ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has seen itself as overcoming silence and superstition in the scientific revelation of the true importance of the family and sexuality in the constitution of personality. Sexual identities and practices, therefore, operate at a uniquely sensitive pressure point in modern and postmodern culture. Much of the coordinated analysis of sexual and other politics remains to be done, yet it does help justify the application of the word radical to the most significant theorising of sexuality and subjectivity. Sigmund Freud argued that childhood was loaded with a sexual potential that was uncentred and fragmentary. Perhaps the most influential argument about sexuality since the 1960s— Michel Foucault’s multi-volume History of Sexuality—challenges the belief that the modern era has seen a progressive emancipation of sexuality from the constraints of traditional blind repression. The influence of Foucault’s argument has been immense, particularly on the burgeoning field of queer theory.
