I put this on my list because it’s the foundation of so much of modern sexuality studies that I thought it was important to actually read the text instead of just others’ citations and interpretations of key parts (mostly the scientia sexualis part). Unfortunately, I feel like the parts I already knew through quotations were the only parts (with only minimal hyperbole) that are going to be useful to me.
For a “history of ____” book, I definitely expected there to be more historical examples and evidence cited. There’s the Jouy case (highly contentious in its own right), but not much else. Since the “we inherited sexual repression from the Victorians” idea is so commonly agreed upon, I don’t mind there not being evidence for that, because the whole point is that it’s an idea NOT grounded in evidence, but Foucault makes pretty sweeping claims about all of Western civilization after the 18th century that I would like more examples of.
I wondered if perhaps I ought to have added additional Volumes to my list— maybe what I was looking for was simply in those volumes! But it seems that the other volumes are about antiquity, not the modern era that Volume 1 mostly deals with.
Other ideas that stuck with me/seem useful:
Sex is a topic that happens to be particularly discursively dense/able to be manipulated in lots of different ways
Movements of power always have a purpose, even if no individual person or group consciously planned it. There is always something GAINED from a particular mobilization of discourse. Like water flowing downwards. This seems vaguely materialist to me (and Foucault was a former Communist so that makes sense), but he doesn’t really talk about what factors might shape the path— this kinda makes it sound like the flows of power are more or less evenly distributed, which is ofc not the case.
I highlighted and then re-read Foucault’s definition of Power several times and I still don’t understand what he is actually saying power is.
Also even though he does clarify that he’s talking about Western society several times instead of just saying “society” and erasing all other traditions, it seems racist to suggest that all other societies have a mystical sexual tradition that’s just about pleasure and technique and cultivation, and that it’s all so uniform that you can just say ars erotica, when he’s so clear that in Western civ, every individual situation must be locally analyzed.
In skimming some summaries of criticism of the book online, it seems like a lot of the positive comments are crediting the book with a) criticizing the repressive hypothesis and b) arguing for how sex and sexuality are not universals but are culturally dependent. I guess it speaks to the ubiquity of that influence that my reaction to the text was “Well, yeah” — my education has taken place entirely post-Foucault, so of course this doesn’t feel new or revolutionary to me. I’m glad to have read it, because it IS a big deal in the field, but I think its utility to me is primarily in the broader effects it’s had on sexuality studies and not any particular argument or theoretical tool. I don’t see myself utilizing his definitions, for example, to make my own arguments.