The History of Sexuality We“ Other victorians le behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on posed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence naking itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly But have we not liberated ourselves from those two long and would have to pay the penalty centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor a slight extent, we are told, Perhaps some progress was mad did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied. and reduced to silence. not only did it not exist, it had no right by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical pru dence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least mani- festation--whether in acts or in words. Everyone knew, for precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of verflow, "in that safest and most discrete of spaces, be example, that children had no sex, which was why they were tween the couch and discourse: yet another round of whis- forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one's eyes and pering on a bed. and could things have been otherwise? We stopped one 's ears whe they came to show evidence to are informed that if repression has indeed been the funda the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was mental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohil to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: noth tions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sen ing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, tence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within real- affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admis- ity, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power ion that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned to see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let Freud's conformism, the normalizing functions of psycho them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where nalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich's vehemence, they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of produc- and all the effects of integration ensured by the "science "of tion, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology. hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute, This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn histori his hysteric-those"other Victorians, "as Steven Marcus cal and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent ould say-seem to have surreptitiously transferred the of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor untrammeled sex have a right to(safely insularized)forms of chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremoni- reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded ous history of the modes of production; its trifing aspect types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism im fades from view. a principle of explanation emerges after the