Acts or Identities? Rethinking Foucault on Homosexuality. Issue 2 (October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Grassi, Umberto
• Is Part Of: Cultural history. Volume 5:Issue 2(2016)
• Page Start: 200
• Page End: 221
• Publication Date: 2016-10
• Subjects: gender -- sexuality -- male and female homosexuality -- intersexuality -- cross-dressing -- Mediterranean -- colonial history -- queer studies; Civilization -- History -- Periodicals; 306.09
• DOI: 10.3366/cult.2016.0126
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2045-290X

Abstract

Abstract : In the first part of this article I summarize the ongoing historiographical debate over Michel Foucault's theory of the nineteenth-century medical 'invention' of homosexuality, as it was formulated in the 1976 first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge . Starting from the now-outdated conflict between 'essentialists' and 'social constructionists', I underline the 'blind spots' of the Foucauldian narrative as highlighted by postcolonial, feminist and queer criticisms. In the second part, I shift to the historiography of the early modern Iberian and Colonial world. Even though a lot of work in this field has already been done, I think that a full comprehension of the connections between this research and the international debate on the history of gender and sexual transgressions is still lacking. Through the analysis of this literature, I propose a revision of Foucault's account, questioning the idea of the nineteenth-century 'great paradigm shift'. On the one hand, these studies address the long-term genealogy of issues that has fully ripened in the nineteenth century. On the other, they confirm the coexistence in past societies of a multiplicity of understandings of sexual behaviors that questions the hypothesis of a succession of coherent and homogeneous epistemological patterns.