Foucault and the Family:

Abstract

In the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, first published in French in 1976 and translated into English in 1978, Michel Foucault refers to the family in a few brief and dazzling pages (103–14 in the English edition, HS1). The prose is compressed, almost telegraphic, but profoundly evocative in characterising the ‘domain’ within which sexuality ever operates ‘by way of a family’.¹ The family is situated as the formative site within which desire is originally formed, and as ‘the family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings, love; sexuality has its privileged development in the family’.² Building upon these brief suggestions, numerous works on the family claim to speak from a Foucauldean perspective, elaborating on what appears to be Foucault’s fleeting—or even non-existent—attention to the issue.³ Indicative of the widespread scholarly consensus that the family is not a major concern for Foucault, there is no entry for ‘family’ in the index of the Dits et écrits, a collection not only of Foucault’s works but of his interviews and lectures.