Prazer sexual? Tensões e desigualdades genderizadas

Foucault famously spoke of pleasure as resistance, not because he considered this theme new, but, on the contrary, because he knew it had been relegated and forgotten, centered around a concern with desire—the idea of sexuality governed by orientations is, essentially, the idea of desire as the fundamental matrix for understanding what sexuality is. If this "capture" by the "instances of normalization" is evident and visible in desire ("tell me what your desire is and I will tell you who you are" (Foucault, 2015, p. 7)), the same is not true for pleasure or, at least, not in the same way. When Krafft-Ebing categorized different behaviors and desires, he was not trying to classify different types of pleasure; when Masters and Johnson analyzed the human sexual response, neither were they (Krafft-Ebing, 2011). The tradition of scientia sexualis (that is, the beginning of the application of scientific processes to the study of sex), which began in the 18th century, had little to say about pleasure itself (though it did not ignore it, see the prohibition and exhortation against child masturbation), but much to say about desire (Foucault, 1994a)—thus positioning pleasure as a potential form of resistance against the regimentation of the latter.