Michel Foucault's "The History of Sexuality"

Foucault again focuses on the idea of confession, and in this essay, in relation to the history of sexuality. He states that "the evolution of the word avowal and of the legal function it designated is itself emblematic of this development: from being a guarantee of the status, identity, and value granted to one person by another, it came to signify someone's acknowledgment of his own actions and thoughts" (58). Foucault goes on to state that we have become a singularly confessing society. According to Foucault, confession began as Christian penance - sex was a privileged theme of confession. This confession compels people to speak of their sexual peculiarity. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the Reformation and the introduction of medicine, confession expanded beyond the Christian understanding. People confessed to family members, friends, doctors, etc.

With the developments in medicine, sex became more of a concern. There suddenly became a need for people to be biologically responsible. People needed to be responsible about who they were having sex with as there was the spread of venereal diseases, people could have genetically problematic children, and many other problems. First sexual consciousness began with the bourgeois families and it was not until later that this became more of a concern with the working class. This happened as working class families were given access to birth control, they became organized conventional families, and the development of the juridical and medical control of perversions in order to protect society. Psychoanalysis became a way to alleviate the effects of repression of sexual perversion - it allowed people to confess perversions within a discourse.

What does this mean in relation to the self? Foucault is talking about confession as a way to speak truth about oneself, and in particular, a way to talk about one's sexuality. Medicine has a role here - one must confess to the doctor in order to get a proper diagnosis. We often confide in others who are close to us about our sexuality; however, it usually remains something hidden inside. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (even today) was the confession forced in the confessional? Is the confession nowadays less forced? Do we speak more freely now? How does this help us construct ourselves? Or is this type of confession destructive? Does it relate to freedom and power?