The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Vintage)

by Michel Foucault

book data

2,197 ratings, 4.01 average rating, 146 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		33%
4		39%
3		21%
2		4%
1		0%

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published

April 14th 1990 (first published 1976) by Vintage

binding

Paperback, 176 pages

isbn

0679724699 (isbn13: 9780679724698)

description

The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern se...more

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06/01/08

Matthew rated it:

bookshelves: gay-non-fiction

Read in October, 2006

I suppose it's high time I write a review of this book, as I finished it several days ago. At the time, though, it was quite late, and I have much to say -- or at least, I thought I did -- so I wanted to wait until I had more time. And here we are. To summarize, I think Foucault's argument is quite interesting, and the ideas he proffers are mind-boggling... and yet, they also have an extremely large blind-spot: the individual's sexuality or, to put it another way, sexuality as the individual exp...more

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3 comments

01/03/08

Trevor rated it:

A much more difficult Foucault - and not nearly as interesting as his history of madness. He seems to take a long time to get started and does seem to repeat himself an awful lot.

All the same, the ideas around the difference between Western and Eastern notions of sexuality are well with thinking about. Essentially Eastern sexuality is an erotic thing - something understood through experience. Western sexuality is 'scientific' in the sense that it only makes sense once we can tal...more

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5 comments

02/14/08

Yumi rated it:

bookshelves: theory-history-sociology

um. what can i say about this book that hasnt already been said? i read it my second year of college and it blew my mind, and in a good way, unlike kant, who made me cry actual tears in overwhelming frustration. foucaults ability to trace the burgeoning relationship between science and sexuality, the changes in the ways of perceiving a womans body, the notion of the creation of (a) sexuality, and, of course, the dynamics of power and discourse, are nothing short of brilliant in this classic stud...more

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05/30/09

Bradley rated it:

Reading this for my Materialist Workshop/Reading Group. We've delved into Birth of the Clinic, a few of his Lectures, and the three volumes of History of Sexuality. Foucault said that History of Sexuality was supposed to be his magnum opus. It took him nearly a decade to complete, and it is comprised mainly of 'Big Ideas,' in the sense that Foucault often forgets to flesh out the details of his work. He paints in broad brush strokes, and I attribute this lack of detail to his burgeoning status ...more Reading this for my Materialist Workshop/Reading Group. We've delved into Birth of the Clinic, a few of his Lectures, and the three volumes of History of Sexuality. Foucault said that History of Sexuality was supposed to be his magnum opus. It took him nearly a decade to complete, and it is comprised mainly of 'Big Ideas,' in the sense that Foucault often forgets to flesh out the details of his work. He paints in broad brush strokes, and I attribute this lack of detail to his burgeoning status at the time.
By the 1980's he was no longer a young-hot-shot intellectual on the make, he was a middle-aged, established titan of critical theory, renowned the world over. He did not need to put down every footnote (in fact there are no footnotes in the Intro.). He no longer has to really show his work, because everybody can predict the conclusions he will reach based on his previous published texts.
While Birth of the Clinic ends with a beautiful set of surrealistic images related to the immutability of death, and the frailty of human existence, History of Sexuality is less prosaic. The last chapter of this Introductory text consists of Foucault clinging to the idealism of the Sexual Revolution. While the sixties were about the "plenitude of the possible," as he says, it is less important to cast the radicalism of the sixties as demanding unobtainable Utopian fantasies, it is more important to keep the discourses of radical change alive.

