Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 44, No.

3, 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00653.x

A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality

George Drazenovich
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario epat_653 259..275

Abstract
The present research paper approaches homosexuality from a Foucauldian perspective. Fou-
cault’s place and standing in a postmodern historical and cultural context will be explained.The
paper outlines how homosexuality has been historically constructed and socially constituted. How
sexuality became understood as a particular form of discourse, that is as a science, will be
explored particularly with regard to the strategic use of confession as a producer of knowledge. I
will present how homosexuality, as a medicalized, ontological identity was implanted in bodies
and an entire pathological population was created.To reverse an excessive medicalized discourse
of homosexuality, Foucault’s prescription of moving to the care of self and predicating sexuality
on the pleasure of bodies as opposed to scientific or clinical ideology will be discussed. Such critical
analysis facilitates new imaginative spaces that can enable educators to engage in meaningful
and informed dialogue around the various discourses surrounding homosexuality in a post-
modern historical and cultural context.

Keywords: Foucault, discourse, confession, homosexuality, medicalization,

subjectivity

In the last twenty-five years, public attitudes towards homosexuality have changed
dramatically. In 1987, the last vestiges of homosexuality as a psychopathology under
the diagnostic category of ‘ego-dystonic homosexuality’ in the Diagnostic and Statis-
tical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was formally removed (Fox, 1988). The
DSM is the clinical guidebook used by mental health professionals for assigning diag-
nostic labels to various psychiatric pathologies. It is publicly available and regularly
updated as a consequence of emerging research. It is currently in its fourth edition
with the fifth due out in May of 2012 (American Psychiatric Association, 2009). In the
United States, a Gallup poll conducted on 29 May 2007 found that 57 percent of
respondents felt that homosexuality should be sanctioned as an alternative public
lifestyle; up from the 34 percent in 1982 (Gallup, 2007). On 20 July 2005 Bill C-38,
The Civil Marriage Act, received royal assent making Canada the fourth country
in the world to grant legal access to marriage for same sex couples (Library of
Parliament, 2005).
Notwithstanding significant shifts in public attitudes towards homosexuality, opposi-
tion to its public expression is still being manifested. Mark Hall, a Grade 12 student in
a publicly funded Catholic school, opted to attend the high school prom with his

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Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
260 George Drazenovich

boyfriend. The school board prohibited them from attending for the putative reason that
their public relationship conflicts with Catholic values. Mark Hall requested an injunc-
tion from the Ontario Court to permit him to attend and was successful (Ontario
Superior Court of Justice, 2002). In the North Vancouver School District a play featuring
a kiss between a lesbian couple was censored. Parents objected to the lesbian kiss and it
was subsequently cut from the production although a heterosexual kiss along with
depictions of violence remained (Gatchalian, 2004). Recently, the province of Alberta
introduced curriculum to educate students about sexual diversity. The curriculum was
met by opposition from parents who did not want their children exposed to diversity
education in sexuality. The provincial government responded to their concerns by
passing Bill 44, an amendment to the Alberta Human Rights Act which permits parents
to withdraw their children from classrooms where subjects of sexual orientation might be
discussed (Legislative Assembly of Alberta, 2009).
Clearly there are multiple problems and issues related to interpretations of sexuality
and their permitted expression within society that is being reflected in schools. Further,
the entire Western European cultural context, as far as homosexuality is concerned, is
situated in the midst of a social and political paradox. At the same time that homosexu-
ality is being widely accepted and condoned in the area of mental health and in many of
the western nation’s public institutions of marriage (Canada, Sweden, Norway, Nether-
lands, Belgium, Spain and South Africa), it is simultaneously being marginalized as a
contaminant that has the potential to corrupt young minds. The question is how did we
arrive at such a situation and what can be done about it? In this paper, homosexuality as
social, cultural and political discourse is interrogated by appeal to Foucault’s (1990a,
1990b, 1988) historical and critical analysis as outlined in his voluminous History of
Sexuality.
Drawing on Foucault’s research, I turn to the so-called repressive sexual culture of the
18th and 19th century and critique it. I will outline how Western civilization created a
‘science of sexuality’ intended to produce and manufacture discourses on sexuality. I will
present how homosexuality, as a medicalized, ontological identity was implanted in
bodies and an entire pathological population was created. To redress some of the
problems that have occurred as a result of an excessive medicalized discourse, Foucault’s
prescription of moving to the care of self and predicating sexuality on bodies and
pleasures as opposed to scientific or clinical ideology will conclude the analysis. Con-
temporary social issues related to homosexuality needs to be understood within the
broader historical and cultural context of Western society.

