É um livro interessante, no entanto tem vários problemas.
1. Se, quando o senhor estava a escrever o livro, considerou que as informações que estava a dar eram importantes, porque é que não as escreveu de forma clara e com palavras que existam mesmo?
2. Porque é que são precisos tantos capítulos para estar a dizer sempre a mesma coisa?
3. Você parece que não sabe tanto como está a tentar dar a entender.
4. Sim, é um bom argumento este que está a dar, mas... é só? 70% do livro é a apresentação de uma ideia que acaba por não se desenvolver e não há conclusão nenhuma. Mas vá, pronto, também é só o primeiro volume.
5. Não fiquei com vontade de saber o que está nos outros dois volumes.

Os primeiros 3 capítulos valem a pena, se se sentirem aventureiros. O que o senhor diz basicamente é que o que mais adoramos fazer é falar sobre sexo e que isso é o resultado de alguns séculos de repressão e tentativa de "retirar o interesse" da coisa. Porque ai e tal o sexo só pode ser no casamento e é só para reprodução. Supostamente, quanto mais se fala no assunto, mais banal se torna e menos curiosidade há acerca da questão.
E o livro anda em círculos em torno desta ideia.

فوکو در این کتاب سعی داره بعضی از باورهای اشتباه ما در مورد سامانه‌ي سکسوالیته رو اصلاح کنه و از خواننده می‌پرسه چرا فکر می‌کنه امیال جنسی‌اش سرکوب شده یا در گذشته سرکوب می‌شده و چرا انسانِ امروز احساس می‌کنه هر چه بیشتر امیال جنسی‌اش رو بروز بده و ب گفتمان تبدیل کنه، آزادی بیشتری داره.
بنابر نظر فوکو این بخش از خواسته‌های انسان به‌شدت به نهادهای قدرت و سیاست روز وابسته است و نه فقط مثل باقی بخش‌های زندگی یک انسان به سیاست وابسته که اصلاً کاملاً زیر سلطه‌ی آن است و حتی ظهور شخصی مثل فروید نه صرفا به خاطر نبوغ شخص او، که لازمه‌ی دوران سیاسی خاص خود اوست. نهادهای قدرت بدنه‌ی اجتماع را به سمت این دیدگاه یا دیدگاه دیگر سوق می‌دهند و باورهای ما بیش از آن‌که به اخلاق، مذهب یا نگرش خودمان مرتبط باشد کاملاً در دست قدرت است که در عصر ما به جای دراختیار داشتن حق مرگ، مدیریت حق زندگی اجتماع را به عهده گرفته و به خاطر آن‌که نقش خود را به‌خوبی ایفا کند، فرد فرد ما را به سمت این دیدگاه سوق داده که سکسوالیته‌ی ما بخش بسیار گسترده‌ای از هویت‌مان را تشکیل می‌دهد و در تمامی رفتارها و افکار ما ردی از آن را پیدا می‌کند و آن را به گفتمان می‌گذارد و ما را به اعتراف وامی‌دارد تا حدی که حس می‌کنیم حتی باید درباره‌ی ریزترین افکار جنسی‌مان به بحث بنشینیم و در کتاب‌ها، فیلم‌ها و هر اثر دیگری به آن رجوع کنیم. فوکو می‌گوید دلیل این‌همه پرحرفی نه سرکوب پیشین انسان که کاملاً خواست قدرت موجود است و مثال‌های تاریخی می‌آورد و بسیاری از نگرش‌هایمان را زیرورو می‌کند و در آخر حدس می‌زند هیچ بعید نیست آیندگان به نسل کنونی بخندند و از خود بپرسند چرا این نسل از انسان‌ها اعتقاد داشتند در هر چیز ردی جنسی به‌جاست و ما برای آن‌ها همان‌قدر عجیب خواهیم بود که انسان قرون وسطی برای ما.

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