La politica della sessualità: corpo sociale e corpo sessuale nell’opera di Michel Foucault

This paper aims to offer insight into the interaction of the notions of “sexual body” and “social body” in the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Particular attention is paid to Foucault’s project, History of Sexuality (Histoire de la sexualité), whose first volume, The Will to Knowledge (La volonté de savoir), was originally published in French in 1976, as well as to the series of lectures he held at the Collège de France in the late 70s. Although Foucault refrained from further researching the “modern biopolitical apparatus of sexuality” – which was the ultimate aim of the first tome of the book series on sexuality – in order to focus on the genealogical reconstruction of Western man’s notion of pleasure, the biopolitical dimension of sexuality plays a major role in the definition of the social body of the community. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of the main historical and political implications related to the process of the “normalization” of the sexual body.