Foucault and the Postmodern Context

Foucault died in 1984 but even before his death he was highly acclaimed and received
public prominence for his critical studies of medicine, psychiatry, and the prison system.
Foucault’s research on medicine, psychiatry and disciplinary practices furnished him
with the necessary tools needed to trace the formation of knowledge regarding sexuality
in The History of Sexuality, the last of his critical studies before his death. In addition to
his influence on cultural theory, Foucault has also had a significant impact on education.
Beginning in the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault focuses on

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 261

questions of how the self has been constituted. Some researchers in education have taken
up these Foucauldian themes. Olssen (2005), for example, discusses Foucault’s support
of personal autonomy as the basis of a liberal education in his research. Peters and Besley
(2007) explore the implications of subjectivity for education in Subjectivity and Truth:
Foucault, education, and the culture of self.
Foucault is a useful guide in exploring questions and problems in a postmodern
historical context. The term postmodern is a historical and intellectual designation used
to delineate a different horizon out of which our culture in the Western world began to
conceive of science, politics, philosophy and religion. The prefix post, before modern,
denotes the idea that the historical or cultural context being described is after the
modern period. The term modern is a common historical periodization which refers to
the era of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is broadly co-extensive with the 18th
and 19th century. According to Pappe (2003), unlike earlier periods which affected
particular aspects of life or certain classes of the population, the Enlightenment wit-
nessed and heralded sweeping social change. Its thought is basically a social philosophy,
starting from social premises, concerned with social ends, and viewing even religion and
art in social terms. It is also characterized by a strong emphasis on rationalism and
empiricism.
Postmodern refers to critical anti-Modernist thought that emerged after World War II.
Postmodernity had its genesis in the literary community as a method of critique but
quickly spread from there to include philosophical approaches which tend to emphasize
subjectivity, plurality and difference. Postmodernity is typified as a mistrust of grand
systems that can explain every phenomenon. In recent times it has found expression in
philosophers and historians such as Foucault. Indeed, Foucault is regarded in the
scholarly community as one of the leading lights of what is sometimes referred to as the
postmodern ‘school’ (Hoy, 1988, p. 37–38; Smart, 2000, p. 452). As Halperin (1998)
notes, the almost ritualistic invocation of Foucault’s name by academics in cultural
theory has had the affect of reducing his thought to a small set of slogans and jargon
which makes a fresh and direct reading of Foucault indispensable (p. 94). Consequently,
the present research paper draws primarily on Foucault’s direct research in the area of
sexuality as outlined in The History of Sexuality.

Sexuality as Discourse
As a historical matter, Foucault suggests that in the Western world, sexuality as a
political, medical and judicial discourse accelerated in the 18th and 19th centuries. The
term discourse has a specific meaning in Foucault’s method and plays a major role in
analyzing homosexuality in a Foucauldian manner. Discourses are social, political and
cultural arrangements of ideas and concepts through which the world as we know it is
communicated and constructed; they are observed in terms of the elements of knowledge
and power inherent in them. Discourse is about the production of language and practices
by particular systems that produce existential meanings which then shape our individual
lives. As Foucault clearly outlines at the beginning of his first volume in The History of
Sexuality, the primary issue with respect to sexuality is to account for the fact that it is
spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from

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which they speak and the institutions which prompt people to speak about it. At issue,
according to Foucault is the overall ‘discursive fact’; the way in which sex is ‘put into
discourse’. His method is to locate the forms of power, the channels it takes, and the
discourses it permeates in order to reach individual modes of behaviour (Foucault,
1990a, p. 11). As Halperin (1998) notes, Foucault’s History of Sexuality will be a difficult
book to read if one expects to uncover Foucault’s ‘theory’ of sexuality. Foucault is not
trying to describe what sexuality is but to specify what it does and how it works in
discursive practice (p. 110). As Foucault (1980) explains:

Discursive practices are not simply ways of producing discourse. They are
embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behav-
ior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and pedagogical forms which, at
once, impose and maintain them. (p. 200)

Foucault (1972) describes discursive practices as ‘a body of anonymous, historical rules,

always determined in time and space that have defined a given period’ (p. 117). Dis-
courses, and the practices associated with them, are situated in particular historical and
social contexts. Foucault locates contemporary sexual discourses as rapidly developing
and multiplying in the 18th and 19th centuries during the so-called sexually repressive
Victorian era.

