ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault’s landmark History of Sexuality (1976) has little to say about sexual acts and identities outside of Europe. In confining his study to Europe, Foucault sought to avoid universalizing gestures that might apply European categories of analysis to all cultures or measure non-European processes and progress along a timeline derived from European experience. Yet desire and sexuality rarely defer to geospatial partitions, and the period across which Foucault imagines a transformation in European sexual discourse coincides with the era often described as the ‘age of expansion’, when colonialism, diplomacy, piracy, and trade brought Europeans into increasing contact with non-European texts, goods, people and information. This is not merely a temporal coincidence. Rather, as Mark Johnson argues, European sexual identities were ‘created and sustained by contrasts drawn with the practices of “Others” imagined to fall outside the norm’s cultural and geographical parameters’. 1
