ABSTRACT
Historians of the body and sex have long been indebted to Foucault and his assertion that sexuality is an historical construct rather than a timeless constant.1 He argued that in the nineteenth century sexual identity became crucial to modern individuals and a new ‘technology of power’ and ‘science of sexuality’ emerged that labelled certain categories of sexual activity as illicit and dangerous. A wealth of writing on sexuality surfaced during the nineteenth century as the printed revolution took hold, literacy rates increased and individuals increasingly consumed written sources of knowledge about sex. Foucault and his followers, many of whom focused on the production and impact of elite discourses of sexuality, established that an assumed prevailing discourse of Victorian prudishness and sexual repression was far from monolithic and suggested instead that a proliferation of knowledge at certain authorized sites about sexuality characterized the nineteenth century.2 It was Foucault’s work which revolutionized the history of sexuality and led to an explosion of studies of licit and illicit sexual behaviour. Foucault’s scholarship emerged at the same time that the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century, despite having roots much earlier, brought sex into public discussion. The passage of anti-censorship legislation allowed sex to be more openly explored in the print and broadcast media, literature and the theatre.3