The Repressive Hypothesis

One of the most provocative preludes to Foucault’s analysis in The History of Sexuality is
his direct opposition to the sexual repression hypothesis. The sexual repression hypoth-
esis is a common theme in popular imagination. The sexual repression hypothesis has
been imprinted on our mind through a variety of images in literature, movies and stories
caricaturing the Victorian era as being mired in hypocritical, prudish, and rigid attitudes
toward sexuality. The Victorian era is generally historicized as lasting between the years
1825 and 1920, roughly co-terminus with the life of Queen Victoria in England. The
basic thrust of the repression hypothesis is that as a result of the influence of Victorian
society in the Western world in the mid-19th century, sexuality was allocated to a regime
of silence and taboo as reflected in puritan social etiquette. While Victorian society may
have permitted ribald expression of sexuality in brothels and mental institutions, in the
public domain it was restricted to the parents’ bedroom and even there shrouded in duty
and obligation. The sexual repression hypothesis is illustrated in the popular jocular
phrase attributed to a close friend of Queen Victoria whose advice to the queen on how
to conduct herself on her wedding night was ‘close your eyes and think of England’
(Partridge, 1986, p. 75).
By opposing the repressive hypothesis in his historical analysis, Foucault is not claim-
ing that sex has not been prohibited, barred, or masked (Foucault, 1990a, p. 12). What
he is arguing is that it is a mistake to analyze the history of sexuality by making the
prohibitions, denials and censorship the central constitutive element of sexuality. When
one bypasses the repressive hypothesis, a historical survey clearly reveals that far from
undergoing a process of restriction, sexuality has been subject to mechanisms of ever-
increasing incitements to discourse.The term ‘incitement to discourse’ refers to a myriad

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 263

of heterogenous social, political, and cultural forces that agitated for increased knowl-
edge and control of a particular area of life, in this case sex. The incitement to discourse
was accomplished through the development or utilization of a variety of institutions
such as schools, clinics, and psychiatric associations. These institutions having both the
knowledge and the power to enact them began multiplying discourses as they emerged.
Foucault locates cultural incitement to discourse as rapidly accelerating and multiplying
in the 19th century and emphatically not being repressed or silenced.

Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated and in such a relatively
short period of time—a similar quantity of discourses concerned with sex. It
may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else ... [we think] that
we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential
always eludes us, so that we must always start out again in search of it. We are
dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses
produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions.
(Foucault, 1990a, p. 33)

Opposing the sexual repression hypothesis may appear, at first, to be counterintuitive.

However, if we grant Foucault his dissent from the sexual repression hypothesis, it begs
the question of how such a process occurred and unfolded in the first place? To answer
the foregoing, I explore how the apparent sexual repression is actually symptomatic of a
driving desire on the part of Western civilization to arrive at a truth, or science, of
sexuality. Foucault famously describes the development of how the West developed a
discourse of sexuality through the development of a scientia sexualis.

The Science of Sexuality (Scientia Sexualis)

According to Foucault, a hallmark of Western culture is that we are the only civilization
that has approached sex by developing a science (as opposed to an art) of sexuality which
has enabled us to constrain, classify and categorize it. The primary method for develop-
ing a science of sexuality has been confession. Indeed, since the Middle Ages confession
remains the main rituals and the most valued technique we rely on for producing truth
which is the mainstay of science.
As Foucault (1990a) explains:

(Confession) plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships,

and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the
most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and
desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest
precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in
private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, those one loves; one
admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, thinking it would be impossible to
tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is
forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal
imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is
driven from its hiding place in the soul or extracted from the body. (p. 59)

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Foucault’s historical analysis reveals that since the time of the Fourth Lateran council in
1215 when the Roman Catholic church imposed once-yearly confession as a standard to
be applied across the Western church, right up to present day psychology, there has been
a sustained incitement to discourse concerning sex almost to the exclusion of any other
kind of human activity. Sex remains the privileged theme of confession. For example,
the Catholic manuals that followed from the Lateran Council particularly during the
Counter-Reformation period, lasting roughly between 1560 and 1648, enjoined the
penitent to examine all thoughts, words, and movements across the body.The confession
of the ‘sins of the flesh’, at the expense of all other types of sins became paramount
(Foucault, 1990a, p. 19). Bloch (2001) notes that theologians wishing to establish norms
and guidelines for everything affecting sexuality made a complete enumeration of all
sexual acts and giving a solution for all possible cases founded the science of casuistry
which later achieved such phenomenal growth (p. 111).
Moving from the Christian pastorals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation
period which is periodized historically as lasting approximately between 1500 to 1600 to
the salacious literature of Marquis de Sade writing in France in 1785, similar themes
surface. Sade (1966) takes up the confessional injunction writing that ‘your narrations
must be decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the precise way and
extent to which we may judge how the passion you describe relates to human manners
and man’s [sic] character is determined by your willingness to disguise no circumstance
(Sade, 1966, p. 271 as cited in Foucault, 1990a, p. 21).
The salient point, Foucault (1990a) argues, is that people in the Western world have
been drawn for at least the last three hundred years to confess everything concerning
their sex (p. 23). Our Western world has hardly been gripped in a pervasive censorship.
On the contrary, the West has been involved in an ever-multiplying incitement to
discourse through the specific mechanisms of confession which has taken many different
forms. As Foucault (1990a) notes,

The confession was, and still remains the general standard governing the true
discourse on sex. It has undergone a considerable transformation, however
... it gradually lost its ritualistic and exclusive localization; it spread; it has been
employed in a whole series of relationships: children and parents, students and
educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquent and experts (p. 63).

