The History of Sexuality

The History of Sexuality

Cover of the first edition of volume 1
Author	Michel Foucault
Original title	Histoire de la sexualité
Translator	Robert Hurley
Country	France
Language	French
Subject	History of human sexuality
Publisher	Éditions Gallimard
Publication date	1976 (vol. 1) 1984 (vol. 2) 1984 (vol. 3)
Published in English	1978 (vol. 1) 1985 (vol. 2) 1986 (vol. 3)
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	168 (English ed., vol. 1) 293 (English ed., vol. 2) 279 (English ed., vol. 3)
ISBN	0-14-012474-8 (vol. 1) 0-14-013734-5 (vol. 2) 0-14-013735-1 (vol. 3)

The History of Sexuality (French: L’Histoire de la sexualité) is a three-volume study of sexuality in the western world by French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which Foucault examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a discursive object and separate sphere of life and argues that the notion that every individual has a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge (La volonté de savoir), was first published in 1976; an English translation appeared in 1978. In 1984 it was followed by The Use of Pleasure (l'usage des plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (le souci de soi).

In Volume 1, Foucault criticizes the "repressive hypothesis", the idea that western society suppressed sexuality from the 17th to the mid-20th century due to the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Foucault argues that discourse on sexuality in fact proliferated during this period, during which experts began to examine sexuality in a scientific manner, encouraging people to confess their sexual feelings and actions. According to Foucault, in the 18th and 19th centuries society took an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within the marital bond: the "world of perversion" that includes the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, the criminal and the homosexual, while by the 19th century, sexuality was being readily explored both through confession and scientific enquiry.

In Volume 2 and Volume 3, Foucault addresses the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. The History of Sexuality received a mixed reception, with some reviewers praising the book and others criticizing Foucault's scholarship.

Background

Publication

Three volumes of The History of Sexuality were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English—Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977, focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science of sexuality, and the emergence of biopower in the West. The work was a further development of the account of the interaction of knowledge and power Foucault provided in Discipline and Punish (1975).^[1]

According to Arnold Davidson, the back cover of the first volume announced that there would be five forthcoming volumes: Volume 2, The Flesh and the Body, would "concern the prehistory of our modern experience of sexuality, concentrating on the problematization of sex in early Christianity"; Volume 3, The Children's Crusade, would discuss "the sexuality of children, especially the problem of childhood masturbation"; Volume 4, Woman, Mother, Hysteric, would discuss "the specific ways in which sexuality had been invested in the female body"; Volume 5, Perverts, was "planned to investigate exactly what the title named"; and Volume 6, Population and Races, was to examine "the way in which treatises, both theoretical and practical, on the topics of population and race were linked to the history" of "biopolitics." Foucault subsequently abandoned this plan.^[2]

The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualité, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi) dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. The latter volume deals considerably with the ancient technological development of the hypomnema which was used to establish a permanent relationship to oneself. Both were published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, the second volume being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986.

In his lecture series from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its "...wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the behaviour of men", which involved a new consideration of the "...examination of conscience" and confession in early Christian literature. These themes of early Christian literature seemed to dominate Foucault's work, alongside his study of Greek and Roman literature, until the end of his life. However, Foucault's death left the work incomplete, and the planned fourth volume of his History of Sexuality on Christianity was never published. The fourth volume was to be entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it is privately held in the Foucault archive. It cannot be published under the restrictions of Foucault's estate.^[3]

Volume I: The Will to Knowledge

Part I: We "Other Victorians"

Part One, entitled "We “Other Victorians”", opens with a discussion of what Foucault calls the "...repressive hypothesis", the widespread belief among late 20th-century westerners that sexuality, and the open discussion of sex, was socially repressed during the late 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, a by-product of the rise of capitalism and bourgeois society. Arguing that this was never the case, he asks why modern westerners believe the hypothesis, noting that in portraying past sexuality as repressed, it provides a basis for the idea that in rejecting past moral systems, future sexuality can be free and uninhibited, a "...garden of earthly delights".^[4]

Part II: The Repressive Hypothesis

“	We must... abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the important point – a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured, through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of disparate sexualities.	”
— Foucault, 1976.[5]

Proceeding to go into further depth in Part Two, "The Repressive Hypothesis," Foucault notes that from the 17th century to the 1970s, there had actually been a "...veritable discursive explosion" in the discussion of sex, albeit using an "...authorized vocabulary" that codified where one could talk about it, when one could talk about it, and with whom. He argues that this desire to talk so enthusiastically about sex in the western world stems from the Counter-Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church called for its followers to confess their sinful desires as well as their actions. As evidence for the obsession of talking about sex, he highlights the publication of the book My Secret Life, anonymously written in the late 19th century and detailing the sex life of a Victorian gentleman. Indeed, Foucault states that at the start of the 18th century, there was an emergence of "...a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex,"...with self-appointed experts speaking both moralistically and rationally on sex, the latter sort trying to categorize it. He notes that in that century, governments became increasingly aware that they were not merely having to manage "subjects" or "a people" but a "population", and that as such they had to concern themselves with such issues as birth and death rates, marriage, and contraception, thereby increasing their interest and changing their discourse on sexuality.^[6]

