Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Phil 014
2/2/2011
repression in history dating from the 17th Century until now is undeniable. He says that
it to deny this repression risks “falling into a sterile paradox” because it would go against
both our current discourses of sexual liberation as political liberation, and the historical
facts that sexuality has long been regarded as a sin, and that power is repressive.
However, Foucault here is playing the devil’s advocate. Within the first chapter he
breaks down these discourses, wondering why our discourses today are so concerned
with liberation from repression, and why contemporary society “has been loudly
realized that they are repressed and why we are talking about it so much.
He asks three questions about what he calls the “repressive hypothesis”: “Is
sexual repression truly an established historical fact?" "Are prohibition, censorship, and
denial truly the forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if not in every
society, most certainly in our own?" "Was there really a historical rupture between the
age of repression and the critical analysis of repression?"( Foucault, 10) Foucault wants
to know how repression structures discourses on sexuality, and also how discourses on
repression. His argument, finally, is that repression exists and has existed, but that rather
discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive
ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward." (18) Rather than
laughing at crude jokes, people during the repressive era were paying doctors to listen to
their outpourings about sexuality. There was "an institutional incitement to speak about
[sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power
to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly
scientists) by limiting where and when sex could be talked about. Since talking about sex
was censored in society and the home, the only outlet to speak of sex was to a religious
confessor or to a doctor. Foucault seemed to believe that there is an innate human need
to talk about sexuality, and if that it is censored from actions and public discourses, it will
Foucault believes that the repressive hypothesis is the reason that there is such
fervor for sexual discourse in the world today. Saying that sexual discourses and
sexuality have been repressed by authorities in the path gives sexual discourse a
importance, it is now talked about with almost a religious fervor. Foucault wants to show
how the belief in a sexually repressive system has incited people to talk more than ever
about sex. Repression also has created an idea of sex as integral to humanity and central
sexual action in order to make people talk about sex. This is the will to knowledge; as
people confess their sexual thoughts, doctors take note, thereby creating a Scientia
Sexualis. The repression of sex has forced sex into discourse in order to give authorities
an accurate lexicon with which to gauge the sexual behavior of their populations. One
practical use of the new sexual knowledge was that authorities could estimate population
growth. They could also intervene when “libertines” did not conform to the standards of
monogamous, heterosexual sex for reproduction. Foucault says that "one had to speak of
[sex] as of a thing to be not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into
systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function according to an
optimum. Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered."
(Foucault, 24)
I admire Foucault for questioning established beliefs. I agree with his main
argument that the idea of “sexuality” itself is a construct which appeared in discourses
that originated from repression. It seems to follow that the more a human characteristic is
repressed, the more it is thought and talked about, like a hungry person who talks and
different people, and is too broad a topic to be broached in a booklet, but there are ways
that Foucault could have broadened his treatment of the subject within a short space. His
view is narrow because he talks only of repression as something that comes about by
power struggles between authorities and society, and as something which could be
correctly understood given the correct circumstances. I believe that repression comes
about in a myriad of ways, and would exist even in a society without institutions. I also
sexuality. Perhaps what Foucault believes is an inability to talk about sex caused by
repression is actually an inability to talk about sex because the concept of it exceeds our
comprehension.
discourses that take place among society’s elite. By focusing on authorities, he ignores
the possibility of repression inflicted by “common man” on his neighbor, and the
ignores the discourses that are taking place in the street. American Sociologist John
Gagnon says of Foucault: “I think that the impulse to reduce things to texts, discourses, is
an error. Because what social life is really about is performances. It’s really people
performing in social spaces.”(Kimmel, 283) Gagnon suggests that “scripts” have more
power over humans than discourses. These scripts are learned while we are children, and
they are the scripts we follow through the rest of our life because it is easier to act a role
Each day, people succumb to pressures from others when they choose what to
wear, how to carry themselves, or what to eat. Do these pressures also come from
authorities? Do we decide to carry a brand name handbag because the Secretary of State
has a secret agenda to control the population? No, we do it because it gives us status in
the eyes of others. Therefore, couldn’t the way we choose to talk or not talk about our
they enjoy talking about and what they refuse to talk about; what they prefer to eat and
what they refuse to eat; claiming that these details made them better than other groups.
Also throughout history, certain groups have risen in popularity and certain groups have
fallen in popularity without ever necessitating a power struggle. As Coco Chanel said,
judges, and priests who have the power to control society, I would argue for a more fluid
distribution of power. Media and artwork also have a huge part in controlling society.
One artist (or patron)’s idea of beauty can influence how a whole society sees beauty.
Indeed, paintings of the beauty of the Virgin Mary influenced the perceptions of a
the contact that the Western world was beginning to make with other cultures at this point
in history. Foucault says that repression dates to the 16th century; this is the same
century that explorers are discovering the New World. Philosophers like Rousseau were
writing about the “noble savage” and Europeans were comparing their own sexuality to
that of other cultures for the first time. In order to dominate the new cultures, Europeans
had to assert their cultural superiority. One way of doing this was to assert that the native
sexuality was inferior to their sexuality. The pre-existing European “norm” of sexuality
(marriage between a man and a woman) was structured to become the rule. Europeans
denied that their sexuality was similar to that of the native peoples whom they were
subjecting. By doing this, they made the native peoples into an “other.”
Foucault might agree with this theory of the birth of repression. It fits into his
idea of sexuality used by power for repressing people groups. However, he never
mentions European meetings with non-Europeans. Although he gives his book the
limited to French 18th Century history, and some limited knowledge of the Ars Erotica
something that can be known and understood by the common man. I also believe that
sexuality is such a vast, uncharted topic, which varies so much in its interpretation, that it
would be impossible to ever “lift repression;” in other words, humans may never be able
to talk clearly and openly about sexuality in the same way that they may never be able to
proliferation of discourse and he questions the simplistic idea of sexual repression caused
by capitalist power struggles, in the end the point he makes is as simplistic as the one he
questions. He suggests that the authorities have repressed us in order to create more
discourse. I believe he needs to re-examine history in its totality and look deeper into
human nature before he can make such generalized and sweeping claims.
Works Cited:
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Print.