Stepping back historically and analyzing the process of confession reveals that it is a ritual
that unfolds within an inverse power relationship. The psychodynamic structure of
confession is constituted in such a fashion that paradoxically power is not exercised in the
one who speaks but in the one who listens. As a result of the listening that occurred over
the period of many centuries an archive of knowledge concerning sex was gradually
constituted. It became solidified, Foucault argues, when medicine and psychiatry fully
developed it as a science beginning in the 19th century.

The Medicalization of Confession

Medicine created an entire organic, functional and mental pathology arising from incom-
plete or ‘unnatural’ sexual practices such as homosexuality. Medicine classified all forms

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 265

of sex; incorporated them into the notions of developmental and instinctual disturbances
and undertook to manage them (Foucault, 1990a, p. 41). Indeed the very term ‘sexuality’
itself did not appear until the 19th century and accompanied developments in diverse
fields of knowledge such as medicine, psychiatry and even law. Developments in the
discursive practices of medicine, psychiatry and law regarding sexuality changed the way
in which individuals were led to assign meaning to their conduct. It caused individuals
to see themselves as subjects of a sexuality which was accessible to diverse fields of
knowledge and linked to a system of rules and constraints (Foucault, 1990b, p. 4). The
ritual of confession shifted from the religious sphere and began to function within the
norms of a newly developed scientific method.The privileged theme of sex remained but
the discourse shaping it changed completely. Foucault (1990a, p. 65) outlines precisely
how confession thus began to be constituted in medical forms through a confluence of
five factors. These five factors were:
1. A clinical codification of the inducement to speak. Confession was combined with
personal history, standardized questionnaires, and recollection memories. All of these
procedures were means of reinscribing the structure of confession into a scientifically
acceptable practice.
2. Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality. Having a plethora of
information about sex derived from interviews and questions, clinicians could (and in
fact did) impute to almost any physical or psychological disturbance a sexual etiology.
3. Through the principle of latency intrinsic to sexuality. Sex was not only taboo and
difficult to discuss but the mechanisms of it escaped observation from even the
subject. Consequently, the principle of latency allowed clinicians to link accelerated
and subtle confessional techniques to their analytic practice to exact by force a truth
not even known by the individual.
4. Through the method of interpretation. In order for truth to be produced, it had to
pass through a confessional type of relationship to be scientifically validated. The one
who listened was not only consoling but had the power to decipher its meaning and
constitute a discourse of scientific truth based on their interpretive schema.
5. Through the medicalization of the effects of confession.The effects of confession were
recodified as a therapeutic operation. It was placed not under sin, or moral trans-
gression but was placed under the rule of the normal or the pathological. This meant
that sex would derive its meaning from medical interventions.
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply
ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us.
It seems to us that sexual truth, so lodged in our secret nature, demands to surface
(Foucault, 1990a, p. 60). An objection could be raised at this point. Isn’t confession a
liberating and emancipating process? Hasn’t ‘coming out’ been celebrated and encour-
aged by many in the gay, lesbian and transgendered community as an emblem of
empowerment? Few could deny that coming out serves no psychological purpose for
many people or that it hasn’t contributed to changes in public attitudes. A Foucauldian
analysis of homosexuality is in no way intended to displace such efforts and movements.
Foucault’s contribution to liberation accomplished through unmasking and undermin-
ing disguised and evident forms of domination which is embedded in scientific

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knowledge. The force of medicalized discourses of homosexuality can be blunted

through critique. Foucault (1990a) explains the dual role that a critical analysis of
discourses concerning sexuality can provide writing, ‘Discourse transmits and produces
power; it reinforces it, it also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it
possible to thwart it’ (p. 101). Indeed, as Feder (2009) writes, ‘In Foucault’s own work
of course, “the homosexual” is the exemplary model of how a category of identity can be
deployed to “define and subject” individuals, but it was also by means of this category
that a resistance movement, “gay liberation” was born’ (p. 134). Liberation, for Foucault,
involves a process of critique which is closely allied to the notion of enlightenment.
In a published series of interviews and lectures entitled The Politics of Truth, Foucault
(2007) begins his reflections based on a brief article by Immanuel Kant originally
published in 1784. The public use of reason, according to Kant (2007), involves open-
minded criticisms of the laws or conventions of the state (p. 36). Critique is an essential
element for the emancipation and enlightenment of people within society. Understand-
ing Foucault’s critical approach is integral to appreciating his analysis of homosexuality.

