Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction (1978). New York: Vintage, 1990.

My first Foucault (and what a lousy cover, eh?). Here he takes a Marxist look at sexuality as it's been "invented" over the last three centuries. He sites sexuality's birth (so to speak) with the rise of the (Catholic) confession, where "[a]n imperative was established: Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse" (21). What was once biological (sex) became social (sexuality). Foucault urges readers not to think of sexuality as something natural or innate, but rather as "a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse [. . .] are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power" (105-6).

Power might be his actual subject here, and how sexuality has been deployed in order to increase or sustain power. This is the thing about much of the (admittedly very little) theory in general and Marxist theory in specific I've run across: this continuous use of the passive voice. I'm always curious: Well, who? Like when, exactly, did a certain someone or group of someones realize that an increased amount of discourse on sexuality can help them get the power they want or maintain the power they have? Can you give me a specific example?

Foucault can't, or maybe won't. I think specific examples are supposed to be self-evident, or maybe ubiquitous. At any rate, what I like about the theories in this book are the way they read the body as commodity. He contrasts two eras or phases that may or may not be subsequent (they may be concurrent is what I mean): the deployment of alliance (meaning, like, matrimony as social bond to reign in sexual desire) and the deployment of sexuality (a time when licit and illicit were a lot more amorphous, and personal desires were emphasized over the social good). The shift he labels as an economic one, when the monetary benefits of the marriage contract became less necessary for the accumulation of wealth. (Throughout the book I was amazed at how early Foucault grounds these shifts...early 1700s? Really?)

At any rate, while the deployment of alliance concerns itself with the social body, the deployment of sexuality concerns itself with "proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way" (107).

The body then is seen as something that produces and consumes. And somehow (I'm not fully up on it yet), this ties in to certain post-gay theories of the commodification of gay identity—the idea that markets more fully (and more rapidly) than governments are the entities that can "accept" gay people, because markets read new identities as an opportunity (new demographics) as opposed to a problem (new populations). To say, "I am my sexuality" or "My sexuality is who I am" is not liberating, Foucault argues. It's the status quo. We "think we are affirming the rights of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected" (157).