The History of Sexuality: Volume 1

“My aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function.”

In this passage, Foucault outlines his purpose—to dissect the relationship between Sex and Power. He is interested in how Western society holds two truths: the promotion of sexual silence and the expansive discourse born from it. This forms the heart of Foucault’s argument against the repressive hypothesis. Rather than repress, power produces. The knowledge-power relationship requires continuous discussion.

“The object, in short, is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world.”

The elements of this triad—power, knowledge, and pleasure—work together and are intrinsic. Foucault suggests that one cannot be separated from the other. Power is supported by knowledge and driven by pleasure, but both knowledge and pleasure need power to subsist.

“The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois societies, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more difficult and more costly.”

One element of Foucault’s argument concerning The Myth of Repression is that he does not deny that the bourgeoisie sparked a cultural shift toward silence and limitation. The philosopher recognizes that repression was the aim of the religious bourgeois—as well as control—and that this was accomplished by creating a restrictive definition of acceptable sexual behavior. However, Foucault makes it clear that this is only one element of a complicated system of power relationships.

“More important was the 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; 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 accumulated detail.”

In this passage, the reader is introduced to Foucault’s thesis that power, even that which may appear to be repressive, produces discourse. To control sex, institutions needed a vast amount of information, and they needed people to be willing to share their innermost sexual desires and thoughts. Sex needed to be critiqued and monitored on a microscopic level. The confessional and the doctor’s office were spaces where this discourse could flourish.

“Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a ‘people,’ but with a ‘population,’ with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.”

Foucault shows how the various institutions and relationships form a tapestry of power. One of these institutions is the government. A concern with population placed pressure on the marital bed to focus singularly on reproduction. This created an opportunity for the medical field to establish rules about healthy and unhealthy sexual practices, classifying the latter as perversions. Societal norms arise as multiple centers of power exert influence over one another. The Effects of Societal Norms include sweeping cultural shifts and legislation, as well as minute changes to the insular family unit.

“What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”

Foucault argues that before the Victorian age, sex was barely discussed—especially when compared to the expansive discourse of the modern age. Sex was natural and normal. It was unremarkable. The desire to repress sex is also what transformed into a site of immense cultural power. The philosopher argues that the last four hundred years developed the concept of sexuality, a term that did not exist beforehand.

“But medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of ‘incomplete’ sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of ‘development’ and instinctual ‘disturbances’; and it undertook to manage them.”

This quotation provides another example of the relationship between power and the home. The medicalization of sex brought power into the home and pathologized pleasure. Sex was clinical. Healthy sex was about reproduction; unhealthy sex was about desire. This is an example of the pervasive nature of power. Rather than a theory of power in which the medical field is placed at the top of a hierarchy exerting influence over the family unit, Foucault argues that the two coincide with one another. Each influences the other to form cultural attitudes about sex and sexuality.

“The power which thus took charge of sexuality set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled moments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace.”

This poetic statement emphasizes the power-knowledge relationship. Power needs knowledge to survive. It must understand what it is controlling and how best to rule it. Foucault suggests that this controlling gaze tied a knot between Sex and Power that could not be untied. Sexual encounters became dramatizations of power relationships.

“In the name of a biological and historical urgency it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon. It grounded them in ‘truth.’”

Here, Foucault shows another example of how power manifests within various organizations and systems to support societal norms. The capital advantages of racism established a framework for historians and medical practitioners to develop biased theories about race that placed the white population in a position of total power. Foucault compares this enactment of power to the identical treatment of sex and peripheral sexualities.

“This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age-old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses.”

Power is rarely concerned with truth. It is only ever interested in that which will allow it to expand. For Foucault, power is like a monster with an insatiable hunger. If it is not growing, it is dying. Truth stands in the way of its longevity. Therefore, it creates systems that cast doubt over truth or conceal it entirely. One way it does this is through the expansion of discourse. The more power can divide sex and sexuality into minute parts, for example, the more people will believe that it is offering truth. This technique draws attention to details rather than the sweeping influence of power.

“The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth.”

In this passage, Foucault begins to spell out his theories about the power-knowledge relationship. The aim of uncovering the truth about sex was driven by power-knowledge. Foucault argues that the goal of rooting out the truth of sex was an invention of the 19th century. Prior to this period, sex was never about truth or lies; it simply was. This is an example of the shifting influence of Sex and Power.

“One has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization—repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking—are speaking to us of freedom.”

