Queer Theory

The Problem of Subjectivity

In the History of Sexuality, Foucault deconstructs the idea of queer/gay identity. His argument, like those in many of his books, is at once obvious, [Page 613]unsettling, and revelatory. In this work, Foucault distinguished between sexuality and sex. Sex had been an act, a set of pleasures that one performed. Yet at the beginning of first millennium, the Pauline tradition of Christianity focused on sexual pleasure and its restraint as the fundamental question of a religious morality. To live a moral life meant knowing and controlling one's urges, tendencies, and temptations. Foucault calls this sexuality rather than sexsex being something visible and external that one did, sexuality being invisible and interior, something within oneself. Sexuality thus made it possible to generate feelings of guilt and sin simply because one dreamed of or desired disfavored pleasures, especially any one of those in an ill-defined category of illegal acts called sodomy. One could be guilty of sinfulness at any time or place one's sexuality emerged.

In the middle of the 19th century, with the rise of the medical establishment, psychiatry pathologized desire. Certain desires could now be classified as disease. Patients who suffered from this disease required diagnosis and treatment. An entire taxonomy of desire was created that classified people by their pleasures: the homosexual, the invert, the onanist, the pederast, and so fortheach of whom was not just diseased but a specific kind of person. A new priesthood of psychiatrists arose to help them understand and heal their sexuality to save their mental health. Like religion before them, these priests installed sex as the central issue of psychological health and well-being. To know oneself meant to know one's sexuality.

Foucault argued that before the rise of psychiatry in the mid-19th century, the idea that one's social identity was defined by one's desiresthe idea of being a homosexualwas unknown. Even the ancient Greeks, who were familiar with same-sex acts, had no category for it because they did not view pleasure or desire as issues of moral or mental health. The homosexual is an extension of the religio-psychiatric demand that each of us define ourselves by our sexuality. From this perspective, homosexuality is an invention of heterosexuality, and homosexuals are complicit in identifying themselves by their deviation from norms of sexuality that were themselves heterosexual in origin.

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