Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

The Further History of Sexuality: From Michel Foucault to Miley Cyrus

Peter Benson philosophically explores changing attitudes towards sexuality.

When Michel Foucault died in 1984 he left unfinished a proposed sequence of four books with the overall title The History of Sexuality. Only the first three volumes were published. Furthermore, his plan for the sequence had changed drastically between the publication of the first volume in 1976 and the second, which appeared in the year of his death. One thing he didn’t change, however, was the title of his project, and this was quite enough by itself to ruffle the feathers of his many detractors. Although attitudes to sexuality clearly change over time, can it be right to claim that human sexuality itself has a history? Surely it is a natural characteristic which only alters in the long, glacially slow perspective of evolution?

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) portrait by Woodrow Cowher, 2017

A History of Foucault’s Thought

Questions of this kind were not new issues in relation to Foucault’s work.

…