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Modern study has defined sexuality mostly in terms of norm and perversion, model and deviance. In response to this dominant discourse, which gives itself out as medical truth and moral rule, a challenging discourse accepts the category, sexuality, but nevertheless considers sexuality in terms of freedom and repression. Either mode of discourse, however, makes homo- and heterosexuality mirror notions. Whatever the limits of some of Michel Foucault's analyses, and of this taste for paradoxes, we can credit him both with pointing out the inadequacy of contemporary categories to explain attitudes and practices of past centuries and with freeing ourselves from moral oppression. To Foucault, although industrial, or bourgeois, society appears to have led a great crusade against sex (with all the real suffering this has meant for individuals), nevertheless it has attributed to sex the means of expressing individual truth, as in an outpouring of emotions which express the speaker's honesty, thus making sex the source of power and pleasure. Therefore, one should renounce both the “repressive hypothesis” and, in order to escape the dominant discourse, renounce the very category, sexuality . Classical antiquity showed how to use the body's pleasures without polarizing them as homo- or heterosexual. Although Greek literature addressed the debate between love for women and love for boys, the conceptual couple that organized Greek moral life was composed of active and passive halves. The homosexual was not opposed to the heterosexual; rather active man was opposed to the three possible figures of passivity in classical thought: woman, slave, and adolescent.
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