"In sum, the family served as a setting or apparatus for producing sex variants, due to either hereditary or socioenvironmental conditions of improper gender identification.” (Jennifer Terry. 1995. Anxious Slippages between “Us” and “Them”: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies. In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture. Terry, Jennifer and Jacqueline Urla, eds. Pp. 149. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.)
“Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp…” (Michel Foucault. 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Pp. 105. New York: Vintage Books.)
In Foucault's "The History of Sexuality", he asserts that the role of the family (or "deployment of alliance") to be the "anchor" and "permanent support" for the "deployment of sexuality" (Foucault 1978:108). In a sense, it is through the family that knowledge of the body (or relations of power through the body) can be (re)produced. Foucault maintains that "deployment of sexuality" (or knowledge of the "sensations of the body" among other things) has been rooted in the family. (The family constructs the body and its sexuality.) Through this "deployment of sexuality", however, there has been misappropriation of the role of the family and its workings on the body. On the one hand, Terry (1995) describes the paradoxical scientific investigations of the 19th and early 20th Century "sexually variant" bodies. The body was situated, on the one hand, in the 'biological/natural' and deviances could be exposed through examination meanwhile constructing the family as the producer of the variance. In a similar fashion, the GOP ad proclaiming the Democratic party as the enemy of the 'family' situates the family in a privileged 'natural' role. The ad implies that the "deployment of sexuality" will obliterate the "deployment of alliance" meanwhile failing to recognize their obligatory loci in relations of power. In another way, the Simpsons still and the David Lachappelle photo of Curt Cobain and Courtney Love attempt to subvert the placement of sexuality and family as a "natural given" and instead expose the deployment of family and sexuality as historical constructions.
