ABSTRACT
In the ‘Domain’ section of part IV of The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes what he envisaged to be the topics of analysis for the remaining volumes of The History of Sexuality. These were: ‘1. A hysterization of women’s bodies… 2. A pedagogization of children’s sex… 3. A socialization of procreative behavior… [and] 4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 102). The original French edition of volume 1 provided the projected titles for five more volumes of the series. These were: La chair et le corps (The Body and the Flesh), La croissade des enfants (The Children’s Crusade), La femme, la mère, l’hystèrique (The Woman, the Mother, the Hysteric), Les pervers (Perverts) and Population et races (Population and Races) (Macey, 1993, p. 354). In 1976, Foucault thus imagined writing five additional volumes of The History of Sexuality, four of which would have examined one of the figures corresponding to these ‘four great strategic unities’: the masturbating child, the hysterical woman,
the sexual ‘pervert’ and the procreative couple that was responsible for reproducing the population and the race (Foucault, 1978, p. 102). Had Foucault pursued this plan, with the exception of La chair et le corps, he would have maintained a historical focus on the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality and in all his earlier works. As we now know, Foucault would never write the books he anticipated in volume 1. Instead, and to the regret of many Foucault scholars, he would depart from the historical period in which he had developed an expertise in order to write volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality on sexual ethics in ancient Greece and Rome; volume 4 – which was drafted at the time of Foucault’s death but has never been published – focuses on early Christianity.
