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Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher. Foucault's influence extends across the humanities and social sciences and into applied and professional areas of study. He was known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, parameters of educational timeframes, and the prison system, and also for his work on the history of sexuality.

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most referenced volume, The Will to Knowledge was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of biopower in the West. In this volume he attacks the "repressive hypothesis," the widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives. He shows that what we think of as "repression" of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of discourse on the subject.   (More...)