1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
others catalogued and classified numerous perversions, from which issues about
sex became endlessly tracked and monitored with the growth of social medicine,
education, criminology and sexology.
According to Foucault, this fostering of a science of sexuality arose from the
connection of confession to the growth of knowledge about sex. The Roman Catholic
confessional, Foucault contends, was the principal means of regulating the individual
sexuality of believers; the Church was the site in which subjects came to tell the truth
about themselves, especially in relation to sexuality, to their priests. The confessional
can be regarded as the source of the West’s preoccupation with sex, particularly in
terms of the sanctioned inducement to talk of it. Confession became disconnected
from its broad religious framework, however, somewhere in the late eighteenth
century and was transformed into a type of investigation or interrogation through the
scientific study of sex and the creation of medical discourses about it. Sexes became
increasingly bound up with networks of knowledge and power, and in time a matter
for increasing self-policing, self-regulation and self-interrogation. In other words,
instead of sex being regulated by external forces, it is much more a matter of
attitudinal discipline, which is in turn connected to issues of, say, knowledge and
education. Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, says Foucault, are key instances of
such self-policing in the contemporary era. In therapy, the individual does not so
much feel coerced into confessing about sexual practices and erotic fantasies; rather
the information divulged by the patient is treated as the means to freedom, the
realization of a liberation from repression, the road to a new identity.
Structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of identity have proved a valuable
corrective to liberal notions of the free, autonomous individual – so often imagined
without limitation or constraint. In the writings of many authors connected to these
traditions of thought – from Louis Althusser to Jean-Francois Lyotard – identity is
revealed as constituted to its roots in linguistic codes and discursive constructions.
However, structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to identity have also been
sharply criticized on the grounds of sociological determinism – that is, that the
definition of identity primarily in terms of political domination upon passive individuals
denies the power of human agency (Giddens 1984; Habermas 1987). Notwithstanding
these criticisms, however, many social theorists, ranging from sociologists to literary
critics, have drawn from structuralism and post-structuralism to debunk traditional
notions of identity, the unified subject and autonomous selfhood.
The structuralist and post-structuralist critique of identity reigned supreme during
the 1970s and 1980s, but was then superseded to some extent by the arrival of the