The History of Sexuality and Power

This topic concerns the argument that sexuality is not a timeless natural essence but a historically produced object of knowledge and a target of power, an argument most associated with Michel Foucault.

Definition

An approach that studies sexuality as historically variable and produced by relations of power and knowledge, rather than as a fixed biological drive that history merely represses or liberates.

Scope

It covers Foucault's analysis of how modern discourses of medicine, psychiatry, law, and confession produced sexuality as a domain of truth about the self and brought new sexual types, such as 'the homosexual', into being. It also treats the social-constructionist historiography of sexuality that followed, and Rubin's account of the political hierarchies governing sexual practices. The treatment is descriptive.

Core questions

• Was modern sexuality repressed by power, or produced by it?
• When and how did 'the homosexual' emerge as a kind of person rather than a description of acts?
• How do societies rank sexual practices into hierarchies of the respectable and the stigmatized?

Key theories

Against the repressive hypothesis

Foucault's claim that the modern era did not silence sex but incited an explosion of discourse about it, producing sexuality as an object of knowledge and a means by which power operates through, rather than merely against, desire.

The invention of the homosexual

The historicist thesis, developed by Foucault and Halperin, that the homosexual as a distinct kind of person is a recent invention of nineteenth-century medical and legal discourse, in contrast to earlier frameworks that named acts rather than identities.

The charmed circle of sexuality

Rubin's mapping of a hierarchy that grants respectability and protection to some sexual practices while stigmatizing others, and her call for a politics of sexuality not reducible to feminism.

History

Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976) reframed the study of sexuality around power and discourse and inspired a wave of constructionist history, including Halperin's work on ancient Greece. Rubin's 'Thinking Sex' (1984) extended the political analysis of sexual hierarchies, and together these texts shaped the historical sensibility of queer theory.

Debates

Constructionism versus essentialism

Whether sexual identities such as homosexuality are recent historical constructions or whether they name enduring human dispositions found across times and cultures.

Key figures

• Michel Foucault
• David Halperin
• Gayle Rubin

Seminal works

• foucault1976
• rubin1984
• halperin1990

Frequently asked questions

What is the 'repressive hypothesis'?

It is the common assumption, which Foucault challenged, that modern societies have suppressed and silenced sex; he argued instead that they generated an ever-expanding discourse about it.