The History of Sexuality
Histoire de la sexualité — Foucault's three-volume genealogy of sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (1976), The Use of Pleasure (1984), The Care of the Self (1984)
Tradition: French postmodernism / Foucauldian genealogy
The "repressive hypothesis" inverted: sexuality is not what power represses but what power produces — and the genealogy of the modern sexual subject through Greek, Roman, and early Christian practices of the self
The History of Sexuality is Foucault's last major project. Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge (1976), is a methodological and historical-philosophical text that inverts the "repressive hypothesis" — the commonsense view that the Victorians repressed sexuality and we are gradually liberating it. Foucault argues the opposite: the nineteenth century was not silent about sex but produced an enormous discourse on it, classifying, normalising, and creating new categories of sexual identity. "Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." After an eight-year interval (during which Foucault's plans for the project changed considerably), Volume 2 (The Use of Pleasure) and Volume 3 (The Care of the Self) appeared in 1984, just weeks before Foucault's death from AIDS-related illness. These later volumes turn to ancient Greek and Roman practices of the self, exploring how subjects fashioned themselves through ethical practices around sexuality and pleasure. Volume 4 (Confessions of the Flesh, on early Christian sexuality) was completed but withheld at Foucault's request; finally published in 2018.
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Editions cited
- The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978)
- The Use of Pleasure (Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1985)
- The Care of the Self (Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1986)
- Confessions of the Flesh (Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 2021; posthumous)
School Embodiments
The History of Sexuality is canonically postmodern — sexuality as discursively constructed, power as productive rather than merely repressive, the genealogical-historical method displacing essentialist analysis.
"Sexuality is not a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or an obscure domain which knowledge tries to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct." (HoS I, end of Part 4)
A complicated relation: Foucault was classified as a structuralist in the 1960s (against his own preference), and the History of Sexuality retains structuralist elements in its analysis of discursive formations.
"Discursive formations as the analytic units of power-knowledge." (HoS I, paraphrasing the methodological apparatus)
Foucault's working method is pragmatic-realist: trace what power-knowledge actually does — what discourses it produces, what subjects it constitutes, what bodies it shapes — rather than abstract critical analysis.
"What I am attempting to do is a history of truth — not what truth is, but what truth effects have been produced." (Foucault's general methodological self-description)
The History of Sexuality is the canonical constructivist analysis of sexuality — sexual identities, categories, and subjectivities are not natural givens but historical-discursive constructions.
"The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species." (HoS I, the canonical statement on identity-category production)
A complicated relation: Foucault is critical of orthodox Marxism but inherits from it the attention to material practices, productive forces, and the historical-economic embedding of intellectual life.
"Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth." (HoS I)
A retrospective affinity: the genealogical method treats subjects, identities, and institutions as ongoing historical processes rather than stable substances.
"What we call 'sexuality' is the long-term effect of a complex historical process." (HoS I, paraphrasing)
A complicated relation: Foucault was phenomenologically trained but came to criticise phenomenology's assumption of a transcendental subject. The History of Sexuality is partly an analysis of how the modern phenomenological subject was historically produced.
"The subject is what is at stake in the analysis." (Foucault, paraphrasing his self-understanding from the late 1970s)
A complicated relation: Volumes 2 and 3's turn to practices of the self has existentialist elements (the subject as self-fashioning), though Foucault locates self-fashioning in concrete historical-ethical practices rather than abstract free choice.
"From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art." (Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," 1983)
A retrospective engagement: analytic philosophy of mind and social ontology (Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger) develops Foucauldian analyses of "looping kinds" and socially constructed categories in analytic idiom.
"Categories of sexual identity as kinds that loop back on the people they categorise." (echoing HoS I via Ian Hacking)
A complicated relation: the History of Sexuality has been a major reference for liberation theology's analyses of power, discipline, and the production of subjectivity — though Foucault himself was sharply critical of universalising liberationist claims.
"Where there is power, there is resistance." (HoS I, the famous formulation)
Volumes 2 and 3 are a sustained engagement with Hellenistic ethics — Stoic, Epicurean, Cynic practices of the self — that Foucault sees as offering an alternative to modern subjection.
"The Greco-Roman practices of the self." (HoS II-III, the major theme of the later volumes)
Continental-philosophical tradition.
Post-structuralist tradition.
Internal Tensions
The eight-year gap between Volume 1 (1976) and Volumes 2-3 (1984) marks a major shift: from the analysis of disciplinary-biopolitical power to the turn toward Greek-Roman practices of the self. Whether this is continuous development or a real break is the central interpretive question. The posthumous publication of Volume 4 (Confessions of the Flesh, 2018) — held back at Foucault's request — has reopened the question of the complete shape of his ethical project. Recent biographical scholarship on Foucault's personal life, his experiments with the Iranian Revolution, and the ethical implications of his analyses has generated fresh interpretive debate.
I. Time
Historical time as the medium of genealogical analysis; the temporality of discursive formations, not abstract physical time.
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II. Space
The social space of disciplinary institutions — school, hospital, prison, family — as the site where sexual subjects are produced.
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III. Matter
The body as the disciplinary site — biopolitics as power working on living matter.
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IV. Observer
The subject as historically-discursively produced; plural, embodied, both shaped by power and capable of resistance through alternative practices of the self.
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V. Energy
The energies of pleasure and discipline — the force field within which subjects are formed.
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VI. Information
Discourse as the productive information of power-knowledge; constructed rather than discovered.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The History of Sexuality resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 26 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
6 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.