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HIS 302, Spring 2001
Professor Sayegh
Reading Questions, The History of Sexuality (to page 73)
PART I
1. In the first few pages, Foucault says "so the story goes," "we are told," and we are
informed." Why does he use this language?
2. Why is it easy to maintain the discourse on repression when linked to the seventeenth
century? (5)
3. What is the "economic factor" and what two scholars does he link to it? (7)
4. What are three doubts to the repressive hypothesis? (10)
5. What is the object of his study? His main concern? His central aim?
PART II
Chapter 1
1. What does Foucault mean by the phrase "institutional incitement"? (18)
2. How did discourse enter into confession and penitence? How did it digress from
traditional penance? (20)
3. What is the justification for sharing sexual narratives? (22)
4. What is the purpose of putting sex into discourse? (23)
5. How was the discursive technique "relayed by other mechanisms"? (23-30)
6. What does Foucault mean by "'population' as an economic and political problem" and
how did this tie into discourse about sex? (25)
7. Why are silences "an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate
discourses"? (27)
8. What is the significance of the story of the dimwitted farmhand? (31-2)
9. Why did discourses on sex serve as the "very space and as the means of [power's]
exercise?
10. Explain the last sentences of the chapter.
Chapter 2
1. What three codes governed sexual practice before the nineteenth century and what did it
center on? How did it change? (37-8)
2. Why did matrimony begin to be separated from sexuality?
3. What does he say that with repression and sexualities things are unclear? (40-1)
4. What are the four operations involved in the function of power? (41-7)
5. How are pleasure and power interlocked? What is a "gaze"? (44-5)
6. How did the family, schools and hospitals function under spirals of power and pleasure?
7. What does he mean when he says "nineteenth-century 'bourgeois' society…was a society
of blatant and fragmented perversion"?
8. Why is the "implantation of perversions…an instrument-effect"?
9. What, then, is the relationship between pleasure and power?
10. Why does Foucault say that we need to abandon the idea that modern society has
increased sexual repression?
PART III
1. Why is it significant that science emerged in the discourse about sex?
2. How did medical practice bind itself to history, biology and racism? (54)
3. What were the two orders of knowledge into which sex was separated?
4. Why was sex a problem of truth?
5. What are the procedures for producing a truth of sex and what societies do they come
from? (57-59)
6. Who possesses the "agency of domination," the speaker or the listener? Why? (62)
7. What are the five ways the sexual confession was constituted in scientific terms (65-7)
8. What is "sexuality" (according to Foucault)? How did it emerge?
9. Why must the history of sexuality first be written from the viewpoint of a history of
discourses?
10. What does Foucault mean by 'subject'? (70)
11. What is the significance of situating the understanding of a discourse on sex in historical
inquiry? (72-3)