hi folks and welcome to an introduction to michelle foucault's the history of sexuality volume one so the majority of this introduction to michelle foucault's landmark text is going to focus on only one aspect of his argument that he makes early on in this volume one of history of sexuality that is what he says about the repressive hypothesis so where do we find this reference to the repressive hypothesis well actually if you look at the contents you'll find that this is how he names part two of the book the repressive hypothesis so what is the repressive hypothesis i think it's a logic that you'll probably be very very familiar with and anytime we talk about this idea of sexual oppression the very idea of being sexually repressed in a person or in a society or in a particular part of human history so this is how the repressive hypothesis works according to michel foucault since the rise of the bourgeoisie that is those people that emerged with capitalism whose ideology might look like work hard get rewarded in the 17th century sex has been condemned as a waste of energy right think about this for a second if foucault is looking at the influence of capitalism and he's looking at the influence of a particular capitalist ideology that organizes everything around the idea of work hard get rewarded we might think of sex as something condemned as non-productive in terms of producing goods through labor as a result sex has been repressed and confined to reproductive purposes especially in the victorian era when i talk about victorian era i'm referring to the 19th century in europe thus we can achieve liberation if we talk openly about sex and enjoy it more frequently in other words the repressive hypothesis is a hypothesis about the relationship between sexual liberation and repression the idea being that social forces have repressed sexuality in order to achieve liberation we need to talk openly about sex and enjoy it more frequently in the face of that repression foco is going to say that this story this logic is not quite right how is he going to argue that this repressive hypothesis is not quite right because it follows a certain intuition that many of us have about the relationship between sexual liberation and repression so in order to demonstrate that logic that argument that foucault is making i'm going to stage a kind of conversation between vuco and sigmund freud now freud is only mentioned a handful of times in the history of sexuality but if you read between the lines a lot of his arguments are responding to a worldview that is largely fordian or a worldview that looks at sex through a freudian lens sigmund freud himself wrote a lot about repression so let's imagine a conversation between the two in which foucault wants to respond to freud now freud might begin and say hey all of our true sexual desires are repressed by the demands of civilization foucault might say of course you would say that sigmund freud and then freud might respond well yes i believe all of my patients neuroses are merely manifestations of their desires leaking out from behind society's repressive barriers so if i reveal those desires to them they'll be fixed this is more or less a simple account of how freudian psychoanalysis works the idea being of course that for freud the psyche is composed of two major components conscious thoughts and unconscious thoughts and the simplest way to understand freudian psychoanalysis is that we need to get those thoughts and beliefs and feelings that are unconscious to the surface so it can understand why it is we act the way we we act and why it is we desire the things that we desire because freud believes that the forces of society and civilization are repressing those things and it's producing neuroses behaviors and feelings that we don't quite want or that are otherwise declared abnormal so foco might respond this way he would say so you think freud sexual desire is akin to a secret that needs to come out freud might say of course society makes it so okay foucault might say so would you say most people think of sex as secret or private well yes freud's entire doctrine is that sex has been repressed made into something that needs to be private because of what civilization does this is where foucault might start to try to tear at freud's premises okay freud what happens when you tell somebody you have a secret i suppose they bristle with anticipation focusing on the mystery until it is revealed puko might say bingo freud's still not sure he might say what i can you please explain yourself to me i don't know what you mean foco says the repression of sex has paradoxically led to the intense scrutiny of it by that very repressive society in other words the socially imposed secrecy of sexuality has turned sexuality into something that is always being confessed and examined and when foucault might say confessed here he might literally be thinking relegated to the private sphere of a catholic confessional but also bearing intense scrutiny the desire to confess and examine and focus on that which society tells us to not focus on so freud might say but what about 19th century victorian ideals of austerity and repression and this is the era of heightened repression that both freud and foucault are thinking about cocoa might say oh you mean like diagnosing women as hysterics which happened in the 19th century punishing children's sexual behavior which happened in the 19th century and pathologizing non-normative sexualities which happened in the 19th century and of course onto the 20th freud might say yes isn't that sexual