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The introduction elaborates the key concepts of the book: homosexuality, value, and labor. It contextualizes the importance of these concepts for modern Irish history and culture. Furthermore, it argues that the study brings together currently alienated critical discussions that both trace themselves to Foucault’s History of Sexuality: queer theory that has developed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Foucault and studies of empire engaged with the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The chapter makes connections among queer theory, Irish studies, modernist studies, and theories of empire.

This chapter discusses how the history of sexuality was virtually absent from the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) before the 1970s and did not regularly appear until the 1990s. Historians were slower to take up this topic than practitioners of several other disciplines, and some historians presented their findings in other vehicles. In the Journal of American History, the first article did not appear until 1968; the first session at an annual meeting followed in 1971, but very little else showed up in either site during the next two decades. Acceptance and legitimacy within the OAH did not come until the 1990s. The chapter discusses what more needs to be done to grow this field, including a recommendation that the profession should define historical significance.

This chapter situates the book as a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. The study is described as a post-Foucauldian history of sexuality that aims to sustain the radical implications of Foucault’s foundational work in History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Volume 1. The chapter articulates the book’s approach in terms of queer historiography. One of its key strategies is the endeavor to suspend present-day sexual knowledges in the encounter with early films and other extrafilmic archival materials. To presume, at least before critical work commences, the sexual opacity of early cinema is to start from the position that the past is different from the present, particularly in terms of sexual subjectivity, but not to accede to a homophobic denial of the historical existence of same-sex desire or queer ways of living and being. The chapter explores the consequences of this approach for critical modes of identification, and queer articulations of historical time, in the context of recent debates concerning queer temporality.

This book presents an exploration of the history of sexuality in Cuba from the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 to the early twenty-first century. During these five decades the Cuban revolutionary regime intervened in citizens' sexual lives in myriad ways: through policy and legal reform, mass education programs, pronouncements of leaders on the relationship between good revolutionaries and good sexual subjects, incentives to encourage certain forms of sexual union, and repressive methods to discourage and punish others. Above all, the enormous economic, political, and social upheaval ushered in by the Revolution brought transformation to all areas of life, including the family, reproduction, sexual values, and intimate relationships. Cuban sexual ideology did not change overnight after 1959. New revolutionary values continued to coexist with prerevolutionary ones, in a potent and often contradictory mix of the old and the new.

Revisits a well-known work, Foucault’s History of Sexuality volume one, from the perspective of its consideration of procreation. Offers a re-reading of the work. Despite Foucault’s discussion of the deadly aspects of biopolitics and his interest in the role of reproduction in biopolitics, he does not consider procreation from this ‘deadly’ perspective. The chapter argues that we can draw differently on Foucauldian resources so as to correct for this missing analysis, and in so doing, also shed light on modern representations of maternal agency all the way through to a new analysis of contemporary abortion wars

The influence of Michel Foucault's writings on sexuality, especially The History of Sexuality (1978–1986) on subsequent studies of sexuality, gender and the discourses of power and oppression, has been profound. In particular, Foucault has revolutionised the study of the social history of classical antiquity, where, with fifth–fourth century bc Athens, he ultimately decided to begin his investigations. He provides an analytical framework that can be expanded to explore the implications of sex and gender in the whole of social life. Foucault fashioned his analytical ‘techniques’ over a lifetime of archaeology, genealogy and ethics. This chapter presents a feminist critique of his History of Sexuality, and re-evaluates sexuality as a part of personal and political identity through the social acts of constructing gender, whose meanings change with context. It also examines the concepts of time and monumentality, the constitution and political construction of households, and how sexuality is related to socialisation and power.

This chapter argues that Michel Foucault missed a chance for a subversive genealogical encounter with Saint Paul. It describes Paul as the parrhesiast of experimental finitude in relation to care of the self and Christian metaphysics and compares him with the Greco-Roman philosophers—those peddlers of oddly paradoxical “spiritual exercises.” It examines historiographical traditionalism within Foucault's work and his failure to elucidate Paul in relation to the Hellenistic philosophers at the conclusion to the third volume of The History of Sexuality. It also discusses Foucault's assumption that the “religion” of Paulinism constitutes a difference that forecloses real comparative analysis, Paulinism being consigned to becoming the founder of a form of moral system in Christianity whose inventive machinations will engender a “self” constituted by its being turned against itself, at once constitutively guilty, fallen, and also profoundly normalized by the universalization of its underlying metaphysical narrative. Finally, it explores Theodore Zahn's Christian historiographical conservatism.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that the discourse of sexuality shifted at the end of the nineteenth century from an emphasis on sexual acts to sexual identities. Sedgwick builds upon Foucault's famous declaration that the “species” of the homosexual was born at that moment. But Sedgwick and others working on histories of sexuality in the United States have elided the discourse of the jungle: Darwinist-Freudian constructions of “the human” and “the animal” that redefine various behaviors in relation to animal instincts. This helps to explain why the discourse of sexuality shifted at the turn of the century, once heterosexuality was naturalized in the name of reproduction. Questions about human sexuality were soon framed within an evolutionary epistemology that was fundamentally new, but still in transition. After tracing the genealogy of the jungle through Darwin, Kipling, and Freud, this chapter focuses on alternative constructions of the relationship between animality and sexuality that are revealed in Progressive-Era texts.

