Michel Foucault

, philosopher/historian

• "There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals."
  • Quoted in Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) (2001).

• "Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere."
  • ibid

• "What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body - through the eroticization of the body. I think it's...a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure."
  • ibid, in reference to S/M.

• "Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary abberration; the homosexual was now a species."
  • Foucault, Michel (1978) History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. NY: Pantheon. Translated from French by Robert Hurley. Page 43

• "The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified."
  • ibid, page 101

Source

• Aldrich, Robert and Wotherspoon, Gary (Eds.) (2001). Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day. New York: Routledge. ISBN 041522974X.