After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault Edited by Scott Spector, Helmut Puff, and Dagmar Herzog (review)

This book is required reading for any student entering the terrain of Foucauldian sexuality studies and for any scholar already engaged with the intricacies of Michel Foucault’s work. For the first type of reader in particular, it provides an accessible introduction; two opening chapters by Helmut Puff and Merry Wiesner-Hanks detailing concise and provocative literature reviews of the responses to Foucault’s History of Sexuality (the first volume of which was published in English translation in 1978); various models for applying Foucault’s methods within different disciplinary contexts; and an invaluable bibliography. For the latter, the volume presents a series of intriguingly detailed case studies that respond to some of the key criticisms leveled at Foucault’s work. For all readers, the volume lays down the challenge of defining “the future of our history of sexuality” (12).

The volume comprises sixteen short but concise chapters, in addition to an introduction, postscript, and select bibliography. As coeditor Scott Spector writes, the contributors’ aim was to assess “where the histories of sexuality are after the History of Sexuality, and particularly after its decades-long reception by historians” (1). The historical scope of the contributions—from the Middle Ages to the present—is impressive. What the chapters have in common, Spector argues, is “to write histories of sexuality that attend to the demands of Foucault’s radical disruption of how we view sexuality, without projecting onto it a dogmatic program” (6). The book is structured in such a way as to challenge any such dogmatism, while at the same time addressing key criticisms of Foucault’s text, some of which, the authors argue, are founded in misreadings of his work. For example, the first section takes issue with Foucault’s own claims about periodization: his assertions about sexuality as a modern phenomenon are persuasively refuted by examples from Ulinka Rublack, Andreas Krass, and Robert Deam Tobin. Yet, at the same time, the authors insist on the importance of the antiteleology and antiessentialism of Foucault’s method. The volume as a whole, and particularly the second section (with chapters by Kirsten Leng, Robert Beachy, Jeffrey Schneider, Julia Roos, Marti M. Lybeck, and Philipp Sarasin), takes issue with criticisms of Foucault’s concept of power, criticisms which the authors argue are based on an incorrect assumption about a purported lack of agency. Thematizing issues of resistance, tactical polyvalence, and reverse discourse, the case studies look at a range of formations, including the police, the military, prostitution, the media, and the women’s movement, as well as at forms of subjectivity and agency that were, or were not, available.

The third section, which includes contributions by Tracie Matysik, Andreas Pretzel, Florian G. Mildenberger, Erik Huneke, and Massimo Perinelli, begins—as do the two other sections in the book—with a helpful summary by Dagmar Herzog. These chapters focus on the politics of sexual ethics and the work of historical “experts or activists” (184). The chapters thus take a fresh look at some of Foucault’s ideas and terms that have either been taken for granted, condemned as ubiquitous, or misunderstood. They point to what they find useful in his theoretical approach and problematic in terms of his own application of it. Several of the chapters draw on the work of other theorists from within psychoanalytical and cultural studies in their productive and impressively detailed rereadings of Foucault.

The volume makes a powerful case for its focus on Germany through the original research it contains. It is written in a way that is accessible to those who have not yet engaged in detail with the primary texts, and the historiography that it covers is invaluable for anyone wanting to embark on new case studies using Foucault’s methods. Moreover, the breadth of case studies will appeal to scholars interested in many different historical periods. The...