Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Michel Foucault’s “Repressive Hypothesis” Anonymous College

Michel Foucault begins his essay “We ‘Other’ Victorians” with a description of what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” (Foucault 10). This hypothesis holds that openly expressing sexuality at the beginning of the seventeenth century was considered shameless. Transitioning into the Victorian era and with the development of the Victorian bourgeoisie, sexuality began to take on an entirely different meaning. Any physical act or visual representation of sexuality with a purpose separate from procreation became considered “illegitimate,” paving the way to a generation of repressive silence (Foucault 3). In modern American culture, it can be argued that society has “liberated [itself] from those two long centuries in which the history of sexuality [has been] seen first of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression,” but to assume this position is to assume that the repressive hypothesis is accurate, and the Victorians were in fact sexually repressed (Foucault 5). Foucault challenges this stance, arguing that the Victorians were more sexually liberated than modern society generally considers them to have been. Rather, this consideration is based on a sense of sovereignty that can be gained from triumphing over a repressive...