Foucault 54: "Throughout the nineteenth century, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to different rules of formation. From one to the other, there was no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration"
"It is as if a fundamental resistance blocked the development of a rationally formed discourse concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects. A disparity of this sort would indicate that the aim of such a discourse was not to state the truth but to prevent its very emergence."
"Let Charcot's Salpětrière serve as an example in this regard: it was an enormous apparatus for observation, with its examinations, interrogrations, and experiments, but it was also a machinery for incitement, with its public presentations, its theater of ritual crises [...] It is in the context of this continuous incitement to discourse and to truth that the real mechanism of misunderstanding [...] operated"
"The important thing, in this affair, is not that these men shut their eyes or stopped their ears, or that they were mistaken; it is rather that the constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment."
"sex was constituted as a problem of truth"