This series of books were written on the cusp of the Swinging 70's and the Moral Majority Paranoia of the 80's (Reagan and Thatcher, Pat Robertson, and co.) and Foucault is a kind of soothsayer predicting hard times to come for the New Left. He was right! It is only fitting that he wrote this while he was dying of AIDS. His death signified everything that went wrong with the Sexual Revolution, and everything that had been co-opted by "The Powers that Be," in lieu of that dying Idealism. When I read this book I remember something my professor said was written on the city walls of Paris by the radical students in May '68... "Let us be realists and demand the impossible." (less)

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05/24/07

Holly rated it:

bookshelves: taught, theory

There's some interesting juxtapositions here, but if you've read a reasonable amount of Freud, had some early exposure to Thomas Kuhn, and plowed through a lot of Max Weber (as Foucault has, compare "Discipline & Punish" to the 2 Volume "Economy & Society" and the more difficult "Methodology of the Social Sciences"), there's nothing especially new here. The punch line is interesting, and I give Foucault credit for his striking formulation of it, but I'm not blown a...more

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05/27/09

Kristen Shaw rated it:

bookshelves: critical-theory, sexuality

Read in May, 2009

In the words of my professor, "we're living in a post-Foucauldian world, so this will seem really self-evident, but that doesn't mean its right." Coming from that angle, I've been reading from a very critical position. I like Foucault's thesis and his examination seems pretty exhaustive, at least historically. I'm really caught on the discussion of the bourgeoisie and proletariat 'sexual bodies.' Foucault's statement that the technology of sexuality and proliferation of sexual power di...more

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02/18/09

Gill rated it:

bookshelves: academic

Read in January, 2007

How do our ideas of gender and sex relate to the political economy and history of Europe... well, voila!

Strange to see how powerful this book is in its arguments and to still have sociobiologist come out to explain how modern sexuality actually can be explained by genetic coding of our behavior... Maybe there is somewhere in between? The subject internalizes social power, but is there some sort of rhyme or reason to social power besides material accumulation or accumulation of power ...more

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06/09/09

Jesse rated it:

bookshelves: on-my-bookshelf

Read in May, 2009

What can one possibly hope to say, especially in a capsule review? Much more accessible than I was anticipating, and the way it flipped over and then systematically deconstructed a general assumption of mine (and most people, I'd say)--namely, that the steadily increasing discourse regarding sex, sexuality and the human body over the last several centuries has NOT led to a more open and liberated understanding of such topics, but has actually led to more restriction and, inevitably, guilt.
...more

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05/29/07

Amol rated it:

bookshelves: philosophy-proper, social-historical

The more I get angry at this book, the more I become intrigued.

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02/03/08

Velcro Putnam rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

[continued from above]

By making himself both rubber and glue, Delany employs what James calls a "diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading," where two time periods are present in a single text: both the time of the composition and the time of the explication, the time of writing and the time of reading; I would argue that "Wagner/Artaud" also holds a dual sense of "time when i began this essay" and "time when i finished it."
...more [continued from above]

By making himself both rubber and glue, Delany employs what James calls a "diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading," where two time periods are present in a single text: both the time of the composition and the time of the explication, the time of writing and the time of reading; I would argue that "Wagner/Artaud" also holds a dual sense of "time when i began this essay" and "time when i finished it."

His 1991 essay "Reading at Work: and Other Activities Frowned on by Authority: A Reading of Donna Haraway's 'Manefesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s" furthers this 'diachronic discourse-space' by laying out a reading of his own reading of Haraway's article, complete with his uncertainties, mis-readings, reservations, and revised explanations. Part of the essay's pleasure comes from the double-entendre of the title's first phrase, but a more substantial portion of it deploys from the way he mobilizes such dual-consciousness throughout the piece, departing from his initial sense of 'cyborg-as-metaphor' to venture through doubt, corrections, and supplementary evaluations to arrive at 'metaphor-as-cyborg' (James' terms). Along the way, he skirts (with characteristic reticence and suggestiveness) a Derridean counter to preconceptions with castration, wherin the Lacanian "image of inevitability is an artifact of the phallocentrism underlying psychoanalytic thought - an artifact conjured up by the surrounding discourse in order to ensure its own stability."

Foucault made similar arguments about the rhetoric of sexual suppression by which medical, education, and religious institutions presupposed a notion of "the unspeakable truth" hidden within sexuality: if people are convinced that they are enslaved by their inability to speak the truth about their sexuality, then they will turn to a higher authority that can divine the exact nature, proper role, and moral significance of their individual activity - and will soon stop to see any other sort of action as important. In this sense, sexuality becomes a metaphor for the unknown, and the institutions that authorize a particular interpretation of that metaphor enforce it as a technology of knowledge and power - a cyborg whose only program is to say "neener neener neener, you don't have a weiner."

