Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes CHLOË TAYLOR In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that imprisonment produces delinquency or inculcates criminal identities in prisoners. This situation would be exacerbated, for Foucault, in the case of sex offenders, given his argument in The History of Sexuality that sexuality has been constructed as the key to identity in the modern West. Convicted sex offenders will today be constructed to re-offend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which they are inculcated in the prison system, and second in virtue of how their sexual offense is taken up as identity through psychological discourses. Foucault himself considers the sex criminal in several places: first, in his discussion of Charles Jouy in a lecture from 1975, collected in the volume Abnormal; second, in his discussion of Jouy's case included in The History of Sexuality in 1976; third, in a round-table discussion in 1977, where he contemplated the idea that rapists should be punished only for a crime of violence, and not for a sex crime; and finally at a 1978 press conference where he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Beginning with Monique Plaza's response in 1978, feminists were quick to criticize Foucault's proposals regarding rape and sex with minors, and have done so consistently in the decades that followed. Other than this series of feminist responses rejecting Foucault's suggestions for legislative reform, there has been little Foucauldian scholarship on the topic of sex crimes.1 This is surprising given that Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality are arguably Foucault's two most influential works, and that the body of the sex offender is the site where these two studies meet. Hypatia vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall, 2009) @ by Hypatia, Inc.
2 Hypatia In the first section of this paper, I discuss the feminist literature on rape as well as the inadvertent impact of the feminist anti-rape movement on the expansion of the carceral system. In the next section I consider the ways that Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality may be read together to contemplate the topic of the sex offender from a Foucauldian perspective. This will help us to understand the motivations behind Foucault's proposals for legislative reform and the need to think of alternatives to current methods of treating sex offenders. I then provide an account of the culture of rape in the Renaissance West in order to show the novelty and contingency of our current view of sex crimes. This discussion functions as a