repression what else could you call this and here's how foucault would respond and this is more or less the crux of his argument he would say we insist on calling it that but it's really the construction of normative sexuality that emerges as a result of policing sexuality in particular ways freud might say i still don't get it you might say that's because you don't understand the difference between repressive power and normalizing power so here's where we might get to one of foucault's major concepts that's going to help him make the argument that there is no repressive hypothesis or rather the repressive hypothesis is wrong that sex is not repressed but rather in society telling us to keep it private it is actually producing something as opposed to pushing against something so let's think about power in two separate ways following foucault first think of repressive power progressive power is what we usually think of as power it stops you from doing what you want think of dictators the police or your boss this is power that is telling you what to do and what is importantly what not to do but normalizing power is far more insidious it gets you to want to do things this is not the power that threatens you but the power that seeps into your unconscious the very power that influences you to have certain beliefs and desires like the desire to get married to produce offspring to have a heterosexual union it's still power because it influences you but it's not repressive because it rarely takes the form of violence it's far more insidious and subtle foucault might say victorian ideals of sexuality didn't lead to sexual oppression they normalized and produced certain codes of sexuality they continued to turn sex something that just people tend to do in various ways into quote unquote sexuality a discourse full of concepts and identities and here's where i want to get to a second major concept for foucault that term discourse for foucault discourse simply means a system of thought knowledge or communication that constructs our experience of the world one of the major arguments that foucault weaves throughout the history of sexuality volume 1 is the idea that normalizing power took sex which is merely an activity that people do and molded it into what he calls a discourse of sexuality or really what we might call discourses of sexuality in the scientific psychological and juridical realms so what do we mean by that what are examples of scientific and psychological discourses of sex well one of them is in fact sigmund freud who wrote three essays on the theory of sexuality in 1905 but you also get more concretely scientific discourses of sexuality that are emerging in the late 19th century like richard von cross psychopathic sexualis right you start to codify normative sexuality and you start to codify abnormal sexuality you start to attach sex to sexuality which is tied to identity who you are as a person so might put this very point this way a person who engaged in same-sex activity used to be quote someone who succumbed to the sin of sodomy but in the 18th and 19th centuries that person became a quote unquote homosexual so for foucault it's not the idea that sexuality was only policed in the 19th century but it's that the kind of policing wasn't just policing the act itself but started to construct identities attached to the acts before the 18th and 19th centuries for foucault you might simply condemn the act of homosexual sex as a sin but around the 18th and 19th centuries you started to merge that act with a sense of identity an identity that was absolutely sinful in some sense but you started to produce the idea that who you have sex with produces a certain sense of identity of who you are and that is itself the new thing so foucault will say in page 105 this text sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold and check or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries to gradually uncover it is the name that can be given to a historical construct in other words foco's entire project in the history of sexuality is to examine what sexuality is as a social and historical construct he will say on page 68 nearly 150 years have gone into the making of a complex machinery for producing true discourses on sex it is this deployment that enables something called sexuality to embody the truth of sex and its pleasures once again foucault's major aim is to separate sex and act a set of acts from sexuality a discourse so we might ask so what what is the point of foucault giving this history or genealogy of sexuality we might put it very simply in these terms which foucault used in an interview in 1983. he said i wanted to reintegrate a lot of obvious facts of our practices in the historicity of some of these practices and thereby rob them of their evidentiary status in order to give them back the mobility that they have had and that they should always have if we can start to look at the way in which certain things that we hold as natural say our own sexuality is in fact not natural but is understood through layers of social discourse then we might realize that they actually have the possibility of changing that they have a quote unquote mobility and this idea of treating sexuality as something that is mobile and fluid and changeable and not essential or natural is in fact a major theme of what is to be called queer theory that is going to emerge in the 1980s 90s 2000s and today much of which will footnote this very text history of sexuality volume 1. so that's it for our brief introduction to history of sexuality volume 1. thanks