Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Bernardo Bertolucci's movie "Ultimo tango a Parigi" (1972)

Until March 19, 2015, when our conference "Historicizing Foucault" begins in Zurich, we will consecutively publish the abstracts of the accepted presentations. Todd Shepard, Associate Professor of History and co-director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University, will talk about "What Drew Foucault to Sodomy? Anal Sex in the Early 1970s, Between Liberatory Acts and Metaphors of Power" in the panel Counter Cultures on March 20, 2015.

In one of his most frequently cited arguments, Foucault described a shift that took place during the 19th century, as sexual activity between men that had previously been understood to involve merely "sodomites," individuals too weak to resist indulging in a sinful act, now appeared to reveal homosexuals, men of a different species. I propose to resituate this claim, which became widely debated after the 1976 publication of La volonté du savoir, in wide-ranging 1970s debates about sodomy, most particularly about its usual contemporary referent, anal sex. In the early 1970s, an intense discussion around anal sex was stoked both by claims from radical gay liberationists about male-male sex and by popular and artistic evocations of the politics of heterosexual sodomy. Sodomy was à la mode in the early 1970s.

One crucial context was the post-Stonewall emergence of a new "gay liberationist historiography," which used (secular and ecclesiastical) condemnations of "sodomy" to obtain the evidence necessary to give homosexuals a history. Foucault's own turn to such materials allowed him more incisively to critique the limits of such historical work, which failed to historicize its categories in order to map out paths from the darkness of harsh repression to the light of the new freedom to be gay. Yet to focus only on the stumbling beginnings of gay history (or popular discussions that presumed that all homosexuals practiced anal sex—and were male) would be to miss how, in those same years, sodomy seemed to offer a particularly compelling frame to think power differently, against existing binaries and Hegelian teleologies.

In his 1972 Cahiers du Cinéma article, "Figuratif, matériel, excrémentiel," Pierre Baudry drew on Bataille to think of how increasingly frequent filmic images of sodomizing encapsulated a lumpenproletariat form of revolt par excellence, in which the willingness to dirty himself allowed a "bottom dweller" to violate those who, in most domains, dominated him. In 1973, Deleuze explained hat he saw "the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery [enculage]… I would imagine myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous." This explanation of why his approach was radical has been widely cited. Yet no commentators have noticed the summary that Deleuze and Guattari gave in 1972 of their goals for Anti-Oedipus: "ne pas se faire enculer par le socius" (perhaps because of the inaccurate translation in English as "fucked".) One less nuanced 1975 American analysis of the rising popularity of "fanny films" in that country's porn shops moved through discussions of Weber, Freud, and Norman O. Brown before it climaxed with the sweeping claim that "… anality loosed from repression can be powerful to the point of political statement."

My contribution will thus situate Foucault's turn to sodomy as part of his effort to more accurately understand how power functioned historically, within the wider theoretical and cultural interest in anal sex that emerged publicly in the 1970s. It will move between evidence from "sex radical" groups ("homo" and not), popular and pornographic media, and more theoretical publications.