The History of Sexuality

The History of Sexuality is a four-volume work by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which he examines how "sexuality" emerged as a discursive object and as a separate sphere of life. His central claim is that the idea that every individual possesses a sexuality is a relatively recent development in Western societies. The first volume, The Will to Knowledge, was published in France in December 1976; the second, The Use of Pleasure, and the third, The Care of the Self, appeared in 1984 and 1987 respectively, while the fourth, Confessions of the Flesh, was not published until 2018, posthumously. Foucault had been working on the project after Discipline and Punish (1975), and had already announced it in Madness and Civilization and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

In the first volume Foucault criticises what he calls the repressive hypothesis: the belief, widespread in the twentieth century, that bourgeois and capitalist society from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century silenced sex. Against this he argues that discourse about sexuality actually proliferated. From the Counter-Reformation, Catholic confession pushed believers to turn desire into speech, and from the eighteenth century onward the state, medicine, pedagogy and criminal justice took up sex as a matter of population, health and order. This produced categories such as the homosexual or the pervert, which had not previously existed as identities. The book also examines the emergence of a scientia sexualis, a body of knowledge that claims to uncover the truth of sex, in contrast with the ars erotica of ancient and Eastern societies. Foucault proposes an analytics of power that is not reducible to law or to the figure of the sovereign but runs through social relations. He closes with the notion of biopower, a form of power exercised since the eighteenth century both over individual bodies and over the life of populations.

The later volumes shift focus. The Use of Pleasure studies classical Greek texts to show how an ethical practice around pleasure was constructed, while The Care of the Self examines the cultivation of the self in Greco-Roman culture. Foucault planned further volumes but died in 1984 without completing the project. His will forbade posthumous publication, yet the fourth volume appeared in 2018, with the support of his family and of the publisher Gallimard.

The work had an enormous influence on historiography, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies, and it became a key reference for understanding sexuality as a historical and social construction rather than a natural and universal reality.