How Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” works with Warner & “The Trouble With Normal”

Foucault’s thoughts on confession and sexuality in The History of Sexuality are reminiscent of Michael Warner (making the connection yet again), and that resemblance reveals a really large and overarching idea of the standards that queer people, as individuals with non-normative sexual identities, are held to. Foucault writes, “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation” (60). When he says that “[confession] is so deeply ingrained in us” he means that society has, for so long, placed immense pressure and expectations on individuals with “secrets” to make them feel that way. The secrets he references are sexual acts, some of the most historically “locked-away” and “secret” of which are queer, which has been talked about in The Trouble With Normal with Michael Warner’s “list” of good and bad behaviors. Although his “bad” list – and writing, in general – extends to much more than just non-heterosexual sex acts, the stark difference between the good and bad, and the shame that comes along with it is exactly what causes the secrets that Foucault writes about people keeping (and being forced to confess). It is almost ironic, then, that people are forced to lock away parts of themselves via societal pressure and at the same time are compelled by that same society to confess the same things they locked up. Queer sex and sexuality becomes an almost “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation in which people are pulled in two very different directions – secrecy/shame and confession – that makes life that much harder for those individuals. One could even go so far as to say that this paradox is purposeful, because it has been traditionally effective at keeping queer individuals hidden away and quiet as they struggle between the two directions that they are forced to choose, and when queer people are subdued like that, it makes the “normal” people in society – the very traditional, heterosexual individuals, as Warner would probably say – more comfortable to live while thinking more of themselves and less of others in need.