In this thesis I examine the ways in which the modern state addresses sex. I want to ascertain by what considerations the state is informed in its relationship to sex. What is behind the state???s regulation of sexual practices? What is its interest in regard to sex? To answer these questions I examine fundamental artefacts of the modern state, especially the law (but also the bureaucracy), as directed by the 1993 English court case of Brown. Brown involves the search for the sexual subject; The Lords in Brown were at a loss for how to conceptualise the subject before them. Their search is my own: who is the sexual subject? What is his relationship to the state? To answer these questions, Brown directs me for authority to two widely separated moments of supposed classic ???discontinuity???: the 1957 Wolfenden Report, and the late-Victorian Queen???s Bench. These two moments in government - the 1960s and the 1880s - are usually depicted as ideologically different, indicating discontinuity, difference, change and perhaps even revolution between the relative approaches of the state to sex. And yet, in Brown, both are upheld as appropriate contemporary authorities on sex, the individual and the state. Here I take my cue from the Lords and interrogate the artefacts of these two periods in government to ascertain the story of the 20th century state???s relationship to sex. My thesis is a political analysis that incorporates genealogy in its focus on law as indicative of the state. It incorporates a detailed study of primary artefacts of the state: detailed analyses of seemingly discontinuous moments including individual court cases, individual Committees, individual treatises and opinions and political memoirs. I conclude by drawing together my overall argument, that during the 20th century there has been no radical change of the modern state in regard to sex, and that the success of the permissive mythology has generally blinded us to this fact. Not only have we mistaken the nature of the permissive state as concerned with evolution, we have erroneously been persuaded of the blanket repression of the Victorian state. The big break, the discontinuity of the 1960s, that often is described as ???revolutionary??? (and inevitable in the teleology of progress), is a re-configuration of the same object as the Victorian state. The permissive state enacts the latest stage in the great Victorian project of embodying the sexual subject ??? a subject at once embodied and created as an object of control.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187222 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Gleeson, Kate, School of Politics & International Relations, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Politics and International Relations |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Kate Gleeson, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds