Hyoomen's List: critical

• Foucault raises three doubts in "A Will to Knowledge", volume one   of the trilogy "The History of Sexuality"
• Firstly, is sexual repression   an established historical fact?
• Secondly, do the workings of power in our society belong   to the category of repression and is power exercised in a general way through   prohibition, censorship and denial?
• final question asks, does the critical   discourse that addresses itself to repression act as a block to the power mechanism   that has operated unchallenged to this point or is it in fact a part of the   same thing that it denounces and misrepresents by calling it 'repression'?
• Was   there really a rupture between the age of repression and the critical analysis   of repression?
• "there emerged a political, economic and technical   incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in the form of a general theory   of sexuality as in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification and   specification, of quantitative or causal studies"[2].
• He states that   the desire to speak about the repressed nature of sex participated in the very   structure that it was seeking to decipher (Bristow, 1997)
• a whole network of varying, specific and coercive transpositions into discourse
• until Freud, the discourse on sex that scholars and   theoreticians engaged in never ceased to hide the thing that they were speaking   about
• created a screen-discourse, a dispersion avoidance meant to evade   the unbearable and too hazardous truth of sex
• scientia sexualis
• Sex has been the central theme of confession from the Christian penance   to the psychiatrist's couch.
• Since Christianity,   the Western world has never ceased saying: "To know who you are, know   what your sexuality is". Sex has always been the forum where both the   future of our species and our "truth" as human subjects is decided.
• a   means of placing sexuality at the heart of existence and of connecting salvation   with the mastery of these obscure movements
• Sex became our privileged   locus or secret of our being - our truth, and the pursuit is now for the 'truth   of sex' and the 'truth in sex' (Smart, 1985).
• central element of the confession which compels   individuals to express their sexual peculiarity no matter how extreme it may   be (Foucault, 1978)
• a ritual of power manifested by   the presence of another
• truth and sex are joined but it is the truth which serves as the medium   for sex and its manifestations

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