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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 ôthe good old daysö 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 ôwe 'other Victorians,Æö fondly recalling ôa time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of adultsö (3). He contends that, sometime during the early seventeenth century, something horrible began to creep into society, something that put an end to this free and liberated period, something that came to be known as the Victorian era.

When the Victorian period ended and the age of sexual liberation began to dawn, Foucault argues that the result was not a return to sexual freedom but something much more insidious. ...

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Foucault's Views of Sexual Repression. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:03, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701591.html