United States which have explored how cultural and legal discourses about sexuality establish normative or ‘unbecoming’ modes for ‘belonging’ in America, sometimes through racially identified practices, images, and narratives and in the context of neoliberal cultural shifts (Cossman 2007; Berlant 1997).

3. Of course, the new trajectory in Foucault’s thought that begins in the midst of the 1978 lectures also involves a shift in his theoretical lexicon away from a focus on ‘biopolitics’ or ‘security’ and toward an attempt to elaborate power-modalities that he terms “government” or ‘governmentality’. Although these concepts have inspired a great deal of fruitful work by scholars, Foucault uses the notions of government and governmentality in his lectures in ways that lack precision and consistency. These terms are of questionable theoretical value for the discussion at hand, in particular, because they blur his prior, analytically useful distinctions between power-mechanisms aimed at the training of discrete bodies and the construction of individualities (discipline) and techniques directed at populations and operating according to a probability-based logic of maximizing favorable general outcomes (biopolitics or security). The concept of governmentality arguably invites special critical insight, however, insofar as it brings into view a notion of the subject’s relation to power that includes that subject’s enactments of counter-power through practices of the self, of the sort that Foucault’s later thought explores (Cossman 2007, pp. 12-13). Consideration of how such practices might be involved in the cultural formation based around sex scandals lies beyond the purview of this essay but would comprise an instructive path of further analysis.

4. Also, by emphasizing the continuing re-deployment of juridico-legal techniques amid the broader correlative schema that also involves discipline and biopolitics, this essay confirms the importance of recent work aimed at developing a more complex understanding of Foucault’s theory regarding law than characterized most Foucault scholarship in earlier years (Cossman 2007; Golder and Fitzpatrick 2009).

5. A close analysis of sex scandals where women are accused of inappropriate behavior, for example the scandals involving Bristol Palin or Jamie Lynn Spears, lies beyond my scope but would comprise an informative complement to this critique. Similarly, there is a need for further analysis of the gender dynamics involved in the characterizations of women and their relations to men, which this essay does not provide even though it probes the contours of masculine subjectivities shaped through sex scandals. For various accounts of the gender dynamics and implications for feminism of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, see Berlant and Duggan (2001).

6. By contrast, major media coverage of the scandal involving white evangelical mega-pastor Ted Haggard stuck more narrowly to the themes of sexual indiscretion and the ironic or hypocritical involvement in gay sex of cultural conservatives (CNN 2006b; CNN 2009, Johnson 2009).

7. The article also quoted Long as saying: ‘God has launched me into my culture like an arrow and I’ll go to almost any lengths to plant the kingdom in the “hoods”’ (Blake 2010c).

8. In this regard, consider Tiger Woods’s defensive emphasis in his apology that he had ‘worked hard’ to achieve his ‘money and fame’ along with the media’s concentration on the decline of his businesses as well his proclivities toward extravagant spending and gambling (Dorman 2009; Seal 2010). Likewise, the genuinely disturbing matters of Long’s hypocrisy and abuse of authority as a man of the cloth should not prevent us from seeing the racial dynamic involved in Long’s needing to justify that he had earned his fat bank account and luxury toys. The ridicule of Spitzer for the outlandish fees he paid his New York escort, or of Clinton for his notorious appetites for sex and junk food alike, appears rather tame by comparison.

9. Of course, pursuing such an analysis in earnest lies beyond the scope of this essay and would involve considering both parallels and key differences among popular-cultural depictions of black, Latino, and Muslim ‘others’.

10. I am using the term ‘security’ here in Foucault’s strict sense, which I elaborate below after discussing the power-modes of sovereignty and discipline in connection with sex scandals. The reader should not confuse the predominant notion of ‘security’ in American public culture today, for instance with reference to immigration or the war on terror, with Foucault’s theoretically rigorous concept of security, which he sometimes uses interchangeably with ‘biopolitics’ in 1976 but then employs in place of this other term in the 1978 lectures.

11. In the lectures preceding this final commentary of 1976, Foucault argues that the much longer-term historical motif of race war sets the stage for the modern state’s move to adapt technologies of racial differentiation and domination to its own purposes. Having originally arisen as a nationally particularistic ‘counter-history’ to the universalist historical narratives preferred by the sovereign state, the race war thematic ultimately became incorporated into the state’s operations to the point where racially differentiating power modalities have become structural to the state’s authority and conduct (Stoler 1995, 61, 72, 89, Foucault 2003).

12. For a full development of this argument regarding the biopolitical character of immigrant workers’ labor environments, focusing on the meatpacking industry and connecting these labor-based biopolitical mechanisms to those involved in border security, see Apostolidis (2010).