Foucault's Views of Sexual Repression

This paper is a critical examination and close read of a passage from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality - Volume I: An Introduction and a wider consideration of some of the issues raised within this seminal volume. In this particular passage, Foucault touches on many of what would become his central themes, including his contention that, within present society, sexual repression continues to be as powerful a force as it was during Victorian times. This is despite the impact of such influences as the work of Sigmund Freud who, rather than bringing sex out into the light again, instead helped society continue to contain the danger of sex while seeming to make it again a subject for open discussion. Foucault argues that sex which is restrained by the boundaries of scientific and intellectual consideration, rather than being allowed to take the natural place he contends it once enjoyed in popular society, remains repressed, bottled up, and constrained. This passage, as with much of the book as a whole, expresses his longing for "the good old days" of open discussion and frank action, before the time when colonialism and empire tried to keep the populace in its place.

In the beginning of what is still a revolutionary piece of writing, Foucault writes of the period before that of "we 'other Victorians,'" fondly recalling "a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children

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news anchorpersons to realize the ridiculousness of continuing to say, euphemistically, that she had cut off her husband's "male member" instead of his "penis." Hearing Dan Rather say "penis" on national television appeared to be a milestone in throwing off the yoke of repression - while Foucault would argue that instead this was merely another round of "whispering on a bed." In this passage, Foucault also reminds his reader of Freud's practice of having subjects undergoing psychoanalysis recline on a couch to talk through their repressions and fantasies. The couch has become a potent piece of furniture in the world of the other Victorians, serving everyone from the hypnotized and anesthetized couch potato (watching Dan Rather appear to make history) to the lascivious and duplicitous Hollywood producer with his infamous "casting couch." Foucault argues that this piece of livingroom furniture, rather than opening up the opportunities for sexual abandon, instead keeps genuinely human sexual expression "in that safest and most discrete of spaces, between the couch and discourse" - in other words, still sitting primly in the livingroom, talking about sex in clinical, dispassionate tones but not actually doing anything sexual.

Category: Psychology - F