ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is three-fold. I want firstly to reconsider Foucault’s History of Sexuality and related writings on the subject, many of them newly published (Foucault 1980, 1985, 1986; of the recently published texts, the most important for the question of sexuality is Foucault 2003b). I want to emphasize his theorization of sexuality as a discourse and to address some of its implications for geography. I consider this particularly important not merely because it is a text largely neglected by geographers, but also because it is generally susceptible to misreadings bordering on caricature. A quarter of a century on, the History’s ambiguities and complexities are worth revisiting, most particularly in the light of the ongoing publication of Foucault’s seminars at the Collège de France. This is the most unapologetically exegetic section of this chapter, but it is followed by a more empirical discussion of some geographies of sexuality that have been directly inspired by Foucault’s wider discussion of modernity. Here, and secondly, the focus is on the kind of ‘work’ that sexuality accomplishes within modern culture. We shall see that whilst many geographers have found Foucault’s work extraordinarily stimulating, it is all too easy to embed an analysis of sexuality within his discussion of the development of a disciplinary society. By contrast, I will argue, the role of space in sexual normalization and in the ‘tolerance’ of sexual ‘freedoms’, have been far less analyzed. Again, though, the ambiguities in Foucault’s work – some of them productive, some frustrating – are very much to the fore, and I have not tried to gloss over the difficulties in this notion of sexuality as a dispositif. Thirdly, I conclude with a discussion of the importance of Foucault’s work for research into the geographies of sexual subjectivity, including its major importance for queer theories and the related political critique of heterosexism and homophobia. Geographers for whom sexual subjectivity is a concern have found in – or perhaps it is more accurate to say after – Foucault a series of resources, theories, formulations and suggestions that have contributed to major developments in our understanding of sexuality and space. In this section, though the distance from Foucault’s writing is the greatest, and his influence the most indirect, I have nevertheless found the most unambiguously to celebrate.
