Student: Javier Gmez Bentez

Reader Response 1 - Week 9, Michel Foucault: Discourse and History.

Foucault tries to convey in this essay how powerful language can be. By the 17
th
century, the
appearance of the bourgeois classes made emerge a bigger control on discourse about sex.
The attempt to control sex through speech actually meant a rising about sex discourse.
The Christian pastoral of the time obliged to confess not only sexual acts but also thoughts and
desires. This led to a constant awareness of sexuality and a transformation of sex into
discourse.
The rising of these sexual discourses eventually spread to other ambits like the public one. Sex
became a matter of study in any of its aspects: regulation of population, demographic studies,
fertility rates and other public matters became of major importance through sexual discourse.
Another matter that generated a discourse on sex was childrens sexuality. Dividing the schools
by gender and making teenagers talk about sex in a proper manner was supposed to be a way
to avoid perversion or desire. The youth spoke then with technical language to avoid jovial and
frank discussion on the matter in order to elude possible immoralities.
In conclusion, there is no such thing as a repression of sexuality but rather a controlled power
that has brought sex into discourse to make of it a rational thing instead of the passionate
element that it was before. All the arguments used by Foucault in this essay are facts rather
than chimeras. During the Roman Empire sex between people of the same gender (normally
men) was a common practice that nobody give much thought about and this shows how these
different concerns in relation to sex are pretty recent and the result of the discourses which
raised specially in the 19
th
century.
Foucault seems pretty interested in connoting that power; discourse and knowledge are
directly connected. For him, all the studies and discourses had strongly influenced they way in
which sexuality is understood and therefore, as I quote:

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a
dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple
implantation of perversions. Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.









Student: Javier Gmez Bentez