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The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction |  | Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
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Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 10348
Media: Paperback
Pages: 176
Number Of Items: 1
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Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 0679724699
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.7
EAN: 9780679724698
ASIN: 0679724699
Publication Date: April 14, 1990
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Product Description
The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
 the confessions July 27, 2009
Case Quarter (CT USA)
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.
 The History of Sexuality an Introduction by Michael Foucault May 11, 2009
B. VanBergen (Pleasant Prairie, WI)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The History of Sexuality" by Michael Foucault was a very good book. It is a very confusing book. I was assigned this book for my LGBT studies book in college and it was even difficult to understand for most of my class. Michael definitely crosses the line into some topics that some authors would not even consider to go into. The chapter about The Repressive Hypothesis was very interesting to me since I am a psychology major; it was neat to correlate both of my classes to this book by Michael Foucault. I would definitely recommend this book, if you would like to be challenged but are definitely ready for a good read!
Foucault - the smart kid who doesn't do homework February 21, 2009
Mike (NYC)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
More like a 3.5 if that was an option. Part of me hates rating this book so low, but I really have to. Here's why.
I love and hate Foucault more than just about any other philosopher. He is probably the pre-eminent French philosopher of his generation. The problem is that he is probably also the worst French historian of all time.
Foucault certainly has his moments and he's consistently entertaining (he's a very good writer and judging from his lectures, a great lecturer), but underneath it all, he's fundamentally lazy - he never does research studies or clinical work, he never looks outside France, he uses translations and secondary sources when he should be using original texts, he cites literature as if it is representative of the masses in the society in which it was written. Yet his writing is so confident, and his ideas so interesting and self-assured people believe him without checking his sources or his historical assertions.
He reminds me of the student I always have in my class who comes up with the best ideas but is unwilling to follow them through. The B student that should be an A+ student. He doesn't do homework, he doesn't show his work. I have to give them split grades. I'd give Foucault a split grade if I could - Ideas 5/5. Reasoning and Research 2/5.
In Foucault's case, he didn't do research outside France, he didn't reference or respond to contemporary History of Ideas works on Sexuality (e.g. Otto Kiefer's Sexuality in Rome and Greece, Van Gulick's Sexuality in Ancient China), he failed to develop a basic understanding of medicine, he cherrypicked texts that suited his arguments and failed to consider opposing arguments, and his Greek and Latin leave something to be desired.
His concept of the "repressive hypothesis" in this book is extremely interesting and well-reasoned (apart from the historical examples). His notion of biopower is also fairly intriguing, though not fleshed out in sufficient detail here (Psychiatric Power has more on it), and seems to be a kind of extension of the Hegelian for-itself (which is conceived in terms of relationships). He also very briefly, mentions third sex/intersexed individuals, which became a jumping off point for a lot of queer theory. Buyer beware - if you're looking for queer theory, it's only about a page or two, so you'll probably be disappointed.
Here's the real problem with this book - the examples, the historical scholarship. Foucault, determined as he is to prove (like Nietzsche did quite a bit more convinvingly in Beyond Good and Evil) the lack of foundation of contemporary morality bends the truth and fails to see things that are very obvious to medical professionals and more objective historians.
Case in point:
In a passage (31) and elsewhere in references to Ancient Greece, Foucault more or less writes an apologia for pedophilia. There is a problem though with all this - the unstated biological injunction. As someone who was an EMT - I can tell you something that should be obvious to someone as smart as Foucault, but wasn't - apart from normative moral concerns (which wouldn't concern an anti-foundationalist) - sexual intercourse with children physically and biologically injures them. I won't go into the gory details. If they're young enough, it could kill them. There's also the way young people respond to STD's. Sometimes, that's different, too.
Even if you completely dispense with normative morality and enact purely utilitarian laws based upon simply minimizing biological damage or instead engage in a minarchical system with protective services, this would still be largely prohibited either by law or contracted mutual assent.
In addition, Foucault does not understand biology very well and often uses outdated medical references like Pinel to represent current medical practice. The thing is Foucault is clever about it. It's a straw man, but it's a clever straw man, because he cites Pinel in a historical context and later as a means of (falsely) explaining the contemporary. Either that, or he just doesn't get medicine all that well.
Then there's Christianity. Oh, God, is Foucault ever wrong on this frontier. He even claims (117) the first treatise on sin was written in the 15th century. Off the top of my head, there are writings on sin as early as Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century (and perhaps earlier). You're ten centuries off, Foucault! That kind of oversight borders on ridiculous. How no one else has picked up on that baffles me.
I'd definitely read this book, but read it critically. It's not as inept in the scholastic sense as Madness and Civilization (which famously contains references to the non-existent Ship of Fools) but some of the scholarship is abysmal.
The French/Greco-Roman focus is a tad trying too, especially considering the wealth of available laws of quite a number of other major civilizations, which Foucault overlooks, presumably because they have male to male sodomy prohibitions which problematize his central arguments, or because of his obvious ignorance of other languages.
If this sounds overly negative, bear in mind - I like this book, and wholeheartedly recommend purchasing it. Just take it with a grain of salt. It has some extraordinarily interesting ideas, but alas, when I see it, I see what could have been if the author was more disciplined in his approach. If there wasn't so much there that was good, I wouldn't be nearly as upset by Foucault's sloppy scholarship.
 Foucault's Pendulum of Human Sexuality December 18, 2008
Medusa (Troy, MI)
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
In "the History of Sexuality", Foucault tried to use Nietzsche's genealogical approach that views concepts as changing constantly to fit the needs and provocations over time. Nietzsche used the genealogical approach gracefully in Beyond Good and Evil, and though I'm not completely convinced his ideas are correct; the gracefulness of his argument, and his personal experience with the chaotic political and moral nature of the European society he reacted to, form a compelling argument for his genealogical theory.