Entering the second chapter of this section, "The Perverse Implantation", Foucault argues that prior to the 18th century, discourse on sexuality focuses on the productive role of the married couple, which is monitored by both canonical and civil law. In the 18th and 19th centuries, he argues, society ceases discussing the sex lives of married couples, instead taking an increasing interest in sexualities that did not fit within this union; the "world of perversion" that includes the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, the criminal and the homosexual. He notes that this had three major effects on society. Firstly, there was increasing categorization of these "perverts"; where previously a man who engaged in same-sex activities would be labeled as an individual who succumbed to the sin of sodomy, now they would be categorised into a new "species," that of homosexual. Secondly, Foucault argues that the labeling of perverts conveyed a sense of "pleasure and power" on to both those studying sexuality and the perverts themselves. Thirdly, he argues that bourgeoisie society exhibited "blatant and fragmented perversion," readily engaging in perversity but regulating where it could take place.^[7]

Part III: Scientia Sexualis

In part three, "Scientia Sexualis", Foucault explores the development of the scientific study of sex, the attempt to unearth the "truth" of sex, a phenomenon which Foucault argues is peculiar to the West. In contrast to the West's sexual science, Foucault introduces the ars erotica, which he states has only existed in Ancient and Eastern societies. Furthermore, he argues that this scientia sexualis has repeatedly been used for political purposes, being utilized in the name of "public hygiene" to support state racism. Returning to the influence of the Catholic confession, he looks at the relationship between the confessor and the authoritarian figure that he confesses to, arguing that as Roman Catholicism was eclipsed in much of Western and Northern Europe following the Reformation, the concept of confession survived and became more widespread, entering into the relationship between parent and child, patient and psychiatrist and student and educator. By the 19th century, he maintains, the "truth" of sexuality was being readily explored both through confession and scientific enquiry. Foucault proceeds to examine how the confession of sexuality then comes to be "constituted in scientific terms," arguing that scientists begin to trace the cause of all aspects of human psychology and society to sexual factors.^[8]

Part IV: The Deployment of Sexuality

In part four, "The Deployment of Sexuality," Foucault explores the question as to why western society wishes to seek for the "truth" of sex. Chapter one, "Objective", lays out Foucault's argument that we need to develop an "analytics" of power through which to understand sex. Highlighting that power controls sex by laying down rules for it to follow, he discusses how power demands obedience through domination, submission, and subjugation, and also how power masks its true intentions by disguising itself as beneficial. As an example, he highlights the manner in which the feudal absolute monarchies of historical Europe, themselves a form of power, disguised their intentions by claiming that they were necessary to maintain law, order, and peace. As a leftover concept from the days of feudalism, Foucault argues that westerners still view power as emanating from law, but he rejects this, proclaiming that we must "...construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code," and announcing that a different form of power governs sexuality. "We must," Foucault states, "at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king."^[9]

In the second chapter, "Method", Foucault explores what he means by "Power", explaining that he does not mean power as the domination or subjugation exerted on society by the government or the state, but instead remarks that power should be understood "as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate." In this way, he argues, "Power is everywhere . . . because it comes from everywhere," emanating from all social relationships and being imposed throughout society bottom-up rather than top-down.^[10]

Part V: Right of Death and Power over Life

In part five, "The Right of Death and Power over Life," Foucault asserts that the motivations for power over life and death have changed. As in feudal times the "right to life" was more or less a "right to death" because sovereign powers were able to decide when a person died. This has changed to a "right to live," as sovereign states are more concerned about the power of how people live. Power becomes about how to foster life. For example, a state decides to execute someone as a safe guard to society not as justified, as it once was, as vengeful justice. This new emphasis on power over life is called Biopower and comes in two forms. First, Foucault says it is "centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls."^[11] The second form, Foucault argues, emerged later and focuses on the "species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cause these to vary.^[12] Biopower, it is argued, is the source of the rise of capitalism, as states became interested in regulating and normalizing power over life and not as concerned about punishing and condemning actions.

Scholarly reception

The reception of The History of Sexuality among scholars and academics has been mixed.

