Foucault, early Christian ideas of genitalia, and the history of sexuality

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Abstract

This article is a combination of historiographic theoretical revision and a close reading of medical, philosophical, and theological texts referring to the genitalia between 50 BCE and 450 CE. The Latin noun pudenda, which became a common term in the theological and medical writing of antiquity, innovated the localization of sexual shame in a specific part of the external generative organs: the genitalia. The adjectival form of genitalia—genital—first appeared only around the mid-first century CE. But Roman uses of “genital” differed in a fundamental way from the reconstruction of the nominal form in early Christian theology between the first and fifth centuries. This article is about that important conceptual transformation, which helped to externalize sexual matters by focusing on the external genitalia as the locus of concupiscence. A focus on the localization of shame and externality in relation to sexual urges in early Christian theology formed just one part of Michel Foucault’s unfinished fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, which was only released “unedited” by the French publisher Gallimard in 2018, some thirty-four years after it was written. This text, on which Foucault was working when he died in 1984, promised to show how early medieval Christian ideas about sexual pollution, sin, and renunciation contributed to the long historical emergence of the modern sexual self. Despite the unfinished nature of the volume, the fragments of it that have been available to readers over the past thirty-four years have played an important role in stimulating historical scholarship on sexual matters in antiquity and the Middle Ages; but they have also polarized critics and left many questions unanswered. Foucault’s central argument about confession and subjectivity found in this volume amounted to a directional claim about the movement of sexual desire inward; he described it as a matter of conscience and self-monitoring. But in other parts of the book, he discussed the ideas about genitalia in the writing of Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo, paying close attention to the new forms of externalized agency attributed to these organs. There is little indication that Foucault planned to do more work on the history of ideas about genitalia specifically. This article elaborates on his discussion of early Christian thought about genitals, proposing a ground for historiographic reconsideration of the conceptual changes occurring in late antiquity in relation to sexual anatomy. The first part considers uses of the term genitalia in Aristotle and in Roman sources; the second part focuses on descriptions of hyena genitalia in Greek and Latin medical sources and in the writing of Clement of Alexandria; while the third section examines Saint Augustine’s description of genitalia in the Fall and the novel attribution of concupiscence in this new vision of genital urges.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)28-50
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of the History of Sexuality
Volume29
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Foucault, Michel, 1926, 1984
  • Christianity
  • generative organs
  • sex

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