The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

First published in French in 1976, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction challenges the familiar belief that modern Western society has simply repressed sexuality and forbidden open discussion of desire. Instead, Foucault argues that the modern era has produced an extraordinary proliferation of ways to speak about, classify and regulate sex, from medicine and psychiatry to education, religion and the law. He traces how these discourses turned sexuality into an object of knowledge, making intimate life central to the exercise of social power. At the heart of his inquiry is a provocative question: not merely what society has forbidden us to say about sex, but how and why we have been encouraged to speak about it at all.

Conceived as the opening volume of a much larger project, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 transformed debates in philosophy, history, gender studies and social theory. Its account of the relationship between power, knowledge and the individual helped establish new ways of thinking about identity and the institutions that shape it. Foucault’s argument remains challenging precisely because it unsettles the distinction between liberation and control, asking whether greater visibility and more expansive language necessarily make us freer. Elegant, unsettling and intellectually far-reaching, this is a defining work of twentieth-century thought whose questions continue to resonate in contemporary debates about identity, medicine, politics and the body.

From the book

“The history of sexuality—that is, the history of what functioned in the nineteenth century as a specific field of truth—is to be understood, therefore, from the viewpoint of a history of discourses.”

— Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

On The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

“Fascinating but ferociously abstract speculations on the modern obsession with sex.”

— Kirkus Reviews