Hannah Atkinson
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
14 January 2016
Foucault addresses the repressive hypothesis, which is a widely-accepted theory that sex has been repressed , censored, and punished since the 17th century, before which it was treated more freely. This harsh repression was enacted by institutions of power to control an industrializing population, and has resulted in the 20th century's constant, rebellious discourse about sexuality and its oppression.
This concept—that sex has been flatly censored in recent centuries—has become an uncontested fact in 20th-century discourse. Its proponents assume a major break between the age of repression and new age of critically analyzing repression .
According to Foucault, the repressive hypothesis oversimplifies the relationship between sex and power, and disregards historical discourses on sex. By assuming sex has always been silenced, those who speak about sex now claim a sense of subversive power in overcoming some great secret. By insisting that sex is outside of discourse
and that great barriers must be overcome to discuss it, 20th-century society itself creates barriers to discourse.
Beginning in the early 18th century, the ways in which sex could be spoken about became more clearly defined. As the acceptable settings and vocabularies of discourse became established, discourse itself proliferated. By creating institutions to police sexual acts, society emphasized and championed the discourse on sex .
By restricting the acceptable practices of sex and carefully defining a norm, society legitimized all phenomena that fell outside of the norm. New attention was turned to peripheral sexualities in an effort to clearly define these, first by moral terms and then by science and the law. Careful policing by institutions of power—such as family, the law, scientific discourse, and the guidance of moral authorities—does not create a silence and absence of sex, but a complex social discourse.
We, 21st-century scholars, should be conscious of a tendency to assume that we are breaking free of some past silence; it leads us to oversimplify the relationship between pleasure and power. What we take to be a one-way relationship, of oppressor and oppressed, involves both pleasure for institutions of power—in exploring perversion so as to define it—and a power of subversion on the part of the perverted.