View a FREE sample

This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does "incomplete" sexual practices refer to?
(a) Sexual practices that don't include one member of each gender.
(b) Any sexual practice that couldn't result in procreation.
(c) Any sexual practice not condoned by law.
(d) Sexual activities outside matrimony.

2. What was the focus of the codes of sexual conduct up to the end of the eighteenth century?
(a) Married couples.
(b) Perversions.
(c) Children.
(d) Extra-marital sex.

3. Which statement is least correct, according to Foucault, about pedagogical institutions in the eighteenth century?
(a) They have imposed ponderous silence on the sex of children.
(b) They have multiplied forms of discourse on sexuality of children.
(c) They have established various points of implantation for sex.
(d) They have coded contents and qualified speakers regarding sex and children.

4. Which of the following is one of the theses that Foucault has presented?
(a) The discourse of sexual repression is part of the incitement to discourse on sex.
(b) Power is not derived primarily from repression.
(c) Sexual repression is not a historical fact.
(d) All of the above.

5. What does Foucault NOT say about western society?
(a) It promises to liberate itself from the laws that have made it function.
(b) It is on the brink of a sexual revolution.
(c) It speaks verbosely of its own silence.
(d) It denounces the powers it exercises.

6. What does Foucault say that the science of sex achieved in the nineteenth century?
(a) The direct confrontation of a social taboo.
(b) Laying the groundwork for a meticulous scientific course of study.
(c) The study of sex in a detached manner.
(d) The obscuration of truth about sex.

7. What does Foucault say happened when there was the apparent "silencing" of sex in discourse?
(a) Attendance at religious institutions spiked.
(b) People became less informed and were more easily subjugated.
(c) There was a discursive explosion of institutionalized sexual discourse.
(d) There was a marked increase in sexual predation and violence.

8. Which of the many great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was inextricably interwoven with the discourse on sex?
(a) The emergence of population as an economic and political problem.
(b) Serfdom.
(c) The partnership between church and state.
(d) The concentration of wealth and education.

9. What does Foucault say about people of disparate sexualities from the end of the eighteenth century on?
(a) Their neuroses were considered to be contagious, so they were shunned from society.
(b) They were perceived as scandalous, dangerous victims of disease.
(c) They were always considered criminals and sent to prisons or labor camps.
(d) They were perceived as the natural consequence to repression.

10. What element of the confession has opened the pathway to explore existing domains?
(a) Saying what was done.
(b) Having moral impetus to truthfulness.
(c) Saying how the act being confessed was done.
(d) The reconstruction of all individual pleasures.

11. What does Foucault say was true about the discourse on sex by scholars and theoreticians until Freud?
(a) It was ineffective at causing change.
(b) It was unaccepted by the general population.
(c) It never ceased to hide the thing it was talking about.
(d) It was closely tied to the ends needed by governmental needs.

12. What would Foucault agree with about modern industrial society?
(a) It ushered in an age of increased sexual repression.
(b) It witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities.
(c) It has created an imbalanced polarization of pleasure and power.
(d) Never has a society been more prudish.

13. Which of the following is NOT listed as one of the accepted ways to free oneself from the effects of sexual repression?
(a) Irruption of speech.
(b) Transgressing laws.
(c) Abstinence.
(d) Lifting of prohibitions.

14. What is the connection Foucault makes between the author of "My Secret Life" and the peasant Jouy?
(a) They were both anomalies to science.
(b) Their actions were symptomatic of repression.
(c) They were both struggling against power mechanisms out of their domain.
(d) Sex became something to say and to exhaustively put into words.

15. Which of the following is NOT one of the doubts Foucault expresses against the "repressive hypothesis?"
(a) Does the repression of sexuality lead to a concentration of power?
(b) Is sexual repression a historical fact?
(c) Is sexual repression undone by discourse?
(d) Is the analysis of the repression of sexuality a component of the repression itself?

Short Answer Questions

1. Which of the following would Foucault NOT agree was a result of sexual discourse?

2. What reason does Foucault give for modern society being perverse?

3. The innate power structure of the confession leads to which of the following?

4. Which of the following is NOT one of Foucault's statements regarding the discourses around sexuality of children?

5. What does Foucault define as one of the most valued techniques of the West for producing truth?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 885 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample