ABSTRACT
A dour pair stares out from the book jacket. Fastidiously attired in white lab coats, William Masters and Virginia Johnson might have been virologists on the track of Mad Cow Disease or astronomers intent upon solving the riddles of the universe. But no, sex was their subject. In 1966, they published their pioneering work, Human Sexual Response. No sooner had they transformed all that swelling and sloshing and spurting into an elegant architecture of sex, than a rogue theorist began dismantling it. The contemporary notion of sex, Foucault (1980) claimed, was nothing more than an elaborate fiction. It made it possible “to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures and it enables [us] to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle” (p. 154).
