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Antonella’s Assignment #7

In part one of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault clarifies that sexuality was not a thing that was regularly discussed due to a set of extremely strict guidelines that people had to followed regarding to their sexuality. Foucault starts to describe the sexual practices of the English people in the seventeenth century. The sexual practices were quite casual with no shame involved about what they did. Yet near the end of seventeenth century, the new Victorian regime was introduced. Many of the practices in English society had become more rigid and oppressive. One of them being sexual practices. Sexuality was no longer allowed to be practiced outside the home. In the home, those who were allowed to practice were only the married couple of the home. Sex had now become a private matter that no one could talk about aloud anymore. It had become a taboo subject. Foucault believed that the new Victorian regime had started the concept of sexuality became repressed. He then shifts the focus of part one to discuss how brothels and mental institutions had become the places where illicit and unconventional sexualities were acted upon. In these places, people were not restricted to act upon their desires unlike the chaste outside world around them. Foucault deliberates a belief that the bourgeois had order the repression of sexuality due to an emergence of capitalism that had blossomed during that period. A popular idea that was circulated around was that sex had become incompatible thru a rapidly increasing and vital work order. Foucault had disagreed with this notion, he thought that the repression of sexuality was created to be a part of a political cause. Foucault declares that the reason that we had defined the relationship of sex and power through the terms of repression. If sex is repressed, then the fact that if someone had dare to speak about it, it would make them look like they’re committing a wrongdoing. However, a person who would try to be someone different while also not conforming to social norms by disrupting the established rule. Foucault declared that people were eager to speak out sex because it was a form of rebellion to the norms.