The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction Summary and Reviews

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
by Michel Foucault

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
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Book Summary Information

Author: Michel Foucault
Edition: Paperback
Audio: French (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1990-04-14
ISBN: 0679724699
Number of pages: 176
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780679724698
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Book Reviews of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction

Book Review: the confessions
Summary: 5 Stars

i saw a pretty woman in a nun's habit once and i had an overwhelming desire to have sexual relations with her, and i felt guilty thereafter for my desire in the same way i would feel guilty for desiring to have sexual relations with my mother. understandably, these were desires i wanted to keep secret, until I read freud and learned about the incest taboo put in place to control normal incestuous desires prevalent in most societies and cultures.

foucault credits freud for `placing sex at one of the critical points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the strategies of knowledge and power, how wonderfully effective he was ... in giving a new impetus to the secular injunction to study sex and transform it into discourse.'

a discourse foucault charts historically for a sexuality that functioned since the seventeenth century paradoxically as secret and a disclosure. even in the twenty first century when many people speak of sexuality they speak of repression and of the authorities in power in social institutions who do the repressing. foucault writes of a sexuality of obsession and how that obsession became discourse, first in the confessional booth of the catholic church where the confessor was urged to tell everything sexual and how later sexual confession was picked up by confessional writers, in particular the marquis de sade and the anonymous author of `my secret life'; and following was `a multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more ... toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex ... . sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered ... .'

it was administered in discussions for population control, the architecture of school space and sex education, and, within the family, as normative sexual relations -- and the sexual relations, outside the norm, were heard and discussed as perverse by mental institutional workers, and sexual transgressions were relegated to discourses of civil law. those in power had sexual knowledge, and the powerless had silence about sex, secrets about which they were incited to talk. once the secrets were revealed they could be corrected, regulated and proscribed.

something else about my own confession: a few days later I saw the woman in the nun's habit again, on stage as part of a theatre production.

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