History of Sexuality by Foucault

Throughout this book, Foucault tries to dispel the myth that we are sexually repressed. However, Foucault does acknowledge that expressions of sexuality have been subject to a great deal of control since the dawn of modernity. The aim of Foucault's study is not so much to reject repression outright, as to find a more nuanced way to think about what it means to exist as a subject of sexuality under capitalist modernity. Foucault counters the charge that we have been suppressed into silence by noting the incitement to discourse. Furthermore, he suggests the term "control," which gives a more complex picture of the myriad power relations that constitute the deployment of sexuality, instead of the one-way power dynamic of "repression."