Sociological Forum, Vol. 18, No.

3, September 2003 ( C 2003)

An Incitement to Discourse: Sociology and The History of Sexuality1

Steven Epstein2

In 2001, the Christian Century, a weekly based in Chicago, invited members of its editorial board to nominate problematic books for discussion in its spring books issuebooks whose inuence has, perhaps inadvertently, been harmful in some way (Steinfels, 2001:A10). Curiously, the editors could only come up with four, of which one, Michel Foucaults The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (HS1), was the choice of Ellen Charry, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. Charry wrote,
The effect of this book is to endorse the notion that the regulation of sexuality is the work of power elites who are seeking to garner and protect their position of dominance . . . . Though the part about the power elites provides the requisite Marxist tag, most of the book takes the libertarianlibertineanarchist line that to disapprove of any sexual pleasure (including necrophilia, pederasty, sadism, incest, rape, bestiality) is to disrupt the harmless games and casual pleasures of simple people. (Steinfels, 2001:A10)

Although Charrys dubious depictionMarxism? Power elites? suggests as casual an indifference to, or as willful a misreading of, Foucaults actual text as one might imagine, the noteworthy aspect of her account is the association of HS1 with a litany of sexual horrors. Somewhat similarly, in my hometown newspaper in 2002, a sociologist named Anne Hendershott penned an op-ed that blamed Foucauldians, social constructionist sociologists, and various fellow travelers in the academy for having dened down pedophilia as a form of deviance, thereby promoting the sexual exploitation

1 This

2 Department

essay marks the 25th anniversary of the rst publication in English of Michel Foucaults The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. of Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., Dept. 0533, La Jolla, California 92093-0533; e-mail: sepstein@ucsd.edu. 485
0884-8971/03/0900-0485/0
C

2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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of children (Hendershott, 2002).3 In light of such invocations of Foucault and HS1, it seems appropriate to ask: What makes this short book, rst published in French in 1976, threatening? Just how inuential has it been? To whom do its arguments matter in 200325 years after its rst publication in English and 19 years after its authors death? While I will be able only to hint at answers to these broad questions, I would like to consider in more detail the effect of the book on one particular audience, namely, sociologists in the United States. Lets begin with the numbers, which suggest a nice paradox. On one hand, since its rst publication in Robert Hurleys English translation in 1978,4 the book has seen a steady rise in prominence in the social sciences, at least as suggested by counts of English-language social science journal articles that cite it. From 69 articles citing HS1 in 197882, to 230 in 198387, to 421 in 198892, to 892 in 199397, the book has been on an upward trajectory of academic salience; only in recent years might the growth be leveling off (Fig. 1).5 (I feel fairly safe in assuming that an analysis of book publication in the social sciences would reveal a similar citational trend.) On the other hand, an examination of prominent U.S. sociology journals suggests that the American sociological mainstream has thought little about this book, or has attached little importance to it (Fig. 2).6 Between 1978 and 1999, HS1 was cited by only ve articles in the American Journal of Sociology (once each in 1984, 1987, 1993,

3 Hendershott

teaches sociology at the University of San Diego. The San Diego Union Tribune declined to publish the letter that I and two University of California, San Diego colleagues sent in response to her op-ed. 4 All parenthetical page references in this review are to my dilapidated 1980 edition (Foucault, 1980). 5 Of course, this rise in part reects the overall increase in social science journals and publications during the time period in question. Moreover, the apparent growth in citations over time may be overstated because some early citations are not captured in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI): citations in a journal in any year prior to the entry of that journal into the SSCIs database will not be reected in Fig. 1. A few other methodological points: (1) My analysis was conducted using the online resource www.webofscience.com. (2) Although I refer generically to articles, the SSCI also includes other journal publications, such as comments and reviews. The fact that the SSCI treats book reviews as citations of the book reviewed explains some of the earliest citations to HS1. (3) I end this analysis in 1999 because some citations do not get included in the SSCI until a year or two after the publication date; thus counts for 2000 and later remain incomplete at this writing. (4) It should go without saying that citation counts are only the roughest of indicators of the perceived importance (positive or negative) of any piece of scholarship, and that reliance on them as objective measures of scholarly worth is a practice of dubious legitimacy (Edge, 1979; and for a Foucauldian critique of citation counting, see Hicks and Potter, 1991). 6 Some citations to HS1 are not reected in Fig. 2 because of incompleteness in the SSCI database. For example, citations by articles appearing in Sociological Theorys 1994 queer theory symposium are not included in Fig. 2 because the SSCI did not begin including Sociological Theory in its database until later that year.

