By now Michel Foucault's formulations about sexuality--the discursive constructions of sex--are well known. Yet, despite the fact that confession figures prominently in his genealogy about the manufacture and normalization of natural sexual identities, his theory of confession has received far less rigorous study. It generally is conceded that Foucault's problematization of confession has offered valuable insights as to the inherent dangers arising from the power relationships that imbue confessional institutions and techniques, an assessment with which I concur. Certainly, his analyses have challenged Western society's unexamined assumptions about the curative and liberatory properties of confession. However, in this article I argue that Foucault's apparent oblivion about the effects of gender in confessional discourse hides flaws in his confessional theory. When gender is taken into account, several of his conclusions warrant skepticism. I contend that Foucault's confessional theory begs attention since it serves as the cornice piece of his panoptic vision of domination that implicates not only religion, psychiatry, medicine, and jurisprudence, but also education. The need to reexamine his claims, charges, and conclusions is not solely a philosophical concern, but a practical issue facing teachers in schools and universities, community centers and religious institutions. Therefore, in this article I suggest that educators must think about confession in ways that avoid both the pitfalls uncovered by Foucault's deconstructive analysis and the gendered consequences that his patriarchal perspective failed to reveal. To that end, I will conceptualize aesthetic disclosure, a gender-sensitive approach for dealing with students' self-revelations that subverts the power relations exposed in Foucault's confessional theory and offers opportunities for rhetorical agency and artistic self-fashioning. Foucault's Confessional Dilemma Foucault argued that Western society is thoroughly saturated with confession: religious, legal, medical, and psychiatric. Social scientists and psychotherapists have maintained that secrets in themselves are discreditable, that what people conceal is what they regard as shameful or undesirable (See Jung, 2008, pp. 31-35; Bok, 1989, pp. 8-10). Foucault concluded: We have become a singularly confessing society.... one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves ... (Foucault, 1990, p. 59) Foucault charges that individuals' felt need to confess, as well as the felt benefits from having done so, have been ingrained in us as members of Western societies beginning with the Christian confessional, continuing through the rise of nineteenth and twentieth century psychiatry, and emerging in today's media-centered culture. We Westerners, according to Foucault, have come to believe that truth is lodged in our most secret nature and that articulating those secrets produces freedom. And, of course, since sex has been a privileged theme of both the Christian and psychiatric confessional, revealing sexual matters has come to be seen as that which will most completely allow one's true self to surface (Foucault, 1990, pp. 60-63). Foucault further contends that we no longer perceive the obligation to confess as a power that constrains us. Rather, it seems to us that disclosing our secrets produces a kind of liberation. Foucault insists, however, that we are mistaken if we are taken in by the ruse that all these voices urging confession are speaking of freedom, for confession is a ritual of discourse that unfolds within a power relationship. One does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a listener who is not simply the interlocutor, but also the authority who requires, prescribes, or appreciates the confession and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, or reconcile (Foucault, 1990, p. …