The ideas in this book can be applied to anything, what was in the past a taboo topic could be normalized just by creating a discourse around it. Talking about something simply gives it power. The binary of power/knowledge is what attracted me to this book and it delivered.

Me tardé más de un año en leer este libro, pero no me arrepiento. Cada palabra, cada frase es digna de un análisis y reflexión minucioso. Los libros así, que te quebrantan, que explotan tus ideas del mundo son a los que más gratitud tengo.

This is a really good book, and I wish I read this before Valentine's Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Though I try to take these reviews more seriously these days than then. I appreciated that Foucault kept repeating himself, I'm not good at retaining information. The main thesis is basically on page 69:

The society that emerged in the nineteenth century […] did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge.

And the point is that the proliferation of discourses on sexuality (the 'science' of sexology, accompanying a proliferation in concerns on development, population and political economy from the bourgeois nation-state--'biopolitics' and its concern for life and its regulation/normalization. Sexology helpfully bridged the gap between concerns for the individual body and social body.) in capitalist modernity not only attempted to make 'sex' talk and extract truth from it, but also produced 'sex' as an object of knowledge (as a pseudo-scientific 'unity' of "bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, antonio-physiological systems, sensations, and pleasures"). This started in the upper echelons of society--bourgeois families, schools, clinics--Foucault states that "sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that in its successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class effects."

For anyone familiar with John D'Emilio's optimism in "Capitalism and Gay Identity," Foucault's conclusions are decidedly more ambivalent: sex is not inherently subversive, as the repression of sex and certain ways to talk about it has only been one component and condition of possibility of what really was an explosion in discourses on sex in the judicial, medical, social, and political realms during the emergence of European industrial society (we get here the emergence of homosexuality and its dialectical other heterosexuality, which Foucault understands as liminal in the grand scheme of history. Big takeaway for anyone who isn't yet familiar with this--the paragraph on 43 is a classic).

I think my takeaways are that we have to take queerness as seriously as Foucault does, rather than a priori associate with it a progressive politics that liberals, Marxists, and other radicals often automatically do (This is understandable and such a politics can be loosely constructed from the history of fascism and conservatism against sexology and sex panics. But this seems too simple, as anyone familiar with Magnus Hirschfeld beyond the popular stories of heroism can attest to.* The history of identity formation here is just much more ambivalent, especially if we look outside of Euro-Amerika, to the colonies, both third-world and internal. If there is such a politics, it must be struggled towards, not assumed, this is Foucault and Valentine and co’s qualification I'd think), and that reactionary regulations on sex and sexuality (like the recent news on Roe v. Wade) cannot be reduced to an economistic conception of labor and reproductive capacity (for it was the bourgeois clinic which inaugurated the explosion of discourses on sex, to normalize and pathologize a whole new set of invented categories about sex).

I only wish there was a Marxist version of this, without the Foucauldian stuff about power, discourse, biopolitics (which has always seemed too apolitical to me), the weird orientalism with ars erotica, idk wtf a body is, French NAMBLA moments, etc. He explains everything well, though, and the Catholic stuff was pretty funny. When I reread this someday I think I'd want to pay attention to how Foucault delineates sex and sexuality, though. I realized too close to the end that I hadn't been paying attention to that.

* see Sex Science Self: A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity

Read for my Queer Studies class. A study of sexuality, bodies, pleasures, institutions, discourse, knowledge, power, 'truth', and all the relations therein. It definitely changed the way I think. He says in the book that the history of Western sexuality is really a history of discourse, and that is what you should be expecting (as he hammers home: sexuality is discursively produced).
It can be frustrating because it's a book based around ideas; the abstract and not the material. Somewhere in there you may start to feel like ideas exist separate from us and that they are adapting, surviving, and reproducing all on their own, controlling our minds (and our bodies) through their strange ways. You'll get through it.
I didn't find it particularly difficult to read- it wasn't light, you did have to be critically thinking as you went through it, but I don't feel that my skipping a few overly-complicated sentences here and there hurt my understanding of the book as he does repeat. He can make a sentence last a paragraph, which I admire, but it can get irritating if you're trying to understand what he's saying and you have to go back a paragraph to get to the beginning of the point.

