Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (1978)
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (1978)
The most centrifugal event from the last forty years was Robert Hurley’s English translation of Michel Foucault’s La Volénté de savoir as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, volume 1 published by Pantheon books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1978. This translation made Foucault’s groundbreaking theses regarding the subject forming effects of discourse about sex, sexuality, and perversion available to English speakers at a time when English was becoming an increasingly hegemonic international language. In modeling a genealogical approach to discourse analysis, the introduction to The History of Sexuality also transformed the historiography of sociocultural forms while casting self-conscious light on the constitution of scientific objects as objects of discourse. Because its intensifying influence coincided with the institutional rise of feminist and postcolonial criticism, Foucault’s introduction profoundly shaped their questions, methods, and archives while spurring a crucial critique of normativity that facilitated the emergence of queer studies. [End Page 6]
University of Alberta