Critique and Emancipation

A particular style of governance, inspired by the medieval Roman Church, became
uniquely situated as a power structure that influenced how social organizations such as
psychiatry, education and even law exerted their influence. Foucault (2007) explains:
[The] Christian pastoral, or the Christian church inasmuch as it acted in a
precisely and specifically pastoral way, developed this idea—singular and, I
believe, quite foreign to ancient culture—that each individual, whatever his
[sic] age or status, from the beginning to the end of his [sic] life and in his [sic]
every action, had to be governed and had to let himself [sic] be governed.
(p. 43)
While the foregoing concept of governing was initially limited to monastic life and
restricted to small spiritual groups, it expanded in the 15th and 16th centuries from its
religious centre to secular society. Civil society applied the Christian pastoral’s practice
of governing to questions of how to govern children, how to govern the poor and beggars,
and even how to govern one’s own body and mind (Foucault, 2007, p. 44). The critical
attitude can be located, Foucault argues, within the aforementioned social, political, and
historical context. Foucault (2007) writes,
And if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individu-
als are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of
power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement
by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of
power and question power on its discourses of truth. Well, then!: critique will
be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique
would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what
we could call, in a word, the politics of truth. (p. 47)
Extending this notion of governmentality and critique to 19th century, medicalized
discourses of sexuality, Foucault (2007) observes that, ‘It was also not a given that desire,

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concupiscence and individuals’ sexual behavior had to actually be articulated one upon
the other in a system of knowledge and normality called sexuality’ (p. 62). However, this
is precisely what occurred with homosexuality.

The Homosexual Population

It is important to appreciate that what is constitutive in sexuality is the social and political
action that divides sexuality, as a particular form of knowledge (a science), from sex as
a human activity. Sexuality is the name given to a particular historical construction. It is
this action—namely the conceptual constructions propagated by particular institutions
(i.e. the discourses)—that have shaped our perceptions of sex as an activity.We must not
therefore interpret the history of sexuality to how sex operates in practice, but rather
show how sex is subordinate to sexuality as discourse (Foucault, 1990a, p. 157). Foucault
discusses a very important development that arose in the 19th century which had an
impact on creating the discursive sexual category of the homosexual. One of the major
constructions that arose in the 18th century is the creation of the concept of population.
Institutions and bodies of science begin to perceive that they are not dealing simply with
subjects, or even with a people, but with a population with its specific phenomena and
variables (Foucault, 1990a, p. 25). The process of differentiating specific populations
becomes integral to advancing social science knowledge.
Rose (1994) writes:
To differentiate is also to classify, to segregate, to locate persons and groups
under one system of authority and to divide them from those placed under
another. Placing persons and populations under a medical mandate ... exposes
them to scrutiny, to documentation and to descriptions in medical terms. It is
here that one can discover the conditions for the emergence of ‘positive’
knowledge of the human individual ... . Truth, at least in the human sciences,
arises out of the institutional and organizational conditions which gather
humans together and seek to act upon them in order to produce certain end.
(p. 58)
In the 19th century an entire population of people, previously scarcely noticed, began to
be categorized and interpreted in terms of their sexuality. The formerly peripheral
sexuality of mad men and women, criminals, and the sensuality of those who did not like
the opposite sex came under scrutiny. Populations largely inchoate before the 19th
century begin to appear and be placed under systems of quieter but stricter constraints
of natural or unnatural. As Halperin (1998) observes, these strategies took the form of
establishing norms of self-regulations, not by punishing deviations from what was inter-
preted as natural but by constructing new species of individuals, discovering and
implanting perversions, and thereby elaborating more subtle and insidious means of
social control (p. 98). Against this cultural background the newly developed medical
category of the homosexual came into existence. Foucault (1990a) writes:
We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of
homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—
Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations’ can stand as

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268 George Drazenovich

its date of birth—less by a type of sexual relationship than by a certain quality

of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and feminine in
oneself. 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. (p. 43)

Westphal was influenced by Ulrich (1994) who in 1864 was the first to come up with a
scientific theory of homosexuality. Ulrich’s writings, The Riddle of the Man-Manly Love,
gave rise to the paradigm of sexual inversion which became the dominant scientific
paradigm which structured most 19th-century theories of homosexuality (Terry, 1999, p.
43). Ulrich believed that sexual attraction to men was fundamentally female in nature.
Thus males who were attracted to the same sex had a male body but their psyche was
inverted as female. Ulrich believed that homosexuality was an inborn trait and posited
the existence of a third sex to explain it. Foucault highlights Westphals’ (1870) publica-
tion in German, Contrary Sexual Feeling, as emblematic of the way in which homosexu-
ality began to be discretely categorized and implanted in bodies. Foucault (1990a) writes
that discourses on sexuality such as those developed by Westphal set about contacting
bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing
troubled moments wrapping the sexual body in its embrace (p. 44). Irrespective of the
intent of Ulrich and Westphal, the ultimate effect of medicalizing and making homo-
sexuality a species was that it made homosexuality analytically visible as a pathology, an
anomaly, a third sex, an inverted nature. Homosexuality was implanted in bodies to
provide a principle of scientific intelligibility which could be managed under a psychiatric
mandate.
Through the creation of homosexual populations, individuals were subject to strate-
gies of containment. Walton (2009) interprets strategies of containment as reducing
concepts of homosexuality to genitally focussed pleasure to the exclusion of other
dimensions of identity such as family, relationships, and community (p. 217). The
pathologization of homosexuality and the creation of a homosexual population created
a dynamic in which individuals began a process of self-interrogation by accounting
themselves as an anomaly and then seeking help in the very system that created it. As
Terry (1999) writes, ‘These instances of self-interrogation are often embedded in psy-
chiatric case histories and statistical surveys which allow the historian to watch the
complex interplay between authorities and homosexuals as both attempted to make
sense of diverse and culturally minoritized forms of desire’ (p. 15). The effects of
self-interrogation by individuals experiencing same sex desire was evidenced in the
sphere of 19th-century art and culture. The Russian novelists Gogol and Tolstoy endured
psychological torment because of their efforts to suppress their desires. The French
novelist Proust and the German short story writer Mann framed their desires as upper-
class neurosis and decadence, and those who dared publicly discuss their homosexuality,
such as the English 19th century author and playwright Oscar Wilde, risked and
endured imprisonment (Gay Studies, 2009). Foucault articulates how sexuality as a
discourse was implanted in bodies to create not only a new medical category of homo-
sexual but also an identity.

