Bernard E. Harcourt, English Series Editor
The philosopher and social critic, Michel Foucault, began lecturing in the early 1950s on key topics that gave rise later to his major publications, including The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. Sexuality presents Foucault's lectures on sexuality for the first time in English. In the first series, held at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964, Foucault asks how sexuality comes to be constituted as a scientific body of knowledge within Western culture and why it derived from the analysis of "perversions"—morbidity, homosexuality, fetishism. The subsequent course, held at the experimental university at Vincennes in 1969, shows how Foucault's theories were reoriented by the events of May 1968; he refocuses on the regulatory nature of the discourse of sexuality and how it serves economic, social, and political ends. Together, the lectures span a range of interests, from abnormality to heterotopias to ideology, and they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the evolution of Foucault's transformative thinking on sexuality. NOTCHES is grateful to Columbia University Press for permission to publish an extract from Sexuality, the first translation into English of these key lectures.
The two sets of lectures on sexuality in this volume—the first from 1964, the second from 1969—address two very different political moments, separated by the upheaval of the student revolution of May 1968. Both of those moments, moreover, differ greatly from the political situation in 1976, when Michel Foucault published the first volume of The History of Sexuality, or in 1984, when he published volumes 2 and 3 and made final revisions to volume 4. Those earlier moments differ even more radically from our political times today—even putting aside the digital revolution that gave birth to our expository society and the myriad ways it intersects with sexual regulation and prohibitions. The term "transgender"—in its current connotation, using the notion of "gender" rather than "transsexual"—would not even have been entirely comprehensible at those earlier times. As Jack Halberstam remarks, "only a few decades ago, transsexuals in Europe and the United States did not feel that there was a language to describe who they were or what they needed."
The first set of lectures—Foucault's 1964 lectures on "Sexuality" delivered at the University of Clermont-Ferrand—were delivered at a time marked by a resurgence of a soft humanism surrounding sexuality following the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's influential book The Second Sex (1949) and the rise of second-wave feminism. This was a humanism that sought to place sexuality within the ethical framework of loving, equal, respectful relations between men and women; but in the process of ethicizing and equalizing heterosexual relations, it further entrenched homosexuality and other "perversions" into officially diagnosed mental disorders, as in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1952, in which homosexuality was listed as a sociopathic personality distur- bance. The new humanism of sexuality went hand in hand with a demonization of alternative forms of sexuality—of anything that did not fit comfortably in a film like A Man and a Woman (released at around the same time, in 1966).
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