فوکو در کتاب اراده به دانستن ابتدا به تبارشناسی سکسوالیته می پردازد. که در سده ی هفدهم نوعی رک گویی در اعمال جنسی متداول بود. ولی در دوران ویکتوریایی سکسوالیته محبوس شد در خانوادها و تولیدمثل. و همین سرکوب ها باعث ریاکاری جامعه و دادن امتیازهای مثل روسپی خانه ها، بیمارستان های روانی شد.

ولی سده ی هجدهم جامعه با تنوعی از گفتمان های درباره سکس مواجه شد. کم کم صحبت از سکس و لذت های آن به یک الزام تبدیل شد. در قرون وسطی این الزام در قالب اعتراف بود. و در قرون جدید در قالب روانشناسی و پزشکی.

فوکو معتقد است این گفتمان های و نهادهای سکس ابزار قدرت جامه هستند برای نفوذ در تمام زندگی، بدن و لذت های انسان. این قدرت نه از طریق قانون و نه ممنوعیت بلکه از طریق تکثیر سکسوالیته های نامتعارف عمل می کند. قدرت در پی حذف و پرهیز از سکسوالیته نیست. بلکه تنوع سکسوالیته رو جذب می کند. و علیرغم هدفی که از ابتدا این گفتمان ها داشتند باعث اشاعه ی انحراف های جنسی شدند.

پس گفتمان های درباره سکس از سه سده پیش به جای کم شدن افزایش یافته است. گرچه این گفتمان ها با خود امر و نهی، مشروع و نامشروع،مجاز و غیر مجاز به همراه اورده. اما به گونه ی بنیادی تر استحکام و اشاعه همه ی گوناگونی جنسی را تضمین کرده است.

از لحاظ تاریخی، دو روش برای  تولیدحقیقت سکس وجود دارد:
۱. جوامعی نظیر چین، ژاپن،هند،روم و جوامع عربی از "هنر کامجویی" برخوردارند. یعنی حقیقت از خود لذت به دست می آید لذا به منزله ی عمل و تجربه فهم می شود و نه معیار فایده مندی.
۲.تمدن غرب فاقد هنر کامجویی، یگانه تمدنی است که علم جنسی را به کار می گیرد. تمدنی که روش های را برای گفتن حقیقت سکس توسعه داد که در اساس با شکلی از قدرت-دانش هماهنگ است.  و اعتراف تکنیک تولید حقیت در غرب بردل شد. و انسان "حیوان اعتراف گر"

پس فوکو معتقد است شکل گیری دانش درباره سکس را نه به بر حسب سرکوب قانون بلکه بر حسب قدرت تحلیل کنیم.
ولی قدرت نه به معنی مجموعه نهادها و دستگاها و نه به معنی خشونت و استیلا برا افراد. بلکه باید قدرت را بیش از هر چیز به منزله کثرت مناسبات نیرو درک کرد. قدرت همه جا هست نه به این معنی که همه چیز را دربرمی گیرد، بلکه به این معنا که قدرت از همه جا می آید‌.

"قدرت نهاد نیست" ساختار نیست، نوعی قدرت مندی نیست که بعضی از آن برخوردار باشند. قدرت نامی است که به یک موقعیت استراتژیک پیچیده در جامعه ی معین اطلاق می شود.

و عرصه این قدرت در سده ی هجدهم در چهار مجموعه استراتژیک است.ا. هیستریک شدن بدن زن ۲‌تربیتی کردن سکس کودک۳.اجتماعی کردن رفتارهای تولید مثلی۴ روان پزشکانه کردن لذت منحرف.

و روش های قدرت که در عصر کلاسیک از طریق امر نمادین خون بود(تسلطی که حاکمان بر زندگی انسان از طریق حق کشتن و مرگ داشتن) به قدرت سکسوالیته در قرن نوزدم رسید.

پس سکس به عنوان مسئله سیاسی اهمیت زیادی دارد. از یک سو، به انضباط های بدن مربوط است: تربیت، تشدید و توزیع نیرو. از سوی دیگر به سامان دهی جمعیت ها مربوط است.

