"Aesthetic Disclosure": An Educator Reimagines Confession‪.‬

By now Michel Foucault's formulations about sexuality--the discursive constructions of sex--are well known. Yet, despite the fact that confession figures prominently in his genealogy about the manufacture and normalization of "natural" sexual identities, his theory of confession has received far less rigorous study. It generally is conceded that Foucault's problematization of confession has offered valuable insights as to the inherent dangers arising from the power relationships that imbue confessional institutions and techniques, an assessment with which I concur. Certainly, his analyses have challenged Western society's unexamined assumptions about the curative and liberatory properties of confession. However, in this article I argue that Foucault's apparent oblivion about the effects of gender in confessional discourse hides flaws in his confessional theory. When gender is taken into account, several of his conclusions warrant skepticism. I contend that Foucault's confessional theory begs attention since it serves as the cornice piece of his panoptic vision of domination that implicates not only religion, psychiatry, medicine, and jurisprudence, but also education. The need to reexamine his claims, charges, and conclusions is not solely a philosophical concern, but a practical issue facing teachers in schools and universities, community centers and religious institutions. Therefore, in this article I suggest that educators must think about confession in ways that avoid both the pitfalls uncovered by Foucault's deconstructive analysis and the gendered consequences that his patriarchal perspective failed to reveal. To that end, I will conceptualize "aesthetic disclosure," a gender-sensitive approach for dealing with students' self-revelations that subverts the power relations exposed in Foucault's confessional theory and offers opportunities for rhetorical agency and artistic self-fashioning.