In 1976 Michel Foucault published the first volume of his History of Sexuality, ‘The Will to Knowledge’
Let’s be blunt, Michel Foucault is hardly lazy day summer reading. One of the paramount philosophers and social theorists of the twentieth century, this French-born thinker published many famous texts during his lifetime, one of the foremost of which is arguably his volumes on the History of Sexuality. The first volume, ‘The Will to Knowledge’, deals with the repressive hypothesis and deployment of sexuality through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Written in unapologetically academic prose this book demands full concentration of its reader. However its worth in persevering comes from a new way of thinking of ourselves and how we relate to one another. Rather than sexuality actively having been repressed by moral values during the centuries preceding the twentieth, Foucault says that in fact it was forced into a discursive open by rituals like the Catholic confession, which eventually morphed from the relationship between priest and confessor into psychiatrist and patient or mentor and pupil.
As capitalism progressed and the bourgeoise rose, governments came to realise they were dealing not just with subjects but with populations, and therefore sexuality required a more rigorous examination by the state. At the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth, there was an explosion of medicalised analysis of sexuality, particularly centred upon perversions. Here is where perceived symptoms of perversion such as homosexuality began to draw scientific interest and became named and categorised for the first time. As Foucault says, ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species.’
Through this intense need to categorise all types of sexualities, identity became increasingly tied to sexuality during the course of the twentieth century, leading to today’s very much culturally delineated concepts of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’. Foucault himself was homosexual and died in 1984 of HIV/AIDS complications before he could publish the final volume of his sexuality series, ‘Confessions of the Flesh’. It is currently held from public view by his estate. However, the lasting effect of these volumes may be to illustrate how fickle it is that we allow as fleeting a notion as which sex we go to bed with to invoke such division and hostility in modern societies.