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 269

Homosexuality as Identity
Halperin (1998) agrees that sexuality takes on new social and individual functions, and
assumes a new importance in defining the modern self (p. 96). With homosexuality
medicalized in the 19th century, it no longer was solely understood as a transgression
from a moral code or a forbidden act. It remained all of that and more. Homosexuality
became essentialized as a medically and psychologically grounded ontological identity.
As Foucault (1990a) writes:

The 19th century homosexual became a person, a past, a case history and a
childhood ... . Nothing that went into his composition was unaffected by his
sexuality. It was everywhere present in him ... . It was consubstantial with him,
less habitual sin than a singular nature. (p. 43)

Halperin persuasively argues that it is a common misreading of Foucault to assert that no

kind of homosexual identity existed prior to the 19th century. A kind of homosexual
identity existed but it was formed by different kinds of historically contingent discursive
strategies (Halperin, 1998, p. 104). As an example of a different kind of homosexuality
existing prior to the 19th century, Halperin draws on the research of Winkler (1990) who
discussed the concept of the kinaidos in ancient Mediterranean society. The kinaidos was
a scare-image that warned men of the possibility that they could lose their masculine
gender status by engaging in homosexual acts. Interestingly, however the kinaidos is not
someone who has a different sexual orientation from other men or who belongs to
another species; rather he is someone who represents what every man would be like if
they sacrificed their male gender identity and succumbed to their bodily appetites
(Halperin, 1998, p. 101). Thus it is not so much homosexuality per se that Foucault is
suggesting emerged in the 19th century but a particular kind of identity that was unique
and far more essentialised in terms of how the homosexual individual constructed their
identity and themselves as subjects of a totalizing sexuality as a result of the discursive
practices of the 19th century.
It is important to note that Foucault’s objective in the History of Sexuality is a tactical
reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality of the last 500 years. Foucault suggests
that the best strategy for reversing the current discursive mechanisms of sexuality is by
displacing it with a different economy altogether, an economy which will feature bodies
and pleasure instead of such familiar and overworked entities as sexuality (Halperin,
1998, p. 94). Foucault (1990a) concludes his first volume of The History of Sexuality
writing:

Moreover, we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a

different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite under-
stand how the ruses of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization,
were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that the we became
dedicated to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest of
confession from a shadow. (p. 159)

Foucault’s focus on bodies and pleasure involves a critical analysis of how the individual
constructs oneself as a subject. In a series of lectures entitled The Hermeneutics of the

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270 George Drazenovich

Subject, Foucault (2001) outlines the emphasis given to the subject in ancient Greek
thought and notes how predicating ethical conduct and morality on subjectivity is met,
today, with resistance.

All these injunctions to exalt oneself, to devote oneself to oneself, to turn in on

oneself, to offer service to oneself, sound to our ears rather like—what? Like a
sort of challenge and defiance, a desire for radical ethical change, a sort of
moral dandysism, the assertion-challenge of a fixed aesthetic and individual
stage. Or else they sound to us like a somewhat melancholy and sad expression
of the withdrawal of the individual who is unable to hold on to and keep firmly
before his eyes, in his grasp and for himself, a collective morality ... and who,
faced with the disintegration of this collective morality, has naught else to do
but to attend to himself. (p. 12)

Foucault (2001) places the blame for this shift to what he refers to as the ‘Cartesian
moment’ (p. 14). The Cartesian approach requalified the classic Socratic injunction to
‘know thyself’ by discrediting from the field of modern philosophical thought the ancient
Greek principle of the care of the self. Foucault, therefore, carefully explores what is
meant by the care of the self.
While the purpose of the first volume of The History of Sexuality is to outline how
sexuality as discourse is tied to a particular time, place, and system of knowledge, the
second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality are concerned with the arts of
existence, the ethical formation of the person as subject; in sum the care of the self.

