Beyond master and slave: Reconciling our fears of power in the writing classroom

Dennis Lynch; Stephen Jukuri

doi:10.1080/07350199809389096

Rhetoric Review Mar 1998

Beyond master and slave: Reconciling our fears of power in the writing classroom

Dennis Lynch ; Stephen Jukuri Michigan Technological University

Abstract

In Volume Two of History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault describes how the Greeks managed relations of affection between men and boys, a particularly complex task for them, given that young Greek men were in training to be free and equal citizens to the grown men who would court them.' Even while such relations were generally accepted, they still were very problematic, for both parties needed to know how to conduct themselves so as to maintain their autonomous status. To those ends this problematic generated a great deal of concerned discourse, a discourse invested with values, imperatives, demands, rules, advice, and exhortations that were as numerous as they were emphatic and singular (192). Seemingly unresolvable contradictions are good fuel for discourse, and the idea of sexual relations between autonomous (or autonomous-to-be) Greek free men was contradictory because, as Foucault hypothesizes, sexual relations for them had a distinct form and shape roughly parallel to public relations: Sexual partners could play only a dominant or a subordinate role, just as in matters of the public, some men were free citizens and all others-children, wives, and slaves-were subordinate to them. So, unlike other relationships where sexual roles were easily made consonant with social ones, sexual relations between free men and freeborn adolescent males contained a very troubling inconsistency. Given the almost fetishistic attention young men received, one was naturally expected to love and desire them sexually, but as the discourse reveals, both parties had somehow to allow for the ability of those young men to enter into what could only be understood as a submissive role even as they developed their ability to choose, act, and exercise power as free men: In the case of marriage . . . the essential question concerned the moderation that needed to be shown in exercising power. In the case of the relationship with boys, the ethics of pleasures would have to bring into play-across age differences-subtle strategies that would make allowance for the other's freedom, his ability to refuse, and his required consent. (The History of Sexuality Volume

Journal: Rhetoric Review
Published: 1998-03-01
DOI: 10.1080/07350199809389096
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Topics: discourse analysis writing pedagogy
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Beyond master and slave: Reconciling our fears of power in the writing classroom

Abstract

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References (40) · 4 in this index

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