Foucault on the Bus

It's very easy (too easy? it's not exactly a scientific survey if you're only looking for positive evidence) to find "Foucauldian" phenomena in the newspapers. Last week we connected issues from Foucault's idea of bio-politics and "Body of the Condemned" essay to the coverage of Saddam Hussein's hanging and the "death of citizenship" in Guantanamo Bay.

But I had a more banal Foucauldian moment this week that was a throwback to our first topic, looking at the knowledge/power regimes surrounding the practice of confession in our society, and specifically the confession of sexual details.

I've been picking up the free daily Redeye newspaper, and last week they had an article on the hoary old issue of whether you should tell someone you're intimate with the number of previous sexual partners you've had.

There's a lot that's Foucauldian about this even when the issue is just treated as one of social/personal etiquette: the value of honesty in this regard tends to be treated as either an end in itself when it comes to intimate relationships, or as part of a healthy relationship to the self - ie. to be comfortable with yourself is to be comfortable with your sexual past is to be comfortable with disclosing it.

But the connection didn't occur to me until I was reading the numerous letters that responded to the article on Monday, the most strident of which was from an individual who had worked with an HIV/AIDS program for the last 5 years and who argued the necessity of disclosure of sexual history on sexual health safety grounds (this had also been briefly raised in the original article).

Now, I should preface this by saying I risk betraying my 'foreignness' in the delicate area of sexual etiquette, but "where I come from" (not just Australia, but a subset defined by age, education, location etc.), sexual health safety is about a) using condoms and b) getting tested regularly for STDs, and thus the pertinent question to ask a prospective sexual partner is a) "Where is the condom?" and b) "Been tested recently?".

Asking about number of sexual partners struck me as a singularly indirect, unreliable and - as the rest of the discussion made clear - "subjectifying" line of inquiry if what one is actually interested in is the presence or absence of disease. An im-pertinent question.