I’m convinced this guy has never had good sex.

Foucault is amazing. This book can get a bit repetitive at times, but it still blew me away with every page. I want to bring this man back to life and have dinner with him.

حیف از این کتاب و مجموعه‌ی ارزشمند که به این حجم رسیده

Foucault's entire investigation is an attempt to counter the way the 'repressive hypothesis' of human sexuality is presented within the historical discourse. Living in a post-Freudian landscape, we all have at least a basic grasp of the fundamentals of Freud's theory of sexual repression - it's something like the following: civilized society's attempt to repress human sexuality is intrinsically tied to the psychological destabilization of man, so if we can figure out the sex thing, namely by becoming less repressed, our social and political problems will disappear. This was inarguably the most important and consequential theory of the modern era and has carried forward, permanently impressed on the collective consciousness, and, according to Foucault's theory, is one of the indispensable tools of cultural/political power that continues to be aggressively wielded today.

"All these negative elements - defenses, censorships, denials - which the repressive hypothesis groups together in one great central mechanism destined to say no, are doubtless only
component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation of discourse,
a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former."

But Foucault is concerned about the discourses themselves. In being dragged on stage and mandated to dispense with its secrets, "what were the effects of power generated by what was said?" According to him, it is the way "sex is put into discourse." Establishing some kind of linguistic perimeter or a conjuration of ways to talk about sex, pathologize, place it under a set of rubrics.

"From the singular imperialism that compels everyone to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse, to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy, pedagogy, medicine, and justice, incite, extract, distribute, and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an
immense verbosity is what our civilization has required and organized."

The Victorian Era, the one we commonly associate with prudishness and that we have been frantically trying to escape from, started around the 17th century. Prior to that, according to Foucault, sex wasn't relegated to private discussions or to the respectability of the personal conjugal bedroom. It was all very direct and shameless, bodies were on display and freely exchanged.

Then something shifted in the 18th or 19th century, which began to produce discourses around sex and relegated the topic to a variety of different scientific and judicial professions that served (and still serve) as the primary centers of power. These acted as fundamental sources of credibility and expertise, which function as the primary scaffolding of society, foundational nodes of power that promulgate and support the "web of discourses" and power relations that act as sociocultural enclosures. Sexual desire, among all other things, could not be tolerated outside of this enclosure. If power is to survive or function optimally, it must do so under the same biological imperatives of any viable organism, whose fundamental dictates are propagation, expansion, and integration. The way to do this was to expand the jurisdiction of medicine and criminal justice, both principally tasked with treating and eradicating affliction, whether in its biological or social form, so as to capture and pathologize the spectrum of human sexuality and safely bring it under the aegis of the social sphere.

This annexation of human sexuality to the site of the convergent medical/security regime, whose dealings with illness and death or criminality naturally gave the impression that human sexuality was intensely dangerous and in doing so "intensified people's awareness of it as a constant danger." And this move to pathologize sexuality was to categorize perversions as such and relegate them to the periphery of normative sexuality, which all centered on a productive (ie. reproductive) sexuality that ensured the continuation of practical economic imperatives and social relations.

This created an economy of power and pleasure, which "function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes from exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it."

Scientific Confessionalism -

Systems are rarely entirely remade to usher in a new era of culture. More often than not, it's a pivot that more aptly describes these moves from old to new. In this case, the Church provided much of the metaphysical practices and hierarchical dynamics necessary to eventually establish scientific discourse as the predominant method of apprehending the individual. Rather than the omnipotent, all-seeing God invoking spiritual demands about the divulgence of one's sinfulness or behavior, the human being could now be mapped out sexually according to a scientific rubric and the processes of interrogation and analysis. The individual was to be forthcoming with his innermost self, practicing the same type of self-surveillance he did with his own behavior in relation to the demands of religious dogma.

"... can one articulate the production of truth according to the old juridico-religious model of confession, and the extortion of confidential evidence according to the rules of scientific discourse?"

This and his other work gives a tremendous amount of material for intellectual ferment, and his ideas seem to become more prescient with time.

