Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • xlvii
studies. At heart, Foucault’s theories are also materialist. He was concerned
with the way in which human identity was the product, or the
point of intersection, of any number of interlocking social discourses of
power. Much attention is paid to a particular statement of Foucault’s,
made in his History of Sexuality: Volume One. Here he asserts, citing the
development of sexology, that it was not until the latter 19th century
that the homosexual became “a species.” Foucault does not mean, by
this, that there were no people who lived in same-sex romantic and sexual
relationships before this period, nor even that subcultures built
around these behaviors did not exist. Rather, he argues, much like Wittig,
that sexual identities only become highly visible and widely recognized
throughout a culture when they are implicated in social relations
of power. Throughout his works, Foucault documents an increasing
concern with individual identities and bodies as constituents of the social
order, arising with industrial capitalism and the growth of modern
cities. In History of Sexuality: Volume One, he counts both the discipline
of sexology and the medical “hysterisization of women’s bodies” as
forces that marked a change in the meanings of sexual identities and relations
of power in the 19th century. Medical and scientific taxonomies
that arose during this period inspire Foucault’s use of the word
“species” in this context.
The work of Michel Foucault unleashed sexual identities from notions
of essentialism and influenced a number of lesbian theorists, such
as Sue-Ellen Case and Judith Butler, who questioned historically recognized
categories of female sexual identities. Both Butler and Case argue
for a view of gender and sexuality as performative. Gender and sex, for
these theorists, are a collection of learned behaviors and affects. Lesbian,
gay and transgender practices can subvert traditional notions of
gender and are thus both codes by which individuals can communicate
with each other and open challenges to heterosexual structures of
power. Butler and other so-called postmodern theorists after Foucault
have looked again at the relationship between the psyche, the body and
social institutions and discourses as they meet in the figure of the lesbian.
Butler’s work builds upon both psychoanalysis, via Freud and
Jacques Lacan, and the interventions in social history made by Foucault.
She looks at the unstable and shifting relationships between psychic
and material structures in the creation of the lesbian subjectivity.
She also creates an unstable space between individual subjects and the