Foucault mocked Nietzsche's approach but prematurely formulated his "repressive hypothesis" of thinking by which concepts result from the inexorable avalanche of history, and that sexuality has been repressed throughout our political history, therefore the only way to political liberation is sexual liberation.
A side note: Foucault's "The History of Sexuality" is one of the basic justifications for the queer theory that proclaims the intersection between politics, sexuality, and gender. The whole normals vs. abnormal arguments are pointless and vague, as no one can tell what is normal or abnormal in the world. The arguments presented make no sense to me, are too relativist and do not rely on any scientific reason. It is a world devoid of absolutes where we must assume that anything and everything is permissible. This queer thinking recalls my college years, when I was irritated by new societies such as "The Society of Women Engineers" and the "The Society of Black Engineers". Next we will have" The Society of Queer Engineers" and "The Society of Tall Engineers'. What happened to treating humans as humans, who share life regardless of their gender, color or physical appearance? How can we ask for equality between genders when we defeat the whole purpose by being feminists or some other separate group?
Back to "The History of Sexuality", Foucault reviews history to find out why our sexuality became the key to unlocking the truth about us, and arrives at the relationship sex has with power and knowledge. Foucault traces the emergence of sexuality to the seventeenth century, when the Christian emphasis on sins of the flesh led to an increasing awareness of sexuality in family relations. His road to the genesis of human sexuality ends with the bourgeois of the nineteenth century, who effectively invented what we think of as "sexuality," and used it as a way of protecting and separating themselves from the other groups. Foucault acknowledges that sex is not our essence, but rather it is a social construct that makes it easier to control humans. Here Foucault didn't provide any definite prove to his theory. It even sounds more convincing that the opposite is the truth: Sex and all its biological drives are an essential part of our nature and, therefore, it makes us more susceptible to control.
The point Foucault tried to make in many lengthy ways is that how we understand certain concepts has a lot to do with what other concepts we link them to, and in this thought construct, sexuality is not a concept as much as means of linking concepts to each other. Foucault strong, initial argument that our sexual desires or behaviors themselves do not express profound truths about us, rather it is the discourse we have built up around those desires and behaviors that suggest the profound truth. These discourses are not fixed and changeable with time and needs. The growing importance of sexuality in our society reflects the fact that we have found more and more concepts that we can connect through sexuality, and in this way the "deployment of sexuality" is the way that we use sexuality to join different concepts. The history of sexuality is a history of class dominance, where sexuality is a social construct that can be used to link power and knowledge to sex in a variety of different ways.
Finally, Foucault arrives at the conclusion that human life (and its aspects including sexuality) throughout history came to fall under the control of politics, where "bio power" or the new power over life controls life through the discipline of the body and through the regulation of population. It's beyond me how Foucault arrived at this conclusion while discussing how wars got fiercer than ever, how the death penalty became a safeguard not an act of destruction, and how power seems now to control life and population.
I suspect that Foucault, through his arguments, wanted to weaken the concept of sexuality. By simply calling it a social construction, he will weaken the political powers themselves. I also suspect by the way that Foucault identified the four centers that have power and knowledge related to sex(hysterization of women's bodies, pedagogization of children's sex, socialization of procreative behavior, and psychiatrization of perverse pleasure) that he was trying to differentiate by what is socially considered a normal behavior and what is not. This is again a losing argument since it's purely a personal way of looking at things.
As a big fan of Nietzsche (his method of debate not his actual ideas), I don't think that Foucault even came close to Nietzsche's genealogical approach. Foucault took a very exciting topic and managed to destroy his argument with a lengthy complicated delivery, the biggest problem with some philosophers is that they are trying so hard to be original that they overlook the obvious or they wrap it up in such a complex knot you can't possibly untie it. .
At the Bottom of Everything Lies the Struggle for Power October 26, 2008
Martin Asiner (Jersey City, NJ)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Michel Foucault has based his entire corpus of history on the premise that society has been waging a battle between those at the center of society who wield power and those who live at the periphery and lack it. In THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY, VOL I, he does not present a history of sexuality so much as yet another opportunity to delineate another marginalized subgroup, those who wish to succumb to their inner sexual desires but feel refrained by society. Ironically enough, Foucault notes that until the Victorian Age, prudery more often reigned over licentiousness throughout history. It was not until the 19th century, that society began to allow greater freedom for those who wished to explore their own sexuality. There is an inner irony here that is not present explicitly in the book. Foucault himself was a total sexual hedonist who frequented San Francisco's bathhouses where he may have caught the AIDS virus that killed him in 1984. Further, he openly expressed his belief that adults should feel perfectly free to have sex with children. He alludes to this in the book as he writes of a simple minded country youth who shares a "milk curdling" experience with a prepubescent girl.
Foucault saw the 19th century as a true explosion of discourses on sexuality, the totality of which was to demolish the then emphasis on keeping sex and the topic of sex behind closed doors. The struggle for power shifted from a repressive state controlling the environment in which sex might reasonably be expected to thrive to one in which those who had been previously bereft of the right to deal openly with sex to now having an overabundance of that very right. THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY then is a minor variation on Foucault's obsession with accusing the center of massed power of first identifying, then declaring aberrant, then ultimately marginalizing those on the fringes. Oddly enough, this book is one of Foucault's more coherent explorations of those on the fringe.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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