History of Sexuality

In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Michel Foucault distinguished between the mediaeval construction of the sodomite and the nineteenth-century construction of the homosexual as follows:

"As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their author was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history and a childhood, a character, a form of life; also a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing in his total being escapes his sexuality."

Foucault is making a carefully limited point about the differing styles of disqualification applied to male love by pre-modern legal definitions of sodomy and by nineteenth-century psychiatric conceptualizations of homosexuality. These were two historically distant, and operationally distinct, discursive strategies for regulating and delegitimating forms of male same-sex sexual contacts.

Boccaccio's portrait of Pietro di Vinciolo in the Decameron challenges us to think about the connection between sexual acts and sexual identities in European culture before the nineteenth century. Pietro should not be understood as exhibiting a sexual identity, or a sexual orientation in the modern sense, much less the modern formation known as homosexuality. Rather, the challenge is to describe the construction of sexual identities without modern notions of sexuality or sexual orientation.