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Fig. 1. Citations to Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction in the Social Science Citation Index, 19781999.

1995, and 1997)7 and by only three in the American Sociological Review (in 1992, 1997, and 1998).8 There are some clear stand-outs: Theory and Society has shown a steady concern with HS1, and Sociological Quarterly, which discovered HS1 only in 1992, has taken an abiding interest in it ever since. But the record at most other inuential, generalist sociology journals in the United States is not impressive.9 Indeed, the essay you are now reading is apparently only the third publication in the history of Sociological Forum ever to cite HS1.10 Even when Contemporary Sociology, in its thoroughly controversial list of the Ten Most Inuential Books of the Past 25 Years, gave the nod to Foucault, the book it singled out was not HS1, but Discipline and Punish (Simon, 1996). With its Durkheim-like interest in shifts in styles of punishing, its use of Marxian theories of crime as a foil in its early pages, and its concern with domination and rationalization in ways that seemed vaguely
7 The

8 The ASR citations to HS1 were by Connell (1992), Goodwin (1997), and Webster and Hysom

AJS citations to HS1 were by Denzin (1984), Sewell (1987), Gorski (1993), Ellingson (1995), and Emirbayer (1997).

9 Specialty journals such as Social Science and Medicine and Sociology of Sport have had much

(1998). An additional ASR article cited HS1 in 2002 (Gross, 2002).

higher counts. It was also my impression while conducting this analysis, although I did not keep track, that certain British sociological journals, such as Sociology, have cited HS1 very frequently. The journal Signs was also well represented. But I am fairly sure the winner is the Journal of Homosexuality, which appears to cite HS1 several times per issue. 10 At least as reected in the SSCI as of September 2002. Note that the SSCI began indexing Sociological Forum only in 1988, so any earlier citations would not be captured. The two previous Sociological Forum articles are Riley (1999) and Lee (1999).

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Fig. 2. Citations to Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction in selected sociology journals, 19781999.

reminiscent of Weber, Discipline and Punish may simply have resonated with sociologists in a way that no other work by Foucault ever has or will (Foucault, 1979).11 How, then, ought we to think about the sociological signicance of HS1, a book arguably of growing importance to social scientists (and of deeply pernicious social inuence, according to some academics) yet of little apparent interest to the U.S. sociological mainstream? BEYOND REPRESSION AND LIBERATION It is not the easiest of books to approach. Barely 150 pages, HS1 is a provocation in essay form, one that is just as repetitive in drumming home a few sensational claims as it is schematic in gesturing at a rethinking of whole swaths of European history and theory. The writing is forceful and elegant (much unlike the clunky, jargon-ridden prose of too many latter-day, Anglophone Foucauldians), but by no means transparent. And as Robert Scholes, a Brown University semiotician, warned in a generally respectful review in the Washington Post in 1979, Foucaults writing seems to presume a certain kind of readerone who knows enough about such thinkers as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse to understand, without being told, that they are the ones under attack in these pages; and one who considers
11 I

analyzed citation counts for Discipline and Punish for 1999 only. In that year, 194 articles cited HS1 and 266 cited Discipline and Punish. If this nding is consistent with other years, it would suggest that Discipline and Punish may be more inuential within the social sciences generally, though not overwhelmingly so.

