Sexuality and Power

The strategies of social control that seek to control aspects of female sexuality and gender identity through a notion of normality are strategies that are produced and identifiable within the transformative narrative of an independent nation-state. However, these normalizing discourses and disciplinary strategies are challenged by women who internalize, reproduce, and challenge these strategies of social control.. The discourse of sexuality fashions individuals into genders and creates divisions to enforce order. Any sort of a resistance or transgression is contained by fashioning the transgressors through an act of normalization. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces. The narrative of sexuality affirms itself as a political act when it reinforces the power of the periphery to subvert the power of the center. Repression is not monolithic, and that sexual norms and public life are closely interrelated. The shame that keeps women under a male system of control results in creating the tension between power and subversion. The code of Shame, which the patriarchal discourse produces as the code of normalization, controls the transgressive code of Shamelessness. However it is not the power of patriarchy by itself that successfully controls ‘Shameless’ women, but rather it is the discourse of female sexuality which by virtue of its submission to honor as the code of normalization that permits the existence of the power of patriarchy. Moreover power of patriarchy can exist only in relation to subversion because the Shame a woman feels pertains not only to her sense of honor but also to the family honor which in turn includes the honor and thereby the Shame of the male members.The nation-state can produce hegemonic narratives of sexuality and reinforce normalizing and regulating codes of sexuality through state sponsored sex education materials. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces.