Maybe it is time to read sexuality against the grain of Foucault
When discussing scientific theory I often make the joke that whilst foucault spent the major part of his life fleeing from Hegel, I have spent years trying to escape Foucault. For the past year I have been working on projects on sexuality heavily inspirered by him, which in then led my old supervisor to ask why my texts mainly have been confirmation of theories from the 1960’s rather than focusing on what in the empirical material that goes against Foucault. After this comment I came to re-read my material and focus on the differences between my empirical stuff and Foucault. What I actually learned was rather interesting. In the history of sexuality Foucaults primary notion is the idea that sex was not lacking during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. Instead he proposes that society was obsessed with the regulation of speech around sexuality and he also came to focus his analysis on these restrictions. In the subsequent tradition this has also been the f...