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Michel FoucaultThe History of Sexuality: Volume 1
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1976A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Criticisms of Foucault’s Personal Life
Michel Foucault was a highly regarded French philosopher in the 20th century. His works have been studied around the world, and he is lauded as a master scholar. As of 2017, Foucault has been cited in academic papers and university textbooks more than one million times. Throughout his career, Foucault was a strong advocate for gay rights and sexual liberation. The philosopher was open about his relationships with members of the same sex and spent more than 20 years of his life with his partner Daniel Defert. His multi-volume study of the political and social histories of sexuality became a foundation for future critical theory. The History of Sexuality influenced queer theory, feminist theory, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and historicism. However, the philosopher’s thesis is undercut by a complicated personal sexual history and allegations of misconduct that have caused a divide in the academic community: Some academics dismiss Foucault’s intellectual contributions based on the allegations that have been made, and others dismiss the allegations as anti-gay bias.
The allegations against Foucault are complex, and there is not a clear-cut understanding of the facts: In 1966, Foucault took a position teaching French philosophy in the North African country of Tunisia. Later, Foucault’s colleague Guy Sorman claimed that Foucault had sexual relations with children ranging from eight to ten years old, offering them money in exchange. The word “rape” was not used. Sorman regretted that he did not interfere at the time, but he admitted that there was no discussion of consent. Later, Sorman suggested that he did not have substantial evidence to support his claims.
Foucault was a public advocate for lowering the age of consent to 13, and, in 1977, he signed a petition requesting a legal change. Foucault was not the only French academic to sign the petition; also on the list were many members of the French intelligentsia, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. At the time, many members of the French academic community advocated for sexual freedom and indulgence. Pedophile activist groups gained political backing and argued that anti-pedophile sentiments reflected a larger societal problem with anti-gay bias.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault pointed to the classical age as a model for less restrictive sexual practices, including sexual relationships between men and young boys. Foucault argued that children could provide consent, while his passages on classical pedophilia emphasize the roles of dominance and submission. In the first volume, he provided a narrative about a farm hand who engaged in sexual activity with a little girl. Foucault criticized the family of the girl for their complaint against the farm hand: “The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action” (31). In later volumes, Foucault points to the sexual freedom between ancient Greek men and boys as evidence of its social acceptance prior to the Victorian age. Foucault raged against a repressive society while enjoying freedom and overt inattention to his sexual misconduct. It is important to note, however, that Foucault’s writing on the sexuality of children fit into a larger discussion on the topic within the philosophical community.
Sorman’s claims about Foucault’s sexual practices have driven conservative media to dismiss Foucault’s body of work. Mervyn Bendle, Senior Lecturer at James Cook University, discusses the accusations in “Michel Foucault as a Moral Monster” and argues that Foucault’s immoral perspective should cast doubt on the morality and rationality of his arguments. However, other scholars claim that the allegations against Foucault are false and that his ideas about child sexuality are relative to his ongoing attempt to dismantle power structures and cultural norms. Others argue that, even if the allegations are true, Foucault’s intellectual contributions outweigh his moral violations and that his work should be considered independently of his transgressions.
Scholarly Context: Foucault’s Contributions to Philosophy
Foucault was greatly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, who emphasized a new way of thinking about history in On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche argued that the present is independent of the past, and that there is no such thing as good and evil—only cultural norms. Nietzsche’s historical approach to the study of morality inspired Foucault to examine structures of power using a similar technique. Foucault translated Nietzsche’s approach into larger historical studies of topics like madness, discipline, punishment, and sexuality. He rejected the view of history as a series of political maneuvers and the related claim that power is always expressed through restriction and prohibition. Rather than observing history as a series of actions by governments and a queue of political leaders, Foucault considered a full spectrum of historical accounts, arguing that history is larger than a political narrative. This approach can be seen in The History of Sexuality. Foucault focuses his attention on peripheral sexualities—the sexual tendencies of individuals who did not align with the traditional, marital model projected by the Victorian age. Nietzsche showed Foucault that there is a way to study these structures that emphasizes the outliers. Foucault found that individuals living on the fringes of society had the most to teach him about the way power manifests.
Madness and Civilization provides another example of Foucault’s historical approach. In this work, the philosopher argues that the medicalization of madness created a framework for oppression. He suggests that mental institutions since the 18th century provided a lower quality of life for those with mental illness than they would have experienced prior to this era. Foucault believed that a societal trend toward humanitarianism created systems of oppression rather than liberation. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault furthers these ideas. The humanitarian shift put pressure on disciplinary systems to hide punishment out of sight. Forms of deliberately public punishment such as the stocks and the scaffold began to disappear, and prisons and prisoners were hidden from public view. Like hospitals treating the “sexually perverse,” prisons became a place where control could be enacted upon those not aligning with cultural norms.
The History of Sexuality reflects this insight. The philosopher argues that one of the four expressions of power over bodies is the medicalization of sexuality. This created a system for classifying and organizing sexualities as either healthy or unhealthy. The latter were treated and hidden away. Rather than blaming the wealthy, or the bourgeois, for the exertions of power, Foucault argues in all his works that power is pervasive. It permeates every corner of society. Like Nietzsche, Foucault did not see a single cause-effect relationship between events in history. There was not a singular group of people shifting the entire cultural attitude about sex and sexuality. Instead, all of society makes strategic choices about power that contribute to a large and complex web of interrelated consequences. The explosion of language and terms surrounding sexual identities, mental illnesses, and criminal offenses reflects the way power produces rather than represses.
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