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their ideas signicant enough to care about Foucaults profound investment in overturning them (Scholes, 1979; see also Erebon, 2001:43). Moreover, this self-styled introduction is an elaborate teaser for a series of books that were never written. Early reviewers of HS1 listed with shivers of anticipation the titles of the volumes that had been announced as forthcoming in the seriesThe Flesh and the Body; The Childrens Crusade; The Woman, the Mother and the Hysteric; Perverts; and Populations and Races (Vera, 1979) but, perhaps for better and for worse, Foucault took a different and drier scholarly path, one which was then itself cut short by his early death. As a result, all we have to show for the catchy titles are the brief paragraphs in HS1 that were intended to pregure whole volumes. These are but a few of the difculties confronting those who would seek to make sense of the book. For most readers then, and for new readers even now, HS1 rightly attracts attention for its radical overturning of conventional wisdom: For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality (3). Once upon a time in the seventeenth century, according to this ofcial story, European sexual practices were loosely regulated and little concealed: But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie (3). Sexuality was then silenced, and yoked into the service of reproductive heterosexual monogamya tyranny over pleasure that was overthrown only by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. So axiomatic is this repressive hypothesis that, in my experience, a hefty proportion of undergraduate readers inevitably misses the irony that drips like swollen raindrops from the opening pages and takes Foucault simply to be recounting the standard wisdom: often these students are pleased to nd such an elegant restatement of what they already take on faith. Of course, Foucaults intention was rather different, as he sought to describe not the silencing of sex but the discursive explosion surrounding sex in the modern Westthe myriad ways in which sexuality has become an object to be administered as well as the stuff of self-knowledge, via the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing it to speak of itself (34). Even where sexuality might be imagined to be entirely absent, Foucault found it embedded, quite literally, in the architecture of everyday life: The space for classes, the shape of the tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or without curtains), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periodsall this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children (28).

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Amidst Foucaults rhetorical ourish, it is easy to miss his qualifying statements: He was not denying that sex had been prohibited or barred or masked or misapprehended (12). But to emphasize this negativity to imagine that power is that which just says no to sexis to miss the wildly productive and heterogeneous character of the regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse (34). Moreoverand crucially, from a political standpointif power does not so much negate sex as organize it through the proliferation of discourses about it, then the whole project of sexual liberation must be entirely rethought. If repression is not the problem, then antirepression is not the solution; indeed, if sexual meanings are orchestrated through an injunction that we speak about sex, then the triumphalist, let-it-all-hang-out rhetoric of sexual freedom is embarrassingly and dangerously consistent with dominant cultural forms. Here Foucault took particular aim at the grand Freudo-Marxist syntheses of Reich (1972) and Marcuse (1966), the scholarly prophets of misguided liberationism. It was bad enough that these writers adopted, largely without question, the Freudian presumption of a sexual drive which clamors for release but which society forces into a boxand thus failed to see the psychoanalysts couch as the modern clinical codication (65) of the Christian confessional, the place where we are enjoined to tell all. Worse still, they linked the Freudian theory of repression to a critique of the capitalist mode of production through a convenient master narrative: Because capitalism requires the channeling of libido into productive work, the workers body must be transformed into an instrument of labor through the repression of the sexual outlet and its restriction to a single function, that of producing the next generation of laborers. Stories such as these, Foucault insisted, [fail] to take into account the manifold objectives aimed for, the manifold means employed in the different sexual politics concerned with the two sexes, the different age groups and social classes (103). As the bases of a faulty and simplistic analysis, they provide little support for meaningful political action. The originality and freshness of this critique notwithstanding, much of what Foucault had to say in HS1 was readily comprehensible to readers already schooled in Foucaults earlier work (just as it was, perhaps, a turn-off to those who had never been taken by his previous books). Many formulations in HS1about truth, power, normalization, Freud, the family, and so onnd echoes all the way back to Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1965; see Erebon, 2001) and, indeed, its lesser-known precursor, Mental Illness and Psychology (Foucault, 1976), rst published in French in 1962. As T. J. Berard observes, almost regardless of how one characterizes Foucaults overall projector of how Foucault himself tried variously over time to sum up his concernsit is not hard to read The History of Sexuality as the logical next step:

