ABSTRACT
The History of Sexuality is not a history of sexuality. Rather, as its French subtitle, La volonté de savoir, suggests, it is a history of how we came to want to know about sex, or how we came to think that sex was such an important thing to know about. Beyond this, the first volume of The History of Sexuality is a history of the discourses and practices that we have produced to satiate this desire. The History of Sexuality is thus a history of knowledgeable discourses about sex, of the invention of sciences of sex and of how we came to believe that these sciences could tell us not only about a particular activity that we may engage in but, more importantly, about who we are and how we can be happy.