I am a philosopher, and (analytic) philosophers do not consider Foucault to be a philosopher. I read this b/c I was part of an interdisciplinary class in which it was assigned. I'm glad I have now read something by Foucault, but I did not find him to be very interesting, and his confusions were a constant bother to me. His favorite method of argument is to find an example or an anecdote and treat it as though it shows something. Generalizations are constantly being made from mere illustrations. I'm not sure what all his fans see in him. I guess he stokes in people a sense of suspicion or cynicism that things are not what they seem. Some people have a temperament for thinking like that. You can't prove it or disprove it. It's not to my taste, I guess.

Vol 1 of the 'History of Sexuality' was written just before a significant shift in Foucault's thought: the 'ethical turn' of his later work. As such this is his last book covering the complex machinations of (bio)power and discourse, this time considering their operations on the body within the sphere of sexuality. It's a particularly erudite book and is fairly readable,due not only to its brevity but also its clear prose; no mean feat for a work often labeled 'post-structuralist'!
I would suggest then that it is a suitable starting point for a foray into Foucauldian thinking as alongside its relative pedagogical clarity it also contains a number of tropes indicative of Foucault's style and approach; a fairly lax approach to historiography (don't expect a historian's rigor); a tendency to reveal commonplace assumptions as fallacies; and a unique approach to theory in which his idea's and concepts are generated throughout the work via an analysis of 'history'.
The later point means that it is often difficult to see what Foucault is getting at theoretically speaking, leaving one to feel that they have missed some crucial point along the way, an issue compounded by the lack of a modern 'signposted' academic introduction. It's therefore appropriate to provide a short summary of the work:

***please note I am no expert so what follow is merely an interpretation, hope it helps!***

Foucault begins by challenging the 'Repressive Hypothesis', the notion that the during the Victorian ages discourse on sexuality was silenced, unless that sexuality was of the heterosexual, reproductive variety. This narrative posits the construction of a boundary surrounding the monogamous, married bedroom, a boundary which demarcates the sphere of legitimate discourse, confining it to utilitarian role aimed at maintaining the fertility and thus reproductive potentials of hetronormative, state sanctioned relationships.
Foucault demonstrates that this notion, although historically unfounded, became widespread (particularly within leftwing circles: see Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud) since it allowed sexual repression to be linked to capitalism and its associated societal repression. This link was made via the establishment of a narrative which saw discourse on sexuality as being purely aimed at establishing a reproductive imperative that operationalized sexuality towards the reproduction of societies labor capacity. This logic extended to the repression of abnormal (non-reproductive) sexualities, since they represented a wasteful expenditure of vital libidinal energy, energy better used to drive industrial development and economic expansion.
Underlying this perspective is what Foucault terms a 'Judicio-discursive' conception of power, a notion that holds power as a purely negative phenomena that only relates to its object in a oppressive capacity; preventing rather than producing. For Foucault this a far too reductive view of power, a position unable to illuminate the myriad dispersion of power across the sexual sphere.
Foucault challenges the Repressive Hypothesis and its underlying assumptions on the nature of power; demonstrating that contrary to this repressive narrative, Victorian society actually witnessed a veritable explosion of discourses relating to sex that incorporated the most diverse sexualities, seeking to understand, classify and ultimately discover the 'truth' of sex. This 'Will to Knowledge' entailed the deployment of what Foucault terms a ‘Scientia Sexualis’ which functions via an incitement to speak of ones sex, in order that it can be understood and ultimately pathologized. This process sutures sexuality to identity in that it considers ones sexual activity as central to ones very nature; for example this process was integral to the codification of the homosexual as a static identity (prior to which same sex relations were considered a momentary transgression, understood under the broad rubric of 'sodomy').
It is here that Foucault outlines what in my mind is the central theoretical argument of the book; his analysis of power. For Foucault, contrary to liberal and Marxist conceptions, power is not something exercised or even possessed by a hegemonic social entity. Rather it is a relation, immanent to the social field and exercised from a variety of junctions, that acts in a productive capacity. In respect to sexuality power functions to multiply sexualities by trapping them in discourse, codifying them as identities and defining their conduct. There is no exterior of power, everything, including resistance, is caught up in the intricacy of its complex networks.
If we return to the example of homosexuality, it can be seen that power functioned to link a sexual act (same-sex relations) to an identity, producing not only regressive instances of homophobia and marginalization, but also resistance to that marginalization and the production of communities, centered around an identity, that give meaning, a sense of belonging and purpose to many. This point illuminates a key perspective of Foucault's that has led many detractors to consider him nihilistic and amoral; power is not good, or bad it merely 'is'.