An Incitement to Discourse: Sociology and The History of Sexuality Whether Foucault is speaking of a history of the subject, a history or political economy of the will to truth, a history of truth, a history of problematizations, the rationalization of power relations, a re-elaboration of the theory of power, the genealogy of the present, the genealogy of ethics, or a dozen other projects, he is still referring to one and the same body of work, one might even call it a research programme, to which The History of Sexuality clearly belongs, and of which The History of Sexuality was Foucaults last contribution. (Berard, 1999:206)

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For example, as a successor volume to works such as Discipline and Punish, HS1 stands as the best place to go for an explanation of one of Foucaults most inuential (and controversial) theoretical contributions, his theory of power in the modern era. It is interesting to note, however, that Foucault presented his pithy discussion of power in a chapter entitled, not Theory, but Method. In the logic of this volume, describing the operation of power was ostensibly a means to a very particular end: explaining why Lacan was not the answer. After all, the Lacanian reformulation of psychoanalysis that was popular in France rejected the Freudian notion of a pregiven biological sex drive which society then repressed. To encompass Lacan within his critique of the repressive hypothesis, Foucault needed to establish the hidden continuities between the conventional Freudian view and Lacans argument that desire, rather than being primordial, is constituted by social regulation (8182). The point, for Foucault, was that Lacan still adopted uncritically the conventional Western liberal and Marxist conception of power as a negating force possessed by a central sovereign body. Against this general view, and to emphasize the productive character of power, Foucault advanced four propositions: that power is exercised from innumerable points, rather than seized or held; that it fundamentally inheres in widely dispersed social relationships, only on top of which the major dominations, such as state, class, and gender power, emerge as a sort of superstructure; that power, everywhere, is imbued, through and through, with calculation, but in the absence of any overall plan orchestrated from on high; and that where there is power, there is resistance, even if there is no single locus of great Refusal (9496). This conception of power has been subjected to important criticism by liberals (Walzer, 1983), feminists (Diamond and Quinby, 1988), and many others. But not all such criticism is equally fair, and HS1 is a good place to go for evidence of alternative readings to many common renderings of Foucaults views. For example, it is frequently maintained that Foucault offers no way out, because resistance, while omnipresent, is always already colonized. But this is a problem that Foucault does address, even if his answer ultimately cannot explain the precise pathways to the development of meaningful resistance: By denition, [resistances] can only exist in the strategic eld of power relations. But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an

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underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat (96). Rather, Foucault argues, resistances have unpredictable effects, just because of the irregular spacing of their occurrence: [T]he points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a denitive way, inaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior (96). And at particular, historically contingent moments, such resistances might happen to add up to something more. Just as the vast power that we attribute to the state is really parasitic upon the dense web of power relations that criss-cross the social body, so too the strategic codication of the swarming points of resistance is what, from time to time, makes a revolution possible (96)to reference a passage that some admirer saw t to weave onto a memorial panel for Foucault in the Names Projects AIDS Quilt.

BODIES, SUBJECTS, AND POPULATIONS While insisting upon the multiplicity of pathways by which power and pleasure collide and recombine, Foucault was not averse to detecting patterns. He identied four great strategic unities in the manufacture of sexuality over the past three centuriesthose tantalizing phrases that presaged the volumes that he ultimately didnt write: the hysterization of womens bodies, by which the female body was treated as thoroughly saturated with sexuality; the pedagogization of childrens sex, in which authorities worried endlessly over the indulgence by children in erotic activity; the socialization of procreative behavior, in which the state concerned itself with the fertility of couples; and the psychiatrization of perversity, by means of which a host of sexual pathologies were catalogued by science (104105). This depiction, however brief, carried with it two important implications. First, the power that orchestrates sexuality and the knowledge encapsulated in sexual discourses are indissociable. Therefore, the sciences of sexuality (including all those beginning with psy) are thoroughly implicated in our present regime of truth and cannot set us on the path to liberation from it. The task instead is to uncover the will to knowledge (to cite the title of the original French edition of HS1) that undergirds the whole modern construction of a scientia sexualis. Second, a crucial way in which modern sexual power is productive is in the specic sense that Ian Hacking has called making up people (Hacking, 1986). Foucaults discussion of the historical contrast between the sodomite and the homosexual, cited endlessly in lesbian and gay studies and in queer theory, makes the point eloquently:

