The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

⚖The case for it

The Victorians did not silence sex, they built professions around getting people to talk about it: confessors, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers. Watching that folk story come apart with archives behind it is the pleasure readers describe. The closing section on biopower, power shifting from the sovereign’s right to kill toward the administration of life, is what people quote, and several say “the last chapter alone is worth the book.” “Where there is power, there is resistance” travels far past sex, and readers who bounced off Foucault elsewhere say this is where the idea that “sexuality is produced, not repressed” finally clicked. A hundred and sixty pages.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

A hundred and sixty pages that read long, because the sentences refuse to be skimmed; one reviewer describes “prose so dense it obscures rather than clarifies.” Students arrive expecting a history of sex and get a history of discourse about sex, and the mismatch sours the whole read, with one summing up flatly that they “expected a history of sex, got a history of discourse.” Foucault restates the same reversal chapter after chapter without advancing it, and a frustrated reader puts it plainly: it “repeats the same reversal chapter after chapter.” Discursivity, pedagogization, genitality: readers name the coinages as jargon that slows them without earning anything. It was written as the opening of a project he took eight years to continue and never finished as planned, so it “doesn’t stand alone, just an introduction to the real argument.”

— the honest librarian

3h

honest hours

4

sittings