Foucault on the origins of “homosexuality”

Brian Hamilton — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:31:05 +0000

The story Foucault tells about the emergence of “sexuality” in his History of Sexuality, v. 1 involves all kinds of fascinating (and unsettling) reversals of conventional wisdom on the topic. The whole book aims to overturn the basic claim that sexuality has, in the modern era, been fiercely repressed, so that now we have to talk about it as much as possible, identify all our various sexualities, in order to free sex itself from the tyrannical ghost of the Victorian era. He calls that the “repressive hypothesis,” and opposes it with two main arguments: (1) the drive to talk about our sexuality and describe it in detail is actually an extension of the Victorian program, not its subversion; and (2) the idea of repression presumed relies in any case on too simplistic an understanding of power (as simply negative, simply top-down, etc.). On the whole, his argument is fantastically compelling. But I’m still unsure how to deal with some of its consequences.

For example, take this quote on the new understanding of homosexuality that arose in the 19th century–an understanding we clearly still cling to in the 21st.

bq. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality…. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature…. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (p. 43)

In a very similar way, many people (on every side of the contemporary debate) continue to speak of sexual orientation as constitutive of an identity, an essential and all-affecting part of each human person. But hearing the root of that way of speaking makes me extremely skeptical of it. Thoughts?

Brian Hamilton » Sexuality

Foucault on the origins of “homosexuality”