Home > Topic > the power relation
1 " Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meantto invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a “darkcontinent” to penetrate and to “pacify.” (We know what “pacify” means in terms ofscotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they’ve madehaste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man hasof getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for hisown, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understandhow man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, mightfeel resentment and fear of being “taken” by the woman, of being lost in her,absorbed, or alone. "
― Hélène Cixous , The Laugh of the Medusa
2 " [T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event. "
― Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
