Repression hypothesis

If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression" (6).

"What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be..."(7).

Oppression and resistance

"The statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing" (8).

Discourse

"What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all 'discursive fact, the way in which sex is 'put into discourse'" (11).

"...you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse" (21).

"A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses" (25).

"Silence itself -- the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers -- is less about 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 over-all strategies" (27).

Knowledge/power

"A first survey made from this viewpoint seems to indicate that since the end of the sixteenth century, the 'putting into discourse of sex,' far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities/ and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constituting -- despite many mistakes, of course -- a science of sexuality" (12-3).

Knowledge of sex -- incitement to discourse, page 34.

Links between pleasure and power: page 45.

"The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct" (48).

Confession as part of power relationship: 61.

Idea of sex as truth, having a "fundamental secret" (69).

"We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers" (72).

"direct the question of what we are, to sex" (78).

Resistance

"It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization..." (93).

"Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93).

No divide between ruler and ruled (94).

"Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power" (95).

"multiplicity of points of resistance" (95).

Radical ruptures quote: 96

Discourse and resistance

"Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it" (101).

Class elements to this: 122-127

"We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim -- through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality -- to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure" (157).