An Incitement to Discourse: Sociology and The History of Sexuality As dened by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. . . . Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (43)

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This passage, emphasizing the constitutive power of modern medical and psychological discourses, has given rise to many glib formulations of the view that homosexuality did not exist before the nineteenth centuryto which historians have counterposed a growing body of evidence that substantial numbers of premodern Europeans were not simply perpetrators of proscribed acts but also participants in nascent forms of community organized around a perception that they were the sorts of people who practiced such behaviors. Certainly Foucault appears to overestimate the capacity of medical experts to produce social identities out of whole cloth, and to underestimate the agency of historical subjects (Murray, 2000:11). Still, a useful intervention in this debate has been made by David Halperin, who emphasizes that Foucault specically referred to the ancient civil or canonical codes, not the self-perceptions of actors: As almost always in The History of Sexuality, Foucault is speaking about discursive and institutional practices, not about what people really did in bed or what they thought about it (Halperin, 1998:96). With such qualications in mind, Foucaults description of the role of science in the specication or invention of sexual types remains apposite. This account sounds a cautionary note concerning identity politics, insofar as groups such as homosexuals and bisexuals choose to organize politically around the very categories that experts played at least a part in generating through their depiction of perversions. And it has implications for ongoing debates, made more pressing by the exigencies of AIDS prevention, over whether sexuality is best understood in terms of identities or practices; orientations or lifestyles; who you are or what you do (Gagnon and Parker, 1995). While much of Foucaults discussion in HS1 of power and power/ knowledge was broadly consistent with his earlier writings, in one crucial respect Foucault went beyond that work. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault had focused extensively on the disciplining of the body and the harnessing of its forces. In HS1, Foucault added to this an interest in the management and regulation of populations. What was so signicant about sex is that it lay precisely at the point of intersection of these two concerns (139, 145). On one hand, the manipulation of sexual practices was fundamental to the anatomo-politics of the human body. On the other hand, the regulation

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of fertility and the scientic measurement of population growth was constitutive of a biopolitics of the population (139). This is why sex was so important to reformers, experts, professionals, and administrators of various stripesbecause of the simultaneous access that it provided to the life of the individual and the species. Foucaults concern in HS1 with what he called biopower thus spawned the burgeoning literature on governmentality, which seeks to understand the practices of statistics, measurement, public health, surveillance, risk assessment, and bureaucratic management by which whole populations are administered and normalized (Burchell et al., 1991; Carroll, 1998; Rabinow, 1996:91111; Rose, 1999). By way of the history of eugenics, a topic to which Foucault alluded (149), the theme of biopower also provided scholars with points of engagement with the study of race and scientic racism (see, for example, Shah, 2001)and Western colonialism as well, even if, as Ann Stoler has pointed out, Foucault missed some glaring opportunities to make the analytical connection to that topic (Stoler, 1995).

