Culture, Nature, and History: The Case of Ancient Sexuality

2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 986-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Harper
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Specific Domain ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Site

AbstractThis article analyzes the configuration of biology, anthropology, and history over the last generation by taking the sub-field of the “history of sexuality” as a case study. The history of sexuality developed at a particularly important site of engagement with neighboring disciplines. I argue that the concepts of nature and culture that came to prevail among historians of sexuality were deeply influenced by the debate between a particular strand of evolutionary biology, namely sociobiology, and its critics, who were committed to cultural hermeneutics. This debate encouraged a formulation of nature and culture which is effectively dualist and which remains present within the sub-field. By focusing the analysis on the study ofancient(classical Mediterranean) sexuality, I seek detailed insights into the reception of this debate within a specific domain of historical investigation, one whose stakes have been particularly high because of the intervention of Michel Foucault. The article closes by arguing that biologists and anthropologists in the last two decades have advanced the study of culture as a part of nature, and that historians have much to gain by engaging with more recent models. The institution of monogamy is highlighted as an emerging theme of investigation that can only be approached with the unified insights of history, anthropology, and biology.

scholarly journals Kongen hersker, men regerer ikke - Guvernementalitet, statificering og statspraksis hos Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Nicolai Von Eggers ◽  
Mathias Hein Jessen
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Michel Foucault developed his now (in)famous neologism governmentality in the first of the two lectures he devoted to ’a history of governmentality, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). Foucault developed this notion in order to do a historical investigation of ‘the state’ or ‘the political’ which did not assume the entity of the state but treated it as a way of governing, a way of thinking about governing. Recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up Foucault’s notion of governmentality in his writing of a history of power in the West, most notably in The Kingdom and the Glory. It is with inspiration from Agamben’s recent use of Foucault that Foucault’s approach to writing the history of the state (as a history of governmental practices and the reflection hereof) is revisited. Foucault (and Agamben) thus offer another way of writing the history of the state and of the political, which focuses on different texts and on reading more familiar texts in a new light, thereby offering a new and notably different view on the emergence of the modern state and politics.

scholarly journals Something a Bit Peculiar? Sex, the Germans and the History of Sexuality

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
VICTORIA HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Human Life ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

Historians of sexuality are uniquely placed to act theflâneur. Loitering in an archive's seedier or more obscure files, they tour the marginal landscapes of the past. They can vicariously experience deviant activity while maintaining historical detachment, writing histories which titillate as much as educate. Fun though this may be, there is the danger that producing such texts benefits only the writers themselves. Michel Foucault famously suggested that writing about the history of sexuality occurs purely for the ‘speaker's benefit’. Historians have thus sought to prove that ‘marginal’ histories are of true academic, not just voyeuristic, significance. This quest has been particularly fruitful for histories of sexuality – stories which are fascinating not least because they are simultaneously marginal, or unspeakable, and utterly central to human life.

Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-93
Author(s):  
Christopher Hommerding
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Identity ◽  
Public History ◽  
Small Town ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

This essay examines the interpretation of the lives and work of two queer men, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, at the Pendarvis Historic Site in the small town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Using this interpretation as a case study, the essay addresses how public historians might more fully incorporate the history of sexuality into historic site interpretative models. It suggests a number of strategies for helping visitors think critically about the history of sexuality and how our current understandings of sexual identity are not always useful or accurate ways of thinking about queer pasts.

scholarly journals A CONSTITUIÇÃO DO SUJEITO EM MICHEL FOUCAULT A PARTIR DA HISTÓRIA DA SEXUALIDADE

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 158
Author(s):  
Ketlin Kroetz ◽  
José Luis Schifino Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Single Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

RESUMOEste ensaio objetiva discutir o modo como Michel Foucault abordou a constituição do sujeito a partir de a História da Sexualidade em seus volumes (I) A vontade de saber, (II) O uso dos prazeres e (III) O cuidado de si. O trabalho utiliza aportes teóricos de autores que trabalham “com” o filósofo francês em torno dos processos de subjetivação. Sem querer fechar conclusões e/ou propor uma leitura unívoca sobre o tema, o texto que segue conduz o debate em torno da invenção do sujeito e dos distintos modos de constituir-se/devir-a-ser sujeito da experiência no interior dos estudos foucaultianos e seu entrecruzamento com a Educação.Palavras-chave: Constituição do sujeito. História da sexualidade. Michel Foucault.ABSTRACTThis essay aims to discuss how Michel Foucault approached the theme of the subject constitution from the History of Sexuality in its volumes (I) An Introduction, (II) the use of pleasure and (III) The care of the self. The work use a series of theoretical contributions from authors who works “with” the French philosopher around the subjectivation processes. Without any pretention of closing conclusions and/or propose a single reading about the theme, the following text lead us to the debate around the invention of the subject and the different ways to constitutes/becomes the subject of the experience in the field of the Foucauldian studies and its intersection with Education.Keywords: Subject constitution. History of sexuality. Michel Foucault.

scholarly journals HF01-03 THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY AND MICHEL FOUCAULT

2021 ◽  
Vol 206 (Supplement 3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Lukitsch ◽  
Michael Moran
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Pornographic Confessions? Sex Work and Scientia Sexualis in Foucault and Linda Williams

2009 ◽  
pp. 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Sex Industry ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Disciplinary System ◽  
Confessional Discourse

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences in terms of the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities within a disciplinary system of power.

Michel Foucault (1976): Selections from The History of Sexuality

2020 ◽  
pp. 418-434
Author(s):  
Joyce Appleby ◽  
Elizabeth Covington ◽  
David Hoyt ◽  
Michael Latham ◽  
Allison Sneider
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
History Of

Review: Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 293-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Elden
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The State ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of

In February 2018 the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality was finally published. Les aveux de la chair [Confessions of the Flesh] was edited by Frédéric Gros, and appeared in the same Gallimard series as Volumes 1, 2 and 3. The book deals with the early Christian Church Fathers of the second to fifth centuries. This essay reviews the book in relation to Foucault’s other work, showing how it sits in sequence with Volumes 2 and 3, but also partly bridges the chronological and conceptual gap to Volume 1. It discusses the state of the manuscript and whether it should have been published, given Foucault’s stipulation of ‘no posthumous publications’. It outlines the contents of the book, which is in three parts, on the formation of a new experience, on virginity and on marriage. There are also some important supplementary materials included. The review discusses how it begins to answer previously unanswered questions about Foucault’s work, and offers some suggestions about how the book might be received and discussed.

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