Reading group: Foucault's History of Sexuality

Study questions

The following are some questions from the different parts of the the book.  Feel free to answer any of them, based on your perspective from the reading.  Or, in contrast, raise some of your own questions in the comments!

Part II

1. What is "the repressive hypothesis" and why does Foucault think it's wrong?  Is there any part of it that he thinks is right?
2. Elucidate this: "Silence itself...is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall-strategies.  ...There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourse."
3. Foucault tells the story of a "simple-minded" farm hand who "obtained a few caresses from a little girl."  He was seen and the little girl's parents were contacted and the man was indicted and turned over to a doctor and some other experts.  Foucault says: "What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality...could become...the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination..."  He continues, "But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse.  So it was that our society...assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating."  Foucault seems to think that there is nothing wrong with sex between "simple minded adults" and "alert children" and that this is one of the many domains of sexuality that society attempts regulate.  What do you think?
4. Foucault thinks that, contrary to the repressive hypothesis's idea that sex and pleasure be split asunder and sex and reproduction (in order to support labor) be bound together, in fact what explains the increasing interest in all kinds of divergent sexualities is that both the prohibition of them and the evading of that control (since those divergent sexualities have always existed) is grounded in pleasure.  "the medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power.  the pleasure that comes of 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 is, fool it, or travesty it."  What do you think of this idea?

Part III

1. What does Foucault think is the relationship between the medicalization of sexuality, on the one hand, and the religious tradition of confession?  How are the they similar?  How are they different?

Part IV

1. Foucault says "power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.  Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms."  Regarding sexuality, what is the mask of power that allows us to accept that power over sexuality?  Regarding political power, Foucault thinks that the mask of the exercise of power has been law.  So what is the mask regarding the power to control sexuality?