Foucault Discourses Of Sexuality

In the selected quote from Michel Foucault’s The Introduction of the History of Sexuality, the audience is presented with his argument of the discourses of sexuality as it had been manifested in society, and shaped society’s views and experiences of it. The concepts of discourse, power, and surveillance play fundamental roles in Foucault’s philosophy of social control in a society. As discourse influences all aspects of an individual’s life, it becomes a form of control that exerts power over the individual living in that society. I will be exploring the concept of discourse in its relation with punishment and sexuality to better understand Foucault’s theory of using knowledge and power as vehicles of social control in a society. Foucault’s genealogical critiques of the human sciences correlates with this emphasis as he analyzes discourse.

Although the bourgeois and capitalist society regarded sexuality to be taboo because it was not economically productive, sexuality was being studied in order to categorize sexual behaviors and label individuals, since “homosexual was now a species.” (“History of Sexuality” 43) With the medicalization of sexuality, the “machinery,” society’s social institutions produced discourses to constitute a controlled knowledge which affected the thoughts and behaviors about it in different contexts. However, the “true discourses” Foucault mentions, are not actually real or true as it would imply these discourses would stay constant even in different