Michel Foucault: sex and sexuality in the genealogy of the modern western subject

Michel Foucault's work represents a change in the panorama of social theories that have analysed sex and sexuality in the second half of the 20th century. Through his genealogical investigation, conducted above all in The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge, the French philosopher identified the Deployment of Sexuality and the Technology of Confession as indispensable elements for understanding the relation that, in modern Western culture, would unite power, truth and subjectivity within a single frame of biopolitical governance of the living. A perspective focused on the 'truths' and 'practices' within which the (multiform) processes of constitution of sexuality, of the idea of pleasure, of the very relevance of love in our societies are situated. Starting from these premises, the general aim of the essay is to reconstruct this open field of research, emphasising, in particular, the genealogical analysis that Foucault conducts on the cultural practices from which individuals, in the West, have historically been called upon to question themselves and have been questioned, within the concrete situations of everyday experience, about saying (and therefore defining) their sexual identity and sexual orientation. This is an injunction constitutive of the idea of the Subject that has emerged, during Western modernity, to such an extent that sexuality has become an eminently political question, such as to give rise around it to meanings that call into question oppression and liberation at the same time.