The Prostitution of Sexuality. Kathleen Barry
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relations that are at once private and coupled and at the same time collective, institutional, and public. Important to Foucault’s contribution is his recognition that in sexual relations “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” But he eliminates structure, and by doing so, he dissolves the hierarchy of power, making power amorphous. In defining power, he makes it undefinable and his theory diminishes responsibility for power.
As Foucault tells us, sexual power is everywhere and comes from everything, but its agency is secreted in its ubiquity. For Foucault, “there is no subject”; the agents of oppression elude identification. What is important about Foucault’s definition of power is that he reveals the difficulty in exposing sexual power as it is constantly “produced from one moment to the next” in the intertangled web of the “multiplicity of force relations.” However, because Foucault does not directly confront power as gender-structured hierarchal relations, in the context of sex in marriage, in prostitution, in structured inequality, his theory achieves what he sought to avoid. His definition of power merely reinforces masculinist theories of power that obscure that privatization and personalization of patriarchal power by considering power primarily at the level of the state.
However, Foucault is correct that there “is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between ruler and ruled” in the sense that such oppositions suggest that the one who has power is acting, thus making the oppressed who is acted upon a passive figure. But there is interaction and reciprocity in the relations of power. Power is produced through interaction, and that interaction includes the participation of both the “ruler” and the “ruled,” the oppressed who are acting, historical, and temporal, even though the ruler thinks and behaves as if they are not. Exploring interaction makes it possible to reveal power, and this is particularly true in the sexual relations of power. In women’s shelters, as women recount the interactions of privatized abuse, consciousness exposes and makes public previously obscured power relations.
Power is not exclusively enacted among opposites, by one gender on the other, as men and boys are not excluded from sexual exploitation as individuals. The evidence that men and boys are in some cases sexually exploited is not a negation of sexual power that is a female class condition. Rigid adherence to false binary oppositions (individual men and boys versus individual women and girls) conveys the contrary (that men and boys are not equally exploited) and then makes the exception, the sexual exploitation of boys, into the rule.
However, Foucault’s rejection of binary oppositions are not based on the same assumptions as those of the feminist theory I am presenting here, which looks beyond oppositions to understand the complexities of sexual relations of power. For Foucault and his followers, rejecting binary oppositions provided him (and them) with the opportunity to deflect attention away from the agency and social location of domination, the dyad, the couple wherein sexual power is constantly constructed. In destructuring power, he made the relations of power disappear because he made their agents invisible. In trying to connect sex and power, Foucault dismantled the dyad, the nexus wherein sexualized human relations become dialectically hierarchical sexual power relations. But a theorist’s denial of reality does not change that reality; it only hides it. It is impossible to eliminate from the social landscape that which constructed it, the institutional and individual power structure. Without an analysis of power, Foucault’s “multiplicity of force relations” becomes mired in its own diversity. Domination becomes particularized into and unidentifiable among these multiple lines of power. For Foucault, individualized sexual relations of power, operational in dyads, are not collectivized to form systematic domination, because in his definition of sexual power he has eliminated class conditions, the referent for interpersonal, gendered relations of power. Sexual power would lose its interpersonal enforcement if there were no class-based, institutional, systematized, and state-based domination beyond and distinct from its individual manifestations.
Foucault relativizes sexuality to each instance of it. The idea that sexuality is used to “serve the most varied strategies” and is “endowed with the greatest instrumentality” goes nowhere. There is no overall pattern, no consistency from one unit or one sexual relation to another.
Power is relational. It actively engages oppressor and oppressed. In its “multiplicity of force relations,” power operates between classes—economic classes, the capitalist and proletariat; race classes, whites and people of color; and sex classes, men and women. Hegel’s description of the reciprocity of master and slave and Marx’s analysis of the economic relations of the capitalist and working classes identify power relations dialectically constructed into power hierarchies that are sustained by the advantages gained by oppressors in their exploitation of the oppressed. The power of oppression is as diffuse as it is direct. Direct violence, then, is only one aspect of oppression in the subordination of the “other.”
Laborers go to work voluntarily and take a wage for their work that does not represent the full value of their labor; the difference between the value of their labor and the wage paid constitutes the profits of the capitalist. The relations of power between them are sustained in the wage-profit calculation. That is fundamental to the interaction in domination; it is the foundation of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed. A relational theory of power identifies the way subordination is frequently held in place through the active participation of the subordinated without blaming them for their oppression. Hegelian and marxist theories of power reveal dynamics of oppression that account for the interactive relational force that keeps oppression in place.
The relational power of male domination reaches into the private, into and onto the body, through interactive sexual relations that are rendered into sexual exploitation by the power that forges the economic relations of women under patriarchy. Considering sexual exploitation as lived experience, identifying it in sexual acts, whether or not they involve consent, and analyzing sexual exploitation in terms of institutions that promote it, namely prostitution and marriage, gives oppression a substantive context and identifies it as a sex-class condition.
Among the collective conditions of domination, only in the subordination of women are class relations of power simultaneously personal relations, where interactions that are as intimate as sexual relations are also the relations of power. Sexism and sexual exploitation of women as a class by men as a class are class relations that operate as individual interactions. A feminist relational theory of power, of the subordinated female gender class, must reveal power in personal interactions, in physical and emotional relations that operate at the most private and intimate levels of human existence.
Patriarchy superimposes class conditions of power relations upon sex/gender relations between men and women, interperson-ally establishing a near-perfect fit between the class relations of power and gendered interpersonal relations. This has created a particularity to women’s oppression, making it unique in that it is constructed in gendered interpersonal relations that invoke sex. It is highly public, visible, and structural, and yet simultaneously it is personal—hidden, secreted, and bodily, physically, and emotionally internalized.
Gender relations of sexual power are institutionalized and simultaneously individualized in prostitution, pornography, and marriage. Sex is a relational power that is realized in human relations that take place in private, usually hidden from view. In the French history of private life this is referred to as “the secret.”34 As sexual relations are usually unseen and often unspoken, except in group sex and/or gang rape, power relations are structurally privatized and yet commercialized.
When private interactive sexual power relations are made invisible, so is power in sex industries denied. As sex becomes industrialized, not only in business but also through multinational conglomerates, the use of sex in the power relations in which the United States dominates the Third World is made invisible. Consequently, the individual unit of interaction in the sexual relations of power is both realized and sustained by state policies and the industrial development of sex industries that commodify and exchange women.
In the context of these sexual relations of power—the privatized, sexualized location of women’s oppression—when women leave home—as runaways in Western countries, as migrants in the Third World, in the absence of feminist political