Foucault on the Care of the Self

A Foucauldian approach to homosexuality involves researching how different historical
cultures fashioned different sorts of links between sexual acts and forms of identity. As
Halperin (1998) writes, ‘We need to find ways of asking how different historical cultures
fashioned different sorts of links between sexual acts, on the one hand, and sexual tastes,
styles, dispositions, characters, gender presentations, and forms of subjectivity, on the
other’ (p. 109). The formation, or care of the self, as subject is a major Foucauldian
theme. In the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault modifies his
work focussing on how individuals (re)constitute themselves as subjects. Rather than
relying on Enlightenment notions of the subject, particularly as it pertains to sexuality,
Foucault turns to ancient Greek conceptions of the self (Feder, 2009, p. 133). The
objective of raising the general question of the formation of self and directing it to ancient
Greek culture is that ancient Greek culture linked sexuality not to confession but to what
might be called the arts of existence. Foucault (1990b) explains the art of existence as
‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which individuals not only set themselves
rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their
singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values
and meets certain stylistic criteria’ (p. 10). To make one’s life into an oeuvre means to
make one’s very life into an art. To accomplish this process the Greeks focussed on the
cultivation of the self.The cultivation of the self was characterized by the fact that the art
of existence is dominated by the principle that says one must take care of oneself. It is the

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 271

principle of the care of the self that established the self’s necessity, presides over its
development, and organizes its practice (Foucault, 1988, p. 43). In The Hermeneutics of
the Subject, Foucault (2001) emphatically underscores that the concept of the care for the
self does not lead to the constitution of oneself as an object of analysis, decipherment,
and reflection (p. 222). Foucault (2001) interprets the ancient Greek construction of the
self to what we might refer to today as a spiritual process.

We will call ‘spirituality’ then the set of these researches, practices, and expe-
riences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conver-
sions of looking, modifications of existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge
but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price paid for access to the
truth. (p. 15)

Ancient Greek culture organized themes of sexuality around the concept of the aphro-
disia which was interpreted as a spiritual force capable of transforming the subject.

Aphrodisia
Ancient Greek culture, unlike our own, did not possess our concept or discourse of
sexuality. The classical Greek concept of sexuality was formed around the notion of the
aphrodisia. As Foucault (1990b) defines it: ‘The aphrodisia are the acts, gestures and
contact that produce certain forms of pleasure’ (p. 40). These differences had consider-
able importance in how one understood and cared for oneself as subject of sexual desire.
For the ancient Greeks the ‘use of pleasures’ (chresis aphrodision) was formulated around
four axes of experience; the relation to one’s body, the relation to one’s wife, the relation
to boys, and the relation to truth (Foucault, 1990b, p. 32). There is a marked difference,
however, between how sexual pleasure (aphrodisia) was interpreted in ancient Greek
culture and how sexuality, as a 19th century development, is interpreted in ours. As
Foucault (1990b) writes:

(The) Greeks had not evinced, either in their theoretical reflection or in their
practical thinking, a very insistent concern for defining precisely what they
meant by aphrodisia -whether it was a question of determining the nature of
the thing designated, of delimiting its scope, or of drawing up an inventory
of its elements. In any case, they had nothing resembling those long lists of
possible acts, such as one finds later in the penitential books, the manual of
confession, or in the works of psychopathology; no table that served to define
was licit, permitted, or normal, and to describe the vast family of prohibited
gestures. Nor was their anything resembling the concern—which was so char-
acteristic of the question of ... sexuality—for discovering the insidious presence
of a power of undetermined limits ... . Neither classification nor decipherment.
(p. 38)

At issue was not extracting by confessional techniques various sexual acts and then
formulating a discourse of sexuality comprised of rules and constraints intended to
universalize norms and laws to impose on scientifically and politically created popula-
tions. What seemed to be the object of reflection for the Greeks in matters of sexual

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Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
272 George Drazenovich

