ABSTRACT
What Derrida (1998) described as the ‘return of the religious’, and its impact in shaping sexual politics in the twenty-first century, is hardly an altogether novel development. On the contrary, as Foucault and others have pointed out, the social articulation of sexuality since at least the Middle Ages had been organized primarily by religion: ‘The Middle Ages had organized around the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance a discourse that was markedly unitary’ (Foucault 1978, p. 33). What in fact has been most striking about the articulation of sex and sexuality in recent centuries is the extent to which a relatively unified and profoundly hegemonic religious discourse has been broken apart by a range of new discursive formations:
In the course of recent centuries this relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities, which took form in demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism. More precisely, the secure bond that held together the moral theology of concupiscence and the obligation of confession . . . was, if not broken, at least loosened and diversified.
