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Michel Foucault's The History Of Sexuality

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Summary Michel Foucault’s “The History of Sexuality” explores how the topic of sexuality came to be so censored and secretive, and how sex came to become a discourse in modern society. Foucault emphasizes the various concepts that play into the past three to four centuries, and how society shapes its norms in order to believe the reality it thinks of itself truly exist while none else does. The free behavior of sexuality becomes entrapped within a society seeking to shape its individuals in a manner which meets a specific norm, labeling all who fail to meet the characteristics as abnormal, different, even criminal and sick. Modern society criminalizes differences, demonizes abnormal sexual behavior, taboos the language, and yet is fascinated by the endless details of that very concept which they attempt to treat as nonexistent. Quote 1 “Examine, moreover, all your thoughts. Every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant.” Discourse therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul” (Foucault p.20). …show more content…

While the topic of sex was one to be addressed carefully and in tasteful, vague terms, the imposed fear of the flesh as the source of evil led one to constantly reexamine every action, word, sensation and thought for fear of having sinned. The very subconscious dream became a danger zone for involuntary sin. While recognition of these dangers were necessary, confession still required minimal detail. Fear led individuals to reexamine every minimal detail in their very being, yet forbade one to speak of it, it is this awareness that led individuals to make detailed notice of their own

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As Foucault writes in the Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: “But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect

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MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, philologist and social theorist. He made discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge and about how they are utilized as a form of social control through social establishments. This essay talks about Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality. He put forward his theory of the history of sexuality.

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