[continued below]

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01/26/09

Beth rated it:

Oh. My. Gods. Since when is an unnecisarily convoluted theory of power the mark of somebody we should praise for ever and ever amen? Ye gods. No citations, no specifics and a huge reliance on circular logic that is the antithesis of Ockham's Razor. Yuck! But say so in a Queer Theory class and you will meet with silence and dirty looks, because, hey, all talk of power to the people is welcome, even if it is so complicated that the people can't understand it.

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04/09/09

Andrew rated it:

Read in January, 2009

Can we really believe Foucault's account of the development of sexuality in Western culture? Was there really a time when sex was a non-tabooed game? Can we really believe his essentializations of pre-modern and "Eastern" societies with their "Ars erotica." A bit of a tough sell... The best thing about the book may simply be getting us to take a hard look at the needless prohibitions on sex in our culture.

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12/03/08

Johnny's Un-American rated it:

What is there to say in a review on goodreads.com about a book that has changed the way you think about nearly everything without in some way demeaning how profound you think the book really is? In the last few months, I've written extensively on Foucault. Maybe I'll post some of my writing. Are you willing to read twenty pages of my research?

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10/24/08

Adam Z rated it:

Read in October, 2008

holy shit! this book is amazing/riveting as helllll. 400 years of history of institutions and their treatments of sexuality in the west, including the church, schools, psychologists, physicians, the spaces where studied, how sex became an object of study, and most importantly WHY we proclaim so LOUDLY that we're oppressed! watch out, how you're talking about sex might just be another form of subjugation...

The most fascinating part is Foucault places the new paradigm of sexuality (...more

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07/16/08

Kevin rated it:

bookshelves: philosophy

the failure of semiotics and semiology is not complete yet. the use of words to replace true symbols points to the inward navel gazing of READERS, who READ into things, not study the biostructure (or rather the biogenetic structures) of form, movement, semiologists seem to be unaware of the myths that suffuse the very words they employ to dissect other more sophisticated structures. indeed cosmopolitan, the craft is wedded to tools born in the lit criticism freud used and called psychoanalysis. ...more

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01/29/09

Ariel rated it:

Foucault is incredibly verbose, so this was not a pleasant read. However, his perspective on the irony of the fact that most believe that sexuality has been "repressed" is fascinating. His theory is unique and interesting, but his writing is hard to get through. I'd sparknote it.

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05/08/09

Matt rated it:

Read in November, 2008

Academia loves Foucault, apparently. I've been away too long, and we didn't do much theory in my undergraduate program. Still, for self-important critical theory, it makes sense! And I didn't want to kill myself afterwards, as is so often the case with this kind of thing.

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02/25/08

Tami Lynn rated it:

Read in March, 2008

Eh. To be honest, after reading the first 20 pages of this book I started skipping around a bit. The thing I like about Foucault is his direction. This was not like that. It was more like Susan Santog's Regarding the Pain of Others.
This causes a problem because, while the aforementioned Santog lit, was extremely redundant and unnecessarily superfluous (<--like the irony there?), it was more of an essay than a "book." In The History of Sexuality I fawned over the first 20 ...more

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05/15/08

Colin rated it:

Read in January, 2007

I read this when I was temping at a place called the Corporate Executive Board. Saucy! History of Sexuality was the first biopolitics-type reading I ever did outside of school, and is pretty much responsible for my understanding of what the hell Agamben was talking about when I started trying to read him. Anyway, this is a (it seemed to me, perhaps an expert would feel differently) not especially careful study of the way sexuality has manifested itself in more recent times and the way it's becom...more

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02/05/09

Kristin rated it:

this was amazing. it starts off in a way that you feel like he might be wrong, and then it all becomes clear and you no longer see society and sexuality in the same way. i won't say more. it's amazing. foucault, who went mad himself, is maddening.

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"Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite." More quotes...