Meanwhile, adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s queer classic The Picture of Dorian Gray extend and elaborate on explorations of the double by explicitly invoking histories of sexual representation in connection to the sensual qualities of technology and nostalgia. In chapter 5, “`Strange Legacies of Thought and Passion’: Technologies of the Flesh and the Queering Effect of Dorian Gray,” I continue my analysis of the relationship between pornography, legacy, doubles, and technology through a close examination of two films based on Wilde’s novel: Take Off (1976) and Gluttony (2001). More than any other text, Dorian Gray engenders pornographic engagement with erotic legacy and the role of technology in the erotics of representation. Like Wilde’s novel, these films interrogate beauty and mortality, haunted at the margins by Wilde’s tragic fate and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Drawing on Wilde’s magic portrait as a predecessor, Take Off and Gluttony ruminate on mortality and relate it to the sensual, tactile qualities of evolving, mobile visual technologies and the role these technologies play in sexual subjectivity. Pornographic film, Weston and West suggest, is the inheritor to Wilde’s portrait. Both films draw on Wilde’s tale in order to address the media on which the self is captured, the shifting technologies used to exhibit this self, and the relationship of technology and media to the corporeal body. Through their reimagining of histories of Hollywood and pornographic film, respectively, Take Off and Gluttony signal the affective relationship between technology, pornography, decay, and popular culture, tracing a hardcore sexual history of the self that constitutes a sexual lineage.

Chapter 1 further situates queer approaches to history and temporality as a way forward and out of persistent debates about whether and how the past is different from the present. These debates have been of particular interest in the study of gender and sexuality in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This project charts and performs a third way of approaching figures from the past, presenting options beyond a stress on identity or alterity, as positioned by scholars of ancient materials like Bernadette Brooten and David Halperin. Queer thinkers focused on other premodern periods provide insights for this approach, particularly Carolyn Dinshaw’s conceptualization of “touches across time.” Inspired by this approach, each of the following chapters is structured by a specific anachronistic juxtaposition that provides an alternative angle on those who have been marginalized and vilified in both the past and the present.

This chapter explores Michel Foucault's philosophical work, which focuses on the power structures—institutional, cultural, and social—that determine individual experience. His primary concern is to figure the extent of how individuals can experience differently, and his work demonstrates the need to fight for the freedom to think and feel outside the governing of social norms. In his trilogy The History of Sexuality, Foucault contemplates on the molding and normalizing of the most intimate of human experiences: sexual pleasure. How humans know themselves as subjects of desire and what they know of themselves is shaped by external power structures. Foucault describes this integration as power-knowledge—a matrix that instructs and controls. There is no “natural way” of making sense of experiences; these external matrices establish the scope and variety of knowledge and desire. Foucault's History of Sexuality contains a reading of the Symposium, which gives readers an opportunity to reevaluate pleasure and desire as the roots of philosophy.

The little-known figure of Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge is introduced to the reader, and his clandestine writings and importance for the history of sexuality and Classical Reception are outlined. A brief biography sketches Bainbrigge’s education at Eton and Cambridge, his many homosexual friends, and his career as a schoolmaster at Shrewsbury. The Introduction examines his participation in a secretive culture in which men shared private homoerotic writings with each other. It examines Bainbrigge’s wartime friendship with Wilfred Owen, and his own war poetry, in the context of scholarship on homoeroticism and First World War poetry. It lays out the way in which classical education and the history of sexuality are intimately linked, exploring the institutionalization of the Classics in public schools, attempts to censor ancient sexuality, and sex education.

This chapter discusses the role played by antebellum reformist campaigns in a bodily centered history of sexuality. It considers the emergence of dietary correctives to the practice of masturbation in the work of Sylvester Graham, whose endorsement of whole-grained breads as a corrective to sexual excitement remaps both nation and globe. This remapping is prompted by the so-called “political life of the mouth,” an orifice that was as much concerned in the sustenance and reproduction of a purified whiteness as were the genitals that could be overexcited by improper eating. The chapter also elaborates on the idea of “dietetic biopower,” which is haunted by the specter of improper consumption, a possibility that connects the mouth not only to the genitals but also to the anus.