What Is Peculiar To Modern Societies Is

We Have To Be There At The Birth Of Ideas, The Bursting Outward Of Their Force: Not In Books Expressing Them, But In Events Manifesting This Force, In Struggles Carried On Around Ideas, For Or Against Them.

Do Not Ask Who I Am And Do Not Ask Me To Remain The Same: Leave It To Our Bureaucrats And Our Police To See That Our Papers Are In Order. At Least Spare Us Their Morality When We Write.

It Is One Of My Targets To Show People That A Lot Of Things That Are Part Of Their Landscape - That People Are Universal - Are The Result Of Some Very Precise Historical Changes. All My Analyses Are Against The Idea Of Universal Necessities In Human Existence. They Show The Arbitrariness Of Institutions And Show Which Space Of Freedom We Can Still Enjoy And How Many Changes Can Still Be Made.

I Don't Feel That It Is Necessary To Know Exactly What I Am.

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.