PRACTICAL POLITICS Perhaps someday, Foucault concluded, a counterattack that rallied around bodies and pleasures might usher in a different economy of practices and discourses that would be radically discontinuous with the organizing principles of the modern era (157, 159). But Foucault himself took a theoretical, methodological, and historical detour on the way to sketching out this future trajectory, if indeed he ever intended to say much more about it. Having focused in his previous scholarship on how the subject emerges as an object of power and knowledge, Foucault became increasingly concerned with the subjects relationship to self. As he explained at the beginning of the second volume of The History of Sexuality (called The Use of Pleasure), It appeared that I now had to undertake a . . . shift, in order to analyze what is termed the subject. It seemed appropriate to look for the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject (Foucault, 1986a:6). Deciding to reconceive his history of sexuality as a history of ethical problematizations based on practices of the self (Foucault, 1986a:13), Foucault found himself drawn back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Foucault, 1986a,b). This transition in his concerns led to a more nuanced consideration of subjectivity and selfhood than Foucault is sometimes given credit forthough it did not lead, unfortunately, to a consideration of inter subjectivity (Habermas, 1987:238293). But it also led to the writing of volumes that were of interest primarily to specialists.

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That left the rest of us back with HS1, the captivating but thinly substantiated introduction. For whom did this volume have enduring importance? Crucially, the book arrived at the right time in the United States to fuel the rapid growth of cultural studies and to ignite new elds of inquiry, such as queer theory. The vast array of such works inspired by HS1what Ken Plummer has described as the Foucauldian deluge (Plummer, 1998:608) helped turn Foucault into a cultural icon and to give his ideas a wide provenance, if often in watered-down form (Halperin, 1995:26).12 Foucaults work also took on practical signicance in relation to a range of political struggles surrounding sexual beliefs, behaviors, and identities. In 1995, David Halperin asked rhetorically,
If American labor organizers of the 1930s might all be imagined to have carried about with them in their back pockets a copy of The Communist Manifesto, and if antiwar demonstrators and campus protesters of the late 1960s might all be imagined to have carried about with them in their jeans a copy of Life Against Death or Loves Body, Eros and Civilization or One-Dimensional Man, what book do we imagine the more reective members of ACT UP to carry about with them in their leather jackets?

To which Halperin responded,

When I conducted an admittedly unsystematic survey in 1990 of various people I happened to know who had been active in ACT UP/New York during its explosive early phase in the late 1980s, and when I put those questions to them, I received, without the slightest hesitation or a single exception, the following answer: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. (Halperin, 1995:1516)

My own view is that Halperins ndings may be as biased as his account of his sampling methods suggests. Yet as Joshua Gamson ably describes, when AIDS activists placed their bodies on the line to challenge the medicalization of sexuality by experts and the emergence of new normalizing discourses of sexuality, they were engaged on a terrain of struggle whose contours Foucault had helped to illuminate (Gamson, 1989; see also Epstein, 1996; Seidman, 1988; Treichler, 1999). Thus, the Christian Century may have been correct, by their lights, to tag HS1 as a problematic bookif by that we mean one that offers critical tools to resisters of the normative sexual order. This does not, of course, excuse the silliness and irresponsibility of portraying Foucault as a defender of necrophilia and rape. I do not agree with the view, expressed by conservative critics such as Charry and Hendershott, that by deconstructing sexual normalization, Foucault or those inuenced by him thereby surrender the
12 Halperin

complains with some justication that Foucaults continuing prestige, and the almost ritualistic invocation of his name by academic practitioners of cultural theory, has had the effect of reducing the operative range of his thought to a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon that have now become so commonplace and so familiar as to make a more direct engagement with Foucaults texts entirely dispensable (Halperin, 1998:93).

