ABSTRACT
The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge is one of Michel Foucault's most quoted and influential texts, and has had a considerable impact on the work of important thinkers and even whole intellectual schools. However, the ideas Foucault advances in Sexuality Vol. 1 are also at odds with certain schools of thought that take issue with Foucault's theory of power being dispersed. Scholars of queer theory and gender and sexuality studies have drawn from Foucault's ideas to question the standard sexual categories such as man/woman, and homosexual/heterosexual. Foucault's approach was of notable assistance to thinkers such as the United States gender scholar Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick, the authors of Gender Trouble and Epistemology of the Closet respectively. The ideas Foucault advanced in Sexuality Vol. 1 have not only influenced academic debates about sexuality. Since the early 1990s, Foucault's ideas have been applied across the humanities and social sciences.
