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Context The intellectual climate in France in the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by the philosophy of structuralism. Structuralism has been applied to a diverse range of fields, from anthropology to philosophy to mathematics. Structuralism claims that meaning doesn't rest in the individual units of a given system (e.g. words in a linguistic system) but in the relationships between these units. We come to understand the world not by understanding the individual …

…sex. We have come to talk about our need to break free from this repression, to talk freely about sex and to enjoy sex, as a part of a larger political rebellion against bourgeois society. Just like any other form of discourse, the repressive hypothesis is not simply a set of facts in a vacuum. It forces a Marxist reading of history: one where sexual repression is part of a larger history of class stru