conduct was not the act itself, or forms of desire (i.e. sexual ‘orientation’), it was rather
the nature of the force with which one is transported by the aphrodisia (Foucault 1990b,
p. 43). There was no one single overall system of sexuality that imposed itself on all
people in the same way and classified acts in terms of their being natural or natural,
pathological or normal. While there were a few precepts related to moderation and self
control which applied more broadly to all areas of life, standards of sexual morality were
always tailored to one’s way of life, which was itself determined by the status one had
inherited and the purposes one had chosen (Foucault, 1990b, p. 60). Sexual conduct was
in that sense subjectively determined.
Against the backdrop of ancient Greek culture Foucault rhetorically asks that given the
prevalence of accepted homosexual practice, were the Greeks bisexual (Foucault, 1990b,
p. 188)? His reply is affirmative if by bisexual one means that a Greek could simulta-
neously be enamoured of a boy or a girl; that a married man could have male lover; that
it was common for a male to change to a preference for women later in his life. However,
the difference between their understanding and ours is that they did not recognize within
these different sexual movements two kinds of sexual orientation, two different or
competing drives. We can talk of bisexuality thinking of the free choice they allowed
themselves but bisexuality in no way related to tendencies or opposition between sexual
desires. To their way of thinking, what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was
simply the appetite that nature had implanted in one’s heart for beautiful human beings,
whatever their sex might be (Foucault, 1990b, p. 188).
In classical Greek thought, being a sexual subject was conceptualized in an ethical
domain. The ethical domain was not, however, constituted by making sexuality into a
deviancy or species, nor by cohering to universal legislation determining permitted and
forbidden acts (Foucault 1990b, p. 91). There was no differentiation between homo-
sexual or heterosexual orientations. There was only the force of the aphrodisia which
involved not only sexual desire but also the mode of relationship between the self, other
people and beauty. The mode of becoming a subject lay in the wisdom by which one
allowed oneself to be shaped by the spiritual force of the aphrodisia. When one was able
to care for the self, such that one’s very life was transformed into an oeuvre, then it could
be said that the individual fulfilled oneself as an ‘ethical subject by shaping a precisely
measured conduct that was plainly visible to all and deserving to be long remembered’
(Foucault, 1990b, p. 91).

Conclusion
One of the major contributions of Foucault to the area of homosexuality is his critique
of it as population and identity. As Foucault (1996) says:

If identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think they
have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity’ and that their own identity has to become
the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they
ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn
back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are
asked to relate to the question of identity, it has to be an identity to our unique

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 A Foucauldian Analysis of Homosexuality 273

selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of
identity, rather they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of
innovation. (p. 385)

In education today, an entire specialty of cultural studies called queer theory has
emerged as a distinct approach to sexuality. Queer studies is heavily influenced by
Foucault and his History of Sexuality. Explaining queer studies and its approach to
homosexuality as an identity, Kelly (2008) observes:

Foucault argues that it is not the proliferation of identities that leads to sexual
liberation but, rather, the separation of acts and feelings from those identities.
Instead of claiming an identity for one’s desires and acts, Foucault favors using
one’s desires to create new pleasures, relationships, networks, and cultural and
political practices. In other words, it will be liberatory to simply desire, feel,
and act, to just be sexual, rather than to attach those behaviors to larger
cultural meanings. (p. 1)

A clue to the presence of social and cultural tensions outlined in the introduction is due
to the presence of a tectonic shift occurring in our culture as we move beyond on many
of the modern period’s assumptions and discursive practices of governmentality in every
sphere of educational and political culture. It is important that educators understand that
the turn to the subject does not mean ethical neutrality and amorality. Every morality,
Foucault (1990b) notes, is comprised of two elements; codes of behaviour and forms of
subjectivation (p. 29). The last 500 years have seen a morality composed of codes of
behaviour; from entire discourses on sexuality from the Christian pastorals of the later
medieval period to the medicalizing discourses of psychiatry. In cultures like our own,
with emphasis on subjectivity, less importance is placed on systems of codes and rules of
behaviour. The Western world is now living in an age that emphasizes plurality, and
subjectivity. Western pedagogy surrounding sexuality needs to reflect this changing
reality.
The challenge for educators is to educate for adaptation to a world without universal
categories, with boundaries that need to be constantly negotiated and renegotiated.
Foucault’s and the entire postmodern turn to the subject is one of the preferred means
to assist in the development of liberated, and self-responsible adults. The turn to the
subject, and the ancient Greek emphasis on the care of the self, is an appropriate and
necessary pedagogical shift that educators need to consider. The postmodern turn is not
as radical as it appears. Foucault’s second and third volumes demonstrate how we can,
and indeed historically have, thought and perceived very differently.
Foucault’s mining of ancient Greek culture is a useful way to begin to discuss and
think about sexuality absent facile moralizing and division of sexual practices into natural
and unnatural or creating separate sexual orientations. A Foucauldian analysis of homo-
sexuality, in the end then, is not really about homosexuality as an identity that needs to
be affirmed, rejected, changed, celebrated or denigrated. Instead, the emphasis is on the
forms of relations with the self, methods and techniques by which one works them out,
the exercises which one makes oneself into an object to be known and on the practices
that enable one to transform their own being (Foucault, 1990b, p. 30). It seems

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Educational Philosophy and Theory © 2010 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
274 George Drazenovich

appropriate that the last word in a Foucauldian analysis of homosexuality should belong
to Foucault himself. The change that was wrought in Foucault (1990b) as he chronicled
it in the second volume of The History of Sexuality can be one that educators and students
alike can also share as they analyze sexuality through a Foucauldian lens.
After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted
only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another
and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are
times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one
thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is
to go on looking and reflecting at all (p. 8).

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