The History of Sexuality: An introduction

Michel Foucault

Pantheon Books, 1978 - Sex customs - 168 pages

What people are saying

Review: The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction (The History of Sexuality #1)

User Review  - Jed - Goodreads

A sociological/philosophical/historical book which takes aim at the generally accepted theory that Western culture as a whole has suffered from Puritannical sexual repression for the last few hundered ...

Review: The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction (The History of Sexuality #1)

User Review  - Jana - Goodreads

First read this before all the Freud (which I'll get back to reviewing some other time) and then again a few years later and got even more out of it. My copy of this book is so marked up and tagged ...

Contents

• The Incitement to Discourse: 17
• The Perverse Implantation: 36
• Objective: 81

About the author

Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman of History of Systems of Thought until his death. Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness. Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The History of Sexuality: An introduction; Volume 1 of Histoire de la sexualité, Michel Foucault; Social theory; Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
• Author: Michel Foucault
• Translated by: Robert Hurley
• Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1978
• Original from: the University of Virginia
• Digitized: Jun 4, 2008
• Length: 168 pages