The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1
Michel Foucault
Vintage Books (1990). 168 pp.
Foucault’s History of Sexuality asks how the notion of sexual identity became common sense and how sexual desire became associated with revealing the true self. Though considered a postmodern thinker, Foucault’s method is anchored in his work as a historian of Western modernity, covering not just sexuality but a wide range of social and political topics. In light of Foucault’s work, the history of sex can be seen as a procession of different historically contingent sexual regimes, which made claims on bodies, normalcy, health, morality, and the future of society.
One of the major arguments of The History of Sexuality is that Western society is not now nor has ever been sexually repressed. Foucault first lays out the familiar narrative of sexual repression and the need to find the truth about sexuality—through therapy, religion, medicine, and the like—as a quest to liberate desire and access the self. He argues that when looking for evidence of this repression one discovers an explosion of discourse about sex rather than its dwindling. Foucault traces the investments in “normal” sexuality of many social sciences, medical practices, political and social institutions to make the case that Western society has been ironically “speaking of [sex] ad infinitum,” (35).
“The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth” and that truth tied to the secret of who we really are (56). At the juncture of the body, relationships, family, and cultural norms, sex became the capacious vessel holding promises of understanding and pleasure as well as social futurity and liberation.
A second major implication of the work is that sexuality, i.e. the linkage between sex and identity rather than sex as discreet acts, is also a modern development. “The nineteenth-century homosexual,” writes Foucault, “became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood … Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions …Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto…a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species,” (43).
Indeed, Foucault shows that the tie of sex to essential self was a historical effect produced and reinforced by a number of social, cultural, medical, juridical, and religious institutions. Looking at when certain vocabularies became dominant and what sort of social practices helped make them so, the homosexual/heterosexuals divide appears less and less like a natural or trans-historical way of thinking about sexuality.
Having historicized the process by which “normal” heterosexuality and “deviant” homosexuality were invented, Foucault creates the possibility of dreaming and demanding a new sexual order—one that could be more fluid and tied to desire rather than to bodily sex. It is this possibility that motivates queer activism and scholarship along with some schools of contemporary feminism.
The History of Sexuality is arguably the foundational text for the field of queer theory, an academic discipline examining the intersection of gender, sexuality, bodies, and politics. A key tenet of queer theory is that gender and sexuality are not fixed categories dictated by bodies, but are less stable sets of expectations and performances contingent upon what norms and knowledge dominate a particular moment.
Though his work and his legacy challenge any fixed sexual norm, Michel Foucault himself did not intend to be a liberator of sex. Rather, more Foucauldian questions would be: What makes us think that sexuality holds the key to our liberation? What forms of sexuality and desire do we imagine as liberatory or, at least, up-ending of current power relations?
In other words, though part of Foucault’s legacy has been a certain kind of sexual identity politics, “sexual liberation” and “sexual identity” are part of what Foucault was questioning as historical phenomena.
The current age of gay identity politics, if anything, seems to point to renewed investments in sexual identity as a basis for entering into public and religious life. For Christians, unmooring the naturalness of “straight” and “gay” identities may feel further unsettling. Reckoning with Foucault, though, also presents believers with an opportunity to return with fresh eyes to the Bible, laying aside a discourse about sexual identity that has become comfortable for Christians as children of modernism in order to better speak about sex as the children of God. The Church can proclaim the soul and humanity’s being made in the image of God as the source of identity-defining truth and grasp the Bible’s language for sexual ethics.
In today’s public sphere, some Christians frame themselves as defenders of “traditional marriage” and “heterosexuality” as though those are synonymous with biblical sexual ethics. But they are not. After all, what the Bible describes as traditional and natural to this earth is brokenness—not “traditional” sexuality, nor the identity claims of heterosexuality and homosexuality. As traditional sexuality and marriage are increasingly cast as ideas on “the wrong side of history,” it may also be useful to re-center conversations on the reality that the Bible’s teaching on sex for all people has always been and will continue to be profoundly countercultural in any historical moment.
In teaching the whole of the Christian sexual ethic and its prohibitions on lust, premarital sex, adultery, and, yes, same sex relations, Christians are teaching, a view of sexual intimacy that is bound up with our role as divine image bearers. As such, this sexual ethic is unlikely to “feel normal” for all but the rarest of fallen humans unless they rely on the power of the Christ, the accountability of community, and the Bible’s assurance of God’s plan for this world, including sex.
In the world after Foucault, believers might seize the possibilities for loving, humble ministry that does not treat same-sex temptation as any more identity-defining than other biblically prohibited desires and, in the process, present a more winsomely Christ-like witness.
Laura Kenna is a writer and editor as well as an independent scholar. She holds a PhD in American Studies from George Washington University. She most recently taught as faculty for Writing and Cultural Criticism at the Trinity Forum Academy fellowship program in Royal Oak, Maryland and has been a regular guest lecturer on “Trends in Americana” as part of the Public Diplomacy track at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute.
