ABSTRACT
“Sex is not a natural act,” cries out the provocative title of Leonore Tiefer’s 1995 book. Flying in the face of common sense, perhaps, such social constructionist understandings of sexuality became widely accepted within the social sciences toward the end of the twentieth century, even if they still seem to run directly counter to wider cultural assumptions about sex and sexuality. Foucault’s point about the consolidation of a procreative sexuality can be illustrated by following the introduction of the science of sexology in the early twentieth century. For Foucault, language is always located in discourse, and this gives rise to a particular analytic framework for exploring the social production of meaning and action. Central to a Foucauldian analysis of power is the recognition that power is not a unitary force that is independent of us and operates only from the top down, through repression and denial.
