Michel Foucault’s three-volume work The History of Sexuality, the first instalment of which was published in 1976, asked the question how and under what circumstances did ‘sex’ become a subject of discourse. Foucault pursued this question along a number of different lines of inquiry. To begin with, he was intrigued by the fact that the Victorian era is generally regarded as one of the most sexually repressive eras in history (e.g. legend has it that even the legs of pianos had to be covered lest they elicit too much excitement from onlookers), but also witnessed an explosion of interest in sex and an enormous proliferation of discourse about sex. Thus, according to Foucault, the real question one must ask about the Victorian era is not why was sex so repressed, but why we say with such passion that sex was repressed. How and why did sex come to be something that could only be spoken of as though it was hidden and repressed? Why do we think previous historical periods were more open about sex than our own? In the following volumes, Foucault turned his attention to the ancient Greeks and early Christians. In so doing he demonstrated not only that sex has been differently constructed and thought about both throughout the ages and by different religions and different ethnic groups, but also that sex itself cannot be taken for granted. Foucault’s work decisively moved sex out of the realm of the biological and firmly into the realm of the cultural. Sex, he argued, did not pre-exist our concern for it---sex was invented by people who wanted to wield power not only over it, but through it. The stigmatization of homosexuality is, for example, a way of constructing a weapon against a particular group of people, not simply a reaction to a specific form of sexuality. Foucault’s work also demonstrated the widely varying ways sex is laid claim to by different discourses: in medical discourse it is a matter of health, in legal discourse it is a matter for regulation, while in religious discourse it is a matter for moral debate and consideration. In the course of writing these books, Foucault began to develop his notions of biopower and governmentality.