ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge explores how various ideas about sex and new ways of talking about it have developed and spread in modern Western societies since the eighteenth century. The text challenges the "repressive hypothesis", which claimed that the dominant classes of society emphasized the reproductive function of sex, while suppressing and silencing its pleasurable qualities. The themes of Sexuality Vol. 1 are: the relationship between the scientific study of sex and the state's regulation of sexual behavior; and the evolution of sex and sexuality as concepts. The others are the role that modern scientific disciplines have played in shaping our understanding of sexuality; and, the relationship between sex, power, and knowledge. The most important argument Foucault sets out in Sexuality Vol. 1 has to do with the relationship between knowledge, power, and the construction of identity.
