Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality

“Ars erotica” (China, Japan, India and the Roman Empire); sex as art and experience of pleasure

“scientia sexualis” (Western); the confession as the urge to talk about it, a fixation with finding out the “truth” about sexuality arises:

“We have since become an extraordinarily confessing society. Confession has spread its effects far and wide: in the judicial system, in medicine, in pedagogy, in familial relations, in amorous relationships, in everyday life and in the most solemn rituals; crimes are confessed, sins are confessed, thoughts and desires are confessed, one’s past and one’s dreams are confessed, one’s childhood is confessed; one’s diseases and problems are confessed;…”

* psychoanalysis as a legitimization of sexual confession
* sexuality is no longer just something people hide, but it is also hidden
from themselves
* confessing as “coming out”
* trying to contain it –making it sinful– made it a societal obsession
* POWER and sexuality: power relation (in difference)
* social control over the normal: where traits become groups (perverse/perverts), so instead of what someone does, it became what someone is.

“The homosexual of the 19th century became a person: a”past, a history and an adolescence, a personality, a life style; also a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mystical physiology. Nothing of his full personality escapes his sexuality.”

* body of women and hysteria
* sexuality of children
* reproductive rights
* adult sexuality (health and procreation)
* protect purity of race

“What are these strategies about? A struggle against sexuality? Or an attempt to control it? … Actually, it is rather the production of sexuality. It should not be conceived of as a distinction founded in nature that power attempts to subdue, or as
a dark domain that knowledge attempts to gradually uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical measure…”

* homosexuality has a specific socio-historical context
* sexuality as a social construction