1976–1989

Historian Jane Caplan calls The History of Sexuality "certainly the most ambitious and interesting recent attempt to analyse the relations between the production of concepts and the history of society in the field of sexuality", but criticizes Foucault for using an "undifferentiated concept" of speech and an imprecise notion of "power".^[13] Gay activist Dennis Altman describes Foucault's work as representative of the position that homosexuals emerged as a social category in 18th and 19th century western Europe.^[14] Feminist Germaine Greer writes that Foucault rightly argues that, "what we have all along taken as the breaking-through of a silence and the long delayed giving of due attention to human sexuality was in fact the promotion of human sexuality, indeed, the creation of an internal focus for the individual's preoccupations."^[15]

Historian Peter Gay writes that Foucault is right to raise questions about the "repressive hypothesis", but that "his procedure is anecdotal and almost wholly unencumbered by facts; using his accustomed technique (reminiscent of the principle underlying Oscar Wilde's humor) of turning accepted ideas upside down, he turns out to be right in part for his private reasons."^[16] Author José Guilherme Merquior writes in Foucault (1985) that Foucault's views about sexual repression are preferable to those of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and their followers in that they have "the advantage of descriptive, if not explanatory, realism", and that Foucault is supported by "the latest historiographic research on bourgeois sex". Merquior considers the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality to be of higher scholarly quality than the first, and finds Foucault to be "original and insightful" in his discussion of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics in The Care of the Self. However, he notes that the details of Foucault's views are open to question, and suggests that Foucault's discussion of Greek pederasty is less illuminating than that of Kenneth Dover, despite Foucault's references to Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978).^[17] Philosopher Roger Scruton, who rejects Foucault's claim that sexual morality is culturally relative, writes in Sexual Desire (1986) that Foucault mistakenly assumes that there could be societies in which a "problematisation" of the sexual did not occur. Scruton writes, "No history of thought could show the 'problematisation' of sexual experience to be peculiar to certain specific social formations: it is characteristic of personal experience generally, and therefore of every genuine social order."^[18]

Philosopher Peter Dews argues that Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis is more apparent than real, and that the hypothesis is not "abolished, but simply displaced" in The History of Sexuality, as shown for example by Foucault's persistent references to "the body and its pleasures" and to ars erotica.^[19] Classicist Page duBois calls The Use of Pleasure "one of the most exciting new books" in classical studies and "an important contribution to the history of sexuality", but adds that Foucault "takes for granted, and thus 'authorizes,' exactly what needs to be explained: the philosophical establishment of the autonomous male subject".^[20] Historian Patricia O'Brien writes that Foucault was "without expertise" in dealing with antiquity, and that The History of Sexuality lacks "the methodological rigor of Foucault's earlier works, and especially of Discipline and Punish."^[21]

1990–present

Classicist David M. Halperin writes in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990) that the appearance of the English translation of the first volume of Foucault's work in 1978, together with the publication of Dover's Greek Homosexuality the same year, marked the beginning of a new era in the study of the history of sexuality.^[22] He suggests that The History of Sexuality may be the most important contribution to the history of western morality since Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).^[23] Scholar Camille Paglia rejects Halperin's views as uninformed. Paglia calls The History of Sexuality a "disaster" and claims that much of it is fantasy unsupported by the historical record. Paglia observes that the book "is acknowledged even by Foucault's admirers to be his weakest work".^[24]

Jurist and economist Richard Posner calls The History of Sexuality "a remarkable fusion of philosophy and intellectual history", adding that Hurley's translation is brilliant and that the book is lucidly written.^[25] Historian Michael Mason writes that in The History of Sexuality, Foucault presents what amounts to an argument "against the possibility of making historical connections between beliefs about sex and sexual practices". Mason writes that Foucault's argument is only acceptable if one accepts the need to shift attention from "sexuality" to "sex" in thinking about the sexual culture of the last three centuries, and that Foucault does not make a case for such a need.^[26] Literary critic Alexander Welsh criticizes Foucault for failing to place Sigmund Freud in the context of 19th century thought and culture.^[27] Historian Roy Porter calls The History of Sexuality, "a brilliant enterprise, astonishingly bold, shocking even, in its subversion of conventional explanatory frameworks, chronologies, and evaluations, and in its proposed alternatives." Porter credits Foucault with discrediting the view, proposed for example by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955), that "industrialization demanded erotic austerity."^[28]

Classicist Bruce Thornton writes that The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History of Sexuality, is "usually quite readable, surveying the ancient evidence to make some good observations about the various techniques developed to control passion." However, Thornton criticizes Foucault for limiting his scope to "fourth-century medical and philosophical works".^[29] Philosopher Arnold Davidson writes that while "Foucault's interpretation of the culture of the self in late antiquity is sometimes too narrow and therefore misleading", he considers this a defect of "interpretation" rather than of "conceptualization." Davidson argues that, "Foucault's conceptualization of ethics as the self's relationship to itself provides us with a framework of enormous depth and subtlety" and "allows us to grasp aspects of ancient thought that would otherwise remain occluded."^[30]

Psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook argues that while Foucault proposes that "bodies and pleasures" should be the rallying point against "the deployment of sexuality", the notion of "bodies and pleasures", like other Foucauldian terms, has "little content." Whitebook, who endorses Dews' assessment of Foucault's work, finds Foucault's views to be comparable to those of Marcuse and suggests that Foucault was indebted to Marcuse.^[31] In 2005, Scruton dismissed The History of Sexuality as "mendacious", and called his book Sexual Desire (1986) an answer to Foucault's work.^[32] Romana Byrne criticizes Foucault's argument that the scientia sexualis belongs to modern Western culture while the ars erotica belongs only to Eastern and Ancient societies, arguing that a form of ars erotica has been evident in Western society since at least the eighteenth century.^[33]

See also

• Foucauldian discourse analysis
• Gender Trouble
• Greek love
• Postsexualism

References

Footnotes

1. Bernasconi 2005. p. 310.
2. Davidson 2003. p. 125.
3. Foucault 1999. pp. 34, 47
4. Foucault 1976. pp. 1–14.
5. Foucault 1976. p. 49.
6. Foucault 1976. pp. 15–36.
7. Foucault 1976. pp. 37–49.
8. Foucault 1976. pp. 53–73.
9. Foucault 1976. p. 77–91.
10. Foucault 1976. p. 92–102.
11. Foucault 1976. p. 139.
12. Foucault 1976. p. 139.
13. Caplan 1981. p. 165.
14. Altman 1982. p. 48.
15. Greer 1985. p. 198.
16. Gay 1985. pp. 468-9.
17. Merquior 1991. pp. 121-2, 132, 135-6.
18. Scruton 1994. pp. 34, 362.
19. Dews 2007. p. 205.
20. duBois 1988. p. 2.
21. O'Brien 1989. p. 42.
22. Halperin 1990. p. 4.
23. Halperin 1990. p. 62.
24. Paglia 1993. p. 187.
25. Posner 1992. p. 23.
26. Mason 1995. pp. 172-3.
27. Welsh 1994. p. 128.
28. Porter 1996. pp. 248, 252.
29. Thornton 1997. p. 246.
30. Davidson 2003. p. 130.
31. Whitebook 2003. pp. 335, 337-8.
32. Scruton 2005. p. 55.
33. Byrne 2013. pp. 1-4.

Bibliography

Books

• Altman, Dennis (1982). The Homosexualization of America. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-4143-2.
• Bernasconi, Robert (2005). Honderich, Ted, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926479-1.
• Byrne, Romana (2013). Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4411-0081-8.
• Caplan, Jane (1981). The Cambridge Women's Studies Group, ed. Women in Society: Interdisciplinary Essays. London: Virago. ISBN 0-86068-083-5.
• Davidson, Arnold (2003). Gutting, Gary, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-60053-8.
• Dews, Peter (2007). Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London: Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-574-6.
• duBois, Page (1988). Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-16757-7.
• Foucault, Michel (1979) [1976]. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-1094-1.
• Foucault, Michel (1999). Religion and culture: Michel Foucault. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-92362-X.
• Gay, Peter (1985). The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume I: Education of the Senses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503728-6.
• Greer, Germaine (1985). Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility. London: Picador. ISBN 0-330-28551-3.
• Halperin, David M. (1990). One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90097-2.
• Macey, David (1993). The Lives of Michel Foucault. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 978-0091753443.
• Mason, Michael (1995). The Making of Victorian Sexuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-285312-0.
• McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. (2011). Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York: McGraw Hill. ISBN 0078034884.
• Merquior, J. G. (1991). Foucault. London: FontanaPress. ISBN 0-00-686226-8.
• Miller, James (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0671695507.
• Mills, Sara (2004). Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415245692.
• O'Brien, Patricia (1989). Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History. London: University of California. ISBN 0-520-06429-1.
• Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-017209-2.
• Posner, Richard (1992). Sex and Reason. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-80279-9.
• Porter, Roy (1996). Keddie, Nikki R., ed. Debating Gender, Debating Sexuality. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-4655-1.
• Scruton, Roger (2005). Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-8033-0.
• Scruton, Roger (1994). Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation. London: Phoenix. ISBN 1-85799-100-1.
• Smart, Barry (2002). Michel Foucault. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415285339.
• Thornton, Bruce S. (1997). Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-3226-5.
• Welsh, Alexander (1994). Freud's Wishful Dream Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03718-3.
• Whitebook, Joel (2003). Gutting, Gary, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-60053-8.

Journals

• Foucault, Michel (1982). "Critical Inquiry, 1982, Vol 8, No. 4".

External links

• Summaries of the book:
• Previews of the original French editions: La volonté de savoir, La volonté de savoir (Google Books)