Secondly, recognizing that the discourses surrounding sex that developed and in some cases were deployed over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries helps one to understand why "what is said about sex must not be analyzed simply as the surface of projection of these power mechanisms," because it is the actual discursive deployment themselves which embody the power mechanisms under discussion (Foucault 100). These discourses cannot help but to legitimize and reiterate the reigning power structure. The discourses of morality, science, and criticism utilized by the "family organization" in order to constrain and control an individual's sexuality simultaneously serve to define and support the family organization in the first place. This is a crucial contribution to the study of rhetoric and ideology, because it serves to demonstrate how rhetoric deployed in the service of ideology inherently works to buttress that ideology even as it expands and modifies it. Foucault demonstrates the necessity of constantly questioning any given and being aware of the often violent shifts discursive entities undergo by pointing out that these discursive entities are not simply the tools of power, but power itself.
When examining Foucault's summary of his description of the application of power in relation to sex via a kind of discursive multiplication and the key theoretical guides one must be aware of in performing this description, it becomes possible to see the important contributions Foucault...
Foucault's theory reveals two key facets regarding the "power-knowledge" that is utilized and reiterated in the deployment of a kind of discursive weapon. First, he productively describes the ideologically informed deployment of discourse by acknowledging the evolutionary changes discourse undergoes. Secondly, Foucault reveals how every specific discourse instigated by the deployment of discourse in the service of power ultimately simultaneously serves to legitimize and obscure that power. Both of these details remain important considerations for anyone investigating rhetoric, ideology, or the society-wide ways in which language and discussion is used to control the physical world.
Works Cited
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Shepherdson, Charles. "History and the Real: Foucault with Lacan." Postmodern Culture. 5.2
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