Is sex repressed?
 

Foucault 8: what if we proposed "that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship between sex and power is not characterized by repression"?
 
8-9: what if we asked "[w]hy do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to say that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?"
 
10: "Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?"
 
"Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression?"
 
"Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it 'repression?'"

> from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1990)

> tagged with #power, #sexuality

> created Jun 12, 2025 at 3:11:16 PM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

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