Is There a History of Sexuality?

Abstract

Sex has no history. 1 It is natural fact, grounded in the functioning of the body, and, as such, it lies outside of history and culture. by contrast, does not properly refer to some aspect or attribute of bodies. Unlike sex, sexuality is cultural production: it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its physiological capacities by an ideological discourse.' Sexuality is not somatic fact; it is cultural effect. then, does have history-though (as I shall argue) not very long one. To say that, of course, is not to state the obvious -despite the tone of assurance with which I just said it-but to advance controversial, suspiciously fashionable, and, perhaps, strongly counter-intuitive claim. The plausibility of such claim might seem to rest on nothing more substantial than the prestige of the brilliant, pioneering, but largely theoretical work of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault.3 According to Foucault, sexuality is not thing, natural fact, fixed and immovable element in the eternal grammar of human subjectivity, but that set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by certain deployment of a complex political technology.4 Sexuality, Foucault insists in another passage,

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