Michel Foucault — "Sexuality is not a natural given, but a historical construct."
Sexuality is not a natural given, but a historical construct.
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More from Michel Foucault
"The judge of normality is therefore the judge of abnormality."
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same."
"The West has been obsessed with sex for centuries, not because it is repressed, but because it is an object of knowledge and power."
"The work of the intellectual is not to sculpt the beautiful soul, but to tear away the masks of ignorance."
"The human sciences are a form of power, not a form of knowledge."
About Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.