It operates through the hegemony of norms, political technologies, and the shaping of the body and soul. We ''Other Victorians'' Repression is a sentence to disappear, an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and byimplication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such subjects. Repression has been seen as the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age and nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required to free ourselves from it. If sex is repressed, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. It has been argued that repression coincides with the development of capitalism.
Sex is repressed because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative.
However, according to Foucault, the essential thing is not the economic factor, but the existence of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, and the promise of a new felicity are linked together. SSR Prelim Summary Archive.