We've been starting out every seminar session with 15 minutes of writing. This is what I scribbled on Wednesday night:

But for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we’re making. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good again. (295)

So here, in We “Other Victorians", Foucault is saying that whenever we talk about sex, we can’t help but sound defiant. How does this interface with the notions of power described in The Repressive Hypothesis, which claims that we are constantly encouraged to talk about sex by the surrounding power/culture? Foucault suggests that we’ve been talking and talking, that this huge socio/political structure has been created that demands constant discourse regarding sexuality; when, then, does that speech become defiant? Is it when we step outside the confessional? Is it when we abandon the prescribed discourse and begin to examine so-called non-normative sexuality (sodomy, sadism, pediatric sexuality)? Is the inherent subversive tone born of a brand of silence? Is it a brand of silence itself? (“We must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things […] There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (309 – 310)) Beats me.