Introduction: We ‘Other’ Elizabethans

Abstract

In volume one of The History of Sexuality, in the first chapter entitled ‘We “Other” Victorians’, Foucault reminds us of the ways in which we can retrospectively impose our own values on an earlier period, through an act of backward projection. Foucault speaks of a traditional view of Victorian sexuality which he designates ‘the repressive hypothesis’.1 Foucault opposes, or juxtaposes, another way of seeing things, which he calls an ‘incitement to discourse’. Thus what we have inherited as prudery and denial is transformed into a compulsion to speak, an obligation to explain oneself with regard to one’s sexuality. Part of Foucault’s project here is to argue that, far from being a time of sexual repression, the Victorian period witnessed an intense interest in sexuality, an obsession that filled every available discursive space. Thus Foucault can conclude that something more than sexual liberation is at stake in sexual politics. Indeed, it is almost as though the emphasis on sexuality was a displacement of other kinds of politics, including class. The Victorian sexual warded off in some way the awesome materiality of the Victorian social.