History of Sexuality

The History of Sexuality is Michel Foucault's multi-volume genealogical study, published between 1976 and 1984, that examines how sexuality became a privileged site for the production of truth about the self in Western cultures. It is not a history of sexual practices, desires, or repression but a genealogy of how the very concept of "sexuality" — as a deep truth of one's being, a hidden force that must be confessed, analyzed, and normalized — was constructed by specific discursive and institutional practices.

The first volume, The Will to Knowledge, argued that sexuality was not repressed by Victorian power but actively produced as an object of knowledge and intervention. The subsequent volumes — The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self — shifted from the analysis of power to the analysis of ethical self-formation in ancient Greek and Roman cultures. This shift has been read as a turn away from politics toward ethics, but the more defensible reading is that Foucault was tracing the genealogical preconditions of modern Subjectivation: the practices through which individuals learned to constitute themselves as ethical subjects long before Christianity or psychoanalysis provided the vocabulary.

The persistent confusion of the History of Sexuality with a history of sexual liberation or repression misses its central claim: sexuality is a technology of self that produces the subject as a truth-telling being, and that production is the real operation of power.