What Vol 1 provides then is a reappraisal of our historical understanding of sexuality, demonstrating that it has not been repressed, but has rather been discussed endlessly. Furthermore, and arguably most significantly, it provides a novel and radical understanding of power, an understanding that challenges and provokes more traditionalist understandings of power (Marxism and Liberalism!) and the praxis they inspire. What troubles me about Foucault's view of power is that, in its immanence, it seems to rob the individual of agency, rendering us all passive subjects of an inescapable totality.
In some respects I wonder if it is this loss of agency that caused the 'ethical turn' in Foucault's work, demonstrated in the latter two books of The History of Sexuality (The History of Sexuality 2: The Use of Pleasure and The History of Sexuality 3: The Care of the Self) in which Foucault turns to an analysis of Greek and Roman sexual ethics and the methods by which they related to and integrated the power relations structuring their society? I have yet to study these volumes carefully, but I sincerely hope that Foucault is able to provide some respite from the all encompassing power relations that define us and our society; I imagine so, since the practice of ethics hints at the construction of an interiority (subjectivity) that perhaps offers the only means of escape from the complex exteriority this volume traverses.

قد لا يكون لدي الكثير للإحاطة و وصف هذا الكتاب المحنك. لكن علي أن أشير لأكثر النقاط التي أثارت دهشتي.

أولها كانت في منهجية فوكو في معالجة موضوع الجنسانية و الجنس( وهما بالتأكيد أمرين مختلفين؛ حيث تشير الأولى للمنظومة الخطابية و الفكرية التي نمت حول قضية الجنس، أما الأخرى فتشير للغريزة الإنسانية البحت ) فهو يعمل بشكل تأريخي توليفي في تحليله لخلق الأفكار، فنجده يزاوج أو يربط بين السلطة و المعرفة و المتعة، أو الجنس/القمع، أو السلطة/المتعة، أو المعرفة/المتعة. من جهة أخرى، لغة فوكو تطفح أدبية و سلاسة و في ذلك دور كبير لحمل ثقل الأفكار الكثيفة التي يعالجها.

الشيء الأخر، توضيح الكاتب لمحيط بحثة و عدم ا لخوض في التعميمات الخرقاء، فهو يحدد معالجته لهذه الظاهرة في الثقافة الغربية فقط و في حدود فترة زمنية من القرون الوسطة تقريبا إلى القرن العشرين... موضحا أن قضية الجنسانية قد تكونت و تكاثرت تحت ظروف سياسية أقتصادية بأمتياز. فالمجتمعات البرجوازية قد قامت على مركب الجنس لدعم اقتصادها بخلق كثافة سكانية عاملة صحيحة البدن و طبقة سائدة ذات صحة خلقية و خلوقية (مضبوطة) و من هنالك كانت تنمو عمليات المراقبة و الحظر و التحريمات الصارمة. و بأنها كانت محض كثير من التركيز و الدراسات رغم الصمت البادي في السطح، فلقد أعتبرت لوقت طويل السر الإعظم عن بني البشر، و دخلت كل من المعرفة و السلطة و المتعة في دوامة من المطاردات.
أمر أخر قد يبدوا لي مميزا يكمن في تغتيط فوكو لسطح واسع من المصادر عن الجنسانية بدأ من أعترافات النساك في القرون الوسطى و التقريرات الطبية و الأعمال الأدبية ثم الإيروسية الشرقية و فرويد... فيكون بذلك قد انجز مؤلف لائق بقدر أمكانياته لتوليف و تحليل الأفكار و هي الشي الذي أعتبره عن عبقرية هذا المفكر.