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capacity to make any moral judgments about sex and usher in a postmodern nightmare world in which anything goes. As Foucault himself noted in a 1982 interview, I dont think we should have as our objective some sort of absolute freedom or total liberty of sexual action. . . . The important question . . . is not whether a culture without restraints is possible or even desirable but whether the system of constraints in which a society functions leaves individuals the liberty to transform the system (OHiggins, 1982/1983:12, 16).13 On one hand, as Gayle Rubin insists, it is always important to cast a critical eye on the practice of boundary-drawing, by which only sex acts on the good side of the line are accorded moral complexity, while all sex acts on the bad side of the line are considered utterly repulsive and devoid of all emotional nuance (Rubin, 1984:282). Too often, projects to shore up the boundarybased on what Rubin calls the domino theory of sexual perilreect displacements of social anxieties from other domains and, in their moralistic zeal, claim many innocent victims. On the other hand, as Jeffrey Weeks argues, it is possible, and entirely consistent with the scholarly implications of social constructionism, to pay close attention to the contexts of sexual acts and their meanings to participants. While such scrutiny might best begin, as Rubin advises, by rejecting the premise that sex is guilty until proven innocent, it can end with a principled consideration of the place of choice, constraint, equality, and inequality within sexual encounters and relationships (Weeks, 1985:211245; see also Seidman, 1997:157158). SOCIOLOGICAL PROJECTS These debates over the kinds of moral claims that might follow from Foucaults analyses suggest some of the broader cultural and political legacies of HS1and, perhaps even more interestingly, the ways in which the book and its author have themselves become objects of discourse in the same space of contention that the book sought to reinterpret. But if such considerations are helpful in considering the wider impact of HS1, they only go so far in helping us understand the inuence of the book on sociologists in particular. Let me therefore return to the question of the impact of HS1 within U.S. sociology. I believe the story is a complicated one, and at least three separate strands, enumerated below, must be interwoven. 1. At the time of its publication, HS1 was reviewed briey in a few sociological journals, including Contemporary Sociology.14 However,
13 In 14 It

this interview, two of Foucaults examples of why unrestricted sexual liberty would be unacceptable are precisely rape and necrophilia. was also reviewed at greater length in Signs. Subsequently, Contemporary Sociology also featured a review essay by David Brain that examined ve books by Foucault, including the

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as noted at the outset of this essay, it is difcult to detect much inuence of HS1 in most of the dominant, generalist sociology journals in the subsequent quarter-century. What might explain this lack? Of course, many sociologists have never warmed to Foucault, period. There are many reasonable grounds for nding his theoretical arguments faulty or inadequate, and some sociologists simply reject his work on that basis. Others, perhaps, are allergic to any work of the postmodern persuasion, in some cases because they see such work as inimical to the scientic project of sociology (Seidman, 1997) or as threatening the public legitimacy of the discipline (Agger, 2000:239). But the greater popularity among sociologists of Discipline and Punish suggests there might be additional causes of the limited uptake of HS1 by the U.S. sociological mainstream. I would suggest that HS1 additionally has fallen victim to what Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer have described as the missing sexual revolution in sociology (Stein and Plummer, 1994)that is, the remarkable tendency of most sociologists to ignore the domain of sexuality or treat it as a marginal matter, as if sexuality were not a fundamental dimension of social experience, and as if its social organization were not tightly interwoven with core domains of sociological investigation such as inequality, political economy, social movements, and mass media representation. Stein and Plummer were invoking by analogy the classic article by Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne on the missing feminist revolution in sociology (Stacey and Thorne, 1985), in which those authors decried the ghettoization of gender as a separate sociological subeld and the failure to conceive of gender as a constitutive dimension of all aspects of the social world. Stacey and Thorne had observed that disciplines such as sociology, political science, and economics seemed especially resistant to feminism, while others such as anthropology, history, and literature had been more open to rethinking its traditional concerns in the light of feminist analyses. Somewhat similarly, following Stein and Plummer, I would argue that the U.S. sociological mainstream, like certain other disciplines, has been inclined to protect the purity of its core, not just from polluting inuences such as postmodernism, but also from peripheral concerns like sexuality. Thus, while the American Sociological Association now has a Section on Sexualities that boasts 300 members, many members of older and
second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, along with one by Georges Canguilhem. Brain noted that Foucault has outlined a preeminently empirical program of historical inquiry, with theoretical ramications that sociologists have only begun to explore (Brain, 1990:906).

