Pop Theory 5: The Lesbian Sex Machine

How might we think about sexuality as something that always and only manifests in culture, in the (actual/actualized) world and, specifically, as a product of bodily relations? What if we kicked it old school Foucault-style and thought about sexuality not as an identity but as an act? Sex acts instead of sexuality? If desire is fluid, if it flows, why must we think of it in terms of a fixed identity, when desire — which enables and produces connections between bodies — is rendered intelligible in those wonderfully fleshy moments of bodily relations, in sex acts?

In one of the most famous passages of The History of Sexuality, Vol I, Foucault explicates the emergence of the “homosexual” and the translation of acts into identity:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. Everywhere in him it is present: underlying all his actions.... It was con-substantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature…. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (emphasis added)

This passage, my darling homolabians, has become Foucault’s “claim” to fame, so to speak. (That is, now you too can discuss Foucault like a professional snob at parties and social get togethers! “Parkour to you!”) Foucault explains that — instead of understanding “identity” as thea posteriori creation of acts (that identity is a designation established by actions; that it is “performed or produced through action”) — identity has been re-imagined as something innate to the body, that a body is “born” with.

The epistemological shift that occurred — from thinking of sexuality in terms of acts to identity, was cemented by that hideous beast Psychoanalysis, among other discursive beasts — has established how we think about sexuality today.

(There’s actually a contingent of feminist/queer scholars, such as Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Claire Colebrook, who advocate a “becoming-imperceptible” to move and think beyond