Foucault's nostalgia?

One of the students in my Foucault class yesterday called Jouy (from the notorious pages 31-32 of the English version of History of Sexuality, Vol 1) "the first child molestor." I agreed with that, insofar as, roughly speaking, Foucault claims that something like an ancestor of our category of "child molestor" was formed at that time, as the sexuality of children and "abnormals" like Jouy becomes the focus of intensified power / knowledge practices. But prior to that, Foucault would have us believe, no one really cared about the sort of thing that went on in the incident Foucault presents in HS1. 

Two points are relevant here.

First, some people have interpreted Foucault as being nostalgiac for the "earlier, simpler time." I think there's something to that, at least in the HS1 passage with its notorious choice of "pettiness" to describe the incident. But if that holds here, it's a departure from Foucault's principles, which require him to stay neutral and analytical about the transformations of power / knowledge practices. But as that neutrality makes him resist progress narratives ("we moderns are better than those monsters back then") it can make it seem that he prefers the earlier periods (of sovereign power / punishment or of more relaxed and open Renaissance sexuality). 

Second, however, and disturbingly, the incident Foucault describes in HS1 is not the full story, as Foucault himself shows in his lecture course "Abnormal," from 1974-75. Jana Sawicki has an excellent treatment of the issues in her NDPR review of the published course. I quote extensively: 

[T]he more Foucault says about the details of the case, the more disturbing evidence one finds of gender-bias in his reading of the case. As it turns out, there were two incidents with Jouy and the girl, Sophie Adams, not one. The first is the exchange of money for masturbation in the company of a second girl who refuses an offer to do the same. After this incident the girl reportedly boasts about it to a peasant leaving the fields. The second Foucault recounts as follows:

[O]nly a bit later, the day of the festival, Jouy dragged young Sophie Adams (unless it was Sophie Adam who dragged Charles Jouy) into the ditch alongside the road to Nancy. There, something happened: almost rape, perhaps. Anyway, Jouy very decently gives four sous to the little girl who immediately runs to the fair to buy some roasted almonds." (A, 293)

Foucault cites the experts to confirm that the exchange of money by adolescent boys for sexual favors from girls was a regular feature of the social landscape in the village at this time. Jouy was a man of forty, but one whom adult women couldn't take seriously. Foucault concludes: "We have here a village infantile sexuality of the open air, the side of the road, and the undergrowth that legal medicine is cheerfully psychiatrizing." (A, 295) Interestingly, Foucault notes that the villagers also recommend that Sophie be sent to a house of correction for her "bad tendencies." (A, 295)

Foucault's own tendency to dismiss the incidents as "inconsequential" coupled with his repeated suggestions that perhaps Jouy was the victim of Sophie, that her previous sexual liaisons with adolescent boys on the edge of the fields, and that the fact that she appeared not to mind (after all, she didn't tell anyone about the alleged rape) might explain--even justify--the incident smacks of masculinist incredulity about the seriousness and reality of rape. 

It's troubling that Foucault suppresses the second incident in his reference to the case in History of Sexuality, Volume 1 since doing so stacks the deck in favor of his claim that these bucolic pleasures were indeed inconsequential. Sure, it's possible that Sophie was not raped, that she was instead merely prostituting herself. But it's also possible that she was raped. And if we are inclined to be just as disturbed about that, might we be more inclined to think that some sort of intervention would have been appropriate?

Should we conclude from this insensitivity that Foucault regards these bucolic pleasures as genuinely innocent? Is exposing the mechanisms and strategies of this new form of power/knowledge tantamount to claiming that the sexual lives of adolescents were fine before such protective and corrective measures were introduced? That neither Sophie Adams nor Jouy needed protection, correction, or guidance? That Jouy was harmless? Foucault's rhetoric suggests that he might be inclined to say "yes." Is it possible that with more feminist sensitivity he would have been more inclined to say what I wish he had said either, "It's not entirely clear," or nothing at all about the banality of moment before Jouy is rendered pathological? 

The genealogical function of this case is to highlight a transformation in the discursive practices concerning abnormality, a transformation that marks the emergence of an intensification of the interest in infantile sexuality and abnormal sexual tendencies and of policing sexually dangerous behavior. Foucault is in effect historicizing our present practice of being preoccupied with the psycho-sexual development of children. To appeal to present concerns about Sophie's choices, about the effect on her sexual and personal development of exchanging sexual caresses for money, even being raped, would be to beg one of the questions Foucault is raising. 

Perhaps these bucolic pleasures were more pleasurable, or at least less damaging, before they became the intense focus of this particular normalizing power/knowledge. Yet Foucault doesn't feel compelled to address Sophie's fate at all. Jouy is the victim in his story. And this failure to address her fate, coupled with his suspicion that Sophie was in some sense not even rapeable, undermines the critical effect of his own discourse on abnormality.

After all, the point of genealogy is not to endorse the past, but to interrogate the present.  Abnormal does make a compelling case that practices of confinement, medico-legal judgment, and sexual normalization have been constituted within struggles for scientific power and control that are not self-evidently progressive, but it also reminds us at points of the need for a genealogy of the genealogist.