One of the myths of Sex and Power is that there is freedom in the discourse on sex. The more it is talked about, the more liberated it becomes. This is part of the deceptive and compelling nature of power. While power elicits information through confession and the medicalization of sex, it is expanding its influence. People believe they are being taken care of. Doctors treat them. Priests absolve them. They feel lighter for eradicating what they believe to be sexual perversions. Foucault argues that this is not freedom. It is the hologram of liberation that only power offers.

“Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness.”

Another reason the relationship between Sex and Power is not about freedom is power’s obstruction to intimacy. The continuous need to know the truth of something stands between partners; they are unable to submit to pleasure and desire because they are more concerned with what is right or acceptable.

“Where there is desire, the power relation is already present.”

Foucault argues that Sex and Power have become so intrinsically connected that they cannot be separated. Wherever sexual desire appears, power is there. He suggests that intimate relationships have become their own form of power relationships.

“The cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not go near, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and secrecy.”

This passage represents one idea presented by The Myth of Repression. The repressive hypothesis is dependent upon prohibition. This model of power asserts that humans are best left unconnected from one another and that the easiest way to exert control over someone is by separating them from others. Foucault suggests that this is a mirage of power. It pretends to repress while producing vast amounts of discourse and developing complex relationships that ultimately expand the field within which power exerts itself.

“Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”

Another principle of the repressive hypothesis is that power is enacted from the top down. This version of power suggests that those holding hierarchical control—specifically governments or rulers—enact power upon those below them. Foucault argues that this is only one type of power relationship in a tapestry of power relationships. Foucault’s theory is interesting when considered within the context of the 20th century in which he lived. While Foucault watched totalitarian regimes attempt to exert total control over their populations, he also saw how power functioned in many ways and at many levels, all coming together to form societal norms.

“Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.”

Foucault suggests that a model of power that only uses repression is too weak. The repressive hypothesis would almost certainly lead to rebellion. Proponents of the repressive hypothesis believe that the expansion of sexuality, especially in the 20th century, is a rebellious reaction to the oppressive nature of power. Foucault argues, however, that sexual liberation and sexual repression are two parts of the same enactment of power.

“Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality.”

The irony of sexuality is that which is the most intimate or private makes excellent fodder for power. One may assume that the private nature of sex makes it difficult to manage, but this quotation asserts that it is incredibly useful to power. The relationship between Sex and Power is so strong that Foucault suggests they cannot be severed from one another.

“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.”

One of Foucault’s unique assertions is that sexuality is a construct. He suggests that sexuality did not exist before the Victorian age. The discourse that emerged from a seemingly repressive power refined the terms for sexualities. Foucault’s own sexual history lends another element of context to this argument. The philosopher was openly gay during a time when his sexuality was not widely accepted. This passage reveals his belief that his sexuality—if viewed through an earlier historical lens—would have been a mere factor of his preferences. Contemporary bio-power, however, deems it a singular entity.

“Then these new personages made their appearance: the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother—or worse, the mother beset—by murderous obsessions—the impotent, sadistic, perverse husband, the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child, and the young homosexual who rejects marriage or neglects his wife.”

In this passage, Foucault explores how bio-power first appeared in the aristocratic class. The medicalization of sex was a tool to ensure the longevity and survival of the upper caste. The outcome of this was the creation of sexual stereotypes. The concept of female hysteria began in the wealthy class and slowly spread to all other portions of society. The outcome of this was the development of societal norms. Anyone who did not adhere to the “healthy” regimen of reproductive sex was an outlier who must be treated.

“The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures if one tries to center it on mechanisms of repression.”

Foucault defines the two ruptures mentioned in this quote as the puritanical repression of sex in the Victorian age and the sexual liberation of the 20th century. However, he argues that both are enactments of the same mechanism of power.

“The bourgeoisie began by considering that its own sex was something important, a fragile treasure, a secret that had to be discovered at all costs.”

Foucault reveals how the control of sex was used for advancement. The upper class used the medicalization of sex to guarantee its advancement. This contributes to the idea that power multiplies rather than limits. By monitoring and defining sex, power then produced capital wealth.

“Power in this instance was essential a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.”

In the last chapter, Foucault connects the relationship between Sex and Power with a larger narrative of sovereign rule. He shows how rulers in the past used death to increase and maintain their power, whereas the modern age refocused power on life. Seizure was mechanism of power, and the seizure of the body is indicated through the development of various fields for its observation, extraction, and treatment.