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more established sections are likely still inclined to imagine that sexual matters have nothing substantively to do with the topics they study. 2. At the same time as HS1 has been mostly ignored by the U.S. sociological mainstream, it is a growing presence in a range of specialty journals publishing sociological workjournals devoted to the study of sexuality, health, the body, sports, and many other topics. In the year 2000, for example, HS1 was cited with reference to television and commodication in Media, Culture and Society (Ursell, 2000); the pedagogy of race in Teaching Sociology (Wahl et al., 2000); and the evolution of attention-decit disorder in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (Lakoff, 2000), to name but a few. This escalation of concern with Foucault in the specialty journals, alongside the birth of whole new elds of interdisciplinary scholarship, explains the nding noted earlier: the ascending salience of HS1 in social science journals generally. Within sociologically inected lesbian and gay (or LGBT) studies in particular, the inuence of HS1 would be hard to overestimate. For example, in Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies, an edited reader of mostly sociological and anthropological work, Foucault is discussed in chapters by Adam, Epstein, Gamson, Herdt, Plummer, Rubin, Vance, and Weeks (Nardi and Schneider, 1998).15 3. But meanwhile, the enthusiastic reception of HS1 at the margins of the sociological profession has had one curious effect: the foreshortening of historical memory concerning the sociology of sexuality and homosexuality (Epstein, 1994). Well before HS1, in the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists (along with anthropologists, historians, and others) had redirected the study of sexuality. Against naturalized conceptions of sexuality as a biological given, against Freudian models of the sexual drive, and against the Kinseyan obsession with the tabulation of behavior, sociologists had asserted and demonstrated that sexual meanings, identities, and categories were intersubjectively negotiated, social and historical productsthat sexuality was, in a word, constructed. Though sexuality never became institutionalized as a formal subeld of sociological study, the social constructionist perspective on sexuality drew much of its theoretical repower from important currents within sociology, including

15 On

the relations among sociology, queer theory, and LGBT studies, see Escofer (in press), and the essays in Seidman, 1996. On the development of lesbian and gay studies as a eld of study in the United States, see Escofer, 1998.

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symbolic interactionism (Gagnon and Simon, 1973; Plummer, 1975), functionalism (McIntosh, 1968), and labeling theory and the sociology of deviance (Humphreys, 1970; Reiss, 1978). Sociological work of this sort, including a range of empirical studies of homosexual practices, identities, and communities (for example, Levine, 1979; Ponse, 1978; Murray, 1979), anticipated many of the insights of the post-HS1 scholarship. Yet there is a remarkable and lamentable tendency, within sociology and certainly elsewhere, to imagine that it all started with Foucault, and to fail to appreciate the continued relevance of these earlier sociological approaches. One legacy of this historical amnesia is that many sociologists are unaware of the sociological roots of elds such as lesbian and gay studies and instead treat these domains of scholarship as, at best, an alien graft onto the sociological tradition. All that said, it remains important to note both the subtle and the startling ways in which Foucaults insights in HS1 did introduce a break with previous scholarship (Stein, 1989). Constructionist sociologists had analyzed the scripted quality of sexual encounters, but they had paid far less attention to the wide-ranging, discursive production of sexual meanings. They had described the emergence of sexual identities as a response to labeling practices, but they had not focused systematically on the scientic production of sexual types. They had anticipated Foucault in arguing that sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, butas much as they had emphasized its plasticitythey had not by any stretch imagined sexuality as an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population (103). Foucault rightly deserves credit for redirecting the study of sexuality to attend to the constitutive character of power, knowledge, and discourse. As a consequence of the publication of HS1, it is possible to imagine more nuanced sociological investigations of biomedicine, popular culture, social movements, social theory, and a host of other topics, aside from and along with the sociology of sexuality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Sociological Forum Book Review Editors Jeff Goodwin and Jim Jasper for editorial suggestions, and to Hector Carrillo, Jeff Escofer, John Gagnon, Josh Gamson, Arlene Stein, John Torpey, and especially Chris Waters for insightful comments on an earlier draft.

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