ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge aimed to achieve three goals. The goals are: to challenge the "repressive hypothesis", to show that sex from the late seventeenth century onwards was examined as an object of scientific analysis, and to advance a new theory about how power operates. In short, Foucault set out to define "the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world". In Vol. 1, Foucault examines, compares, and contrasts theological, psychiatric, and medical texts and practices from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century in order to understand how views on sexuality changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Foucault's initial aim for the project has only been partly realized, the volumes he managed to publish clearly changed the way scholars thought about sex.
