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Stern, Steven E;Handel, Alysia D
The Journal of Sex Research; Nov 2001; 38, 4; Social Science Premium Collection
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InternationalJournal of Cyber Criminology

Vol 12 Issue 2 July – December 2018

427

Copyright © 2018 International Journal of Cyber Criminology – ISSN: 0974 – 2891
July – December 2018. Vol. 12(2): 427–438. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3366179

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief – K. Jaishankar / Open Access (Authors / Readers No Pay Journal).

This is a Diamond Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative

Commons HTUAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

LicenseUTH, Twhich permits unrestricted non-commercial useT, distribution, and reproduction

in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim
Blame

Tegan S. Starr

1
& Tiffany Lavis

Flinders University, Australia

Abstract

The act of revenge porn occurs when someone (commonly an ex-partner) takes a sexual image and distributes
it online without the consent of the individual depicted in the image. Despite new legislation to protect victims,

revenge porn impacts many individuals who are faced with a culture of victim blaming similar to other acts of
sexual assault. The present study used revenge porn scenarios to evaluate the degree to which individuals
blame the victim and whether this is mediated by perceiving revenge porn as a betrayal. Three factors were

predicted to affect perceptions of betrayal and blame: victim-perpetrator relationship length (one month or one

year), the medium used for sexting (text message or Snapchat) and the perceiver’s level of trust in others. The

way in which the sexual image was sent did not impact perceived breach of trust or victim blame. The length
of the victim-perpetrator relationship did impact victim blame but not perceived betrayal. In line with
predictions, those with higher interpersonal trust were found to show less victim blaming which was mediated

by their higher perceptions of betrayal in an act of revenge porn. The findings contribute towards future
education initiatives to improve outcomes for victims of revenge porn.
______________________________________________________________________________
Keywords: revenge porn, victim blame, trust, betrayal, victimisation.

Background

Revenge porn (or image-based abuse) is an emerging crime area in which intimate images are
shared without the consent of the depicted individual, and with the intention to cause distress
(Bloom, 2014). When intimate images are leaked, it is often done by ex-partners who are seeking

revenge following a break up, therefore ‘revenge porn’ is the common term that is used to
describe non-consensual distribution of intimate images (Bloom, 2014). However, revenge porn
also occurs whereby peers, co-workers, family members or strangers distribute images in order to
purposefully cause harm and distress to the victim (Henry, Powell, & Flynn, 2017). Most of the
victims are young females, similar to other forms of sexual harassment, however males have also
been victims of revenge porn (Branch, Hillinski-Rosick, Johnson, & Solano, 2017). Commonly,

images are sent to various social media sites including Facebook, pornographic websites, ‘slut-

shaming’ websites, and revenge porn specific websites such as ‘myex.com’ (Citron & Franks,

1
Flinders University, Sturt Road, Bedford Park 5042, South Australia, Australia.
Email: tegan.starr@student.adelaide.edu.au
2
Flinders University, Sturt Road, Bedford Park 5042, South Australia, Australia.
Email: admin@probitypsychology.com.au

Starr & Lavis – Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and

Victim Blame

428

2014; Henry et al., 2017). A recent study found that one in five Australians have experienced
some form of image-based abuse, such as threats to share images in order to receive money or
sexual favours (Henry et al., 2017). More specifically, one in ten people have had an intimate
image distributed without their consent (Branch et al., 2017; Henry et al., 2017). These
prevalence rates justify the need to address revenge porn as a serious concern.

The distribution of an image without consent can have serious consequences for the victim,
where the shame and embarrassment of having a personal image made public can further lead to
severe distress and anxiety (Citron & Franks, 2014; Franks, 2016). As many as three quarters of
individuals who have had their intimate image distributed without consent have experienced
psychological distress, including symptoms of anxiety and/or depression (Henry et al., 2017).
Some websites exploit victims, by requesting money in order to have the image taken down
(Stroud, 2014), but once an image is on the Internet it may reappear anywhere, causing more
distress for the victim (Bloom, 2014). Furthermore, since images are often distributed along with
personal details of the victim, such as full name, address and links to social media profiles, victims
are vulnerable to abuse, stalking, sexual harassment and potentially rape (Citron & Franks, 2014;
Waldman, 2017). In recognition of the impact of revenge porn, in August 2018 the Australian
Parliament passed legislation aimed at protecting individuals from becoming victim to revenge
porn (Reichert, 2018). The laws will help to discourage potential offenders; however it is unlikely
that these legislative changes will address the potential for victim blame (Henry et al., 2017;
Martin, 2015).

Victim Blame
While research into revenge porn is still developing, there is evidence to indicate that victims

are likely to, at least partially, bear responsibility for their images being shared. There are many
theories to explain why individuals direct blame towards the victims of sexual abuse. Victim
precipitation is a criminological theory suggesting that a crime can be initiated by the behaviour
or actions of the victim (Timmer & Norman, 1984). Therefore victim blame often flows from
this assumption that the victim was responsible for the crime being acted upon them. For
example, a victim of revenge porn may be viewed as responsible for taking and sending an image
to someone in the first place. Although, it is important to note that some instances of revenge
porn can occur through hacking or unwarranted images being taken by someone else. To
ascertain how serious and prevalent victim blaming is, a recent study found as many as 70% of
Australians agreed an individual should be wise enough not to take an intimate image, and 62% of
participants agreed that someone who sends an intimate image to another person is partially
responsible if that image turns up online (Henry et al., 2017). Victim blaming attitudes have a
harmful effect on victims of revenge porn and potentially damage outcomes for victims (Martin,
2015). The harassment fuelled by victim blaming arguably makes it difficult for a victim of
revenge porn to feel safe to seek assistance from police and/or lawyers, knowing s/he may be
judged for the initial action of taking the intimate image (Bothamley & Tully, 2017).
Furthermore, where employers, friends or family blame the victim, this is particularly damaging
for the victim who is in need of a support system to overcome the wrongdoing. To demonstrate
the potential victimisation that results from revenge porn, it is noteworthy to consider the

example whereby a victim’s parents stated “[the victim] was a whore for doing anything like that

online in the first place” (Wolak & Finkelhor, 2016, p. 41). In a number of revenge porn cases,
victims have lost employment, where others have been required to move state or country in order
to escape the harassment and humiliation of revenge porn and victim blaming (Franks, 2016). In

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some circumstances, victims have committed suicide due to the bullying and harassment
experienced as a victim of revenge porn (Celizic, 2009; Franks, 2016).

Without support programs and education for victim blaming, victims of revenge porn may
experience high levels of emotional distress when trying to cope with the situation. Even when
approaching police, some victims of revenge porn report being blamed by officers and having

been turned away from police assistance due to the incident being perceived as the victim’s fault
(Citron & Franks, 2014; Wolak & Finkelhor, 2016). This is not dissimilar to what occurs for
victims of rape, who are sometimes blamed for their victimisation despite specialist training within
the police force (Sleath & Bull, 2012). It is therefore important to consider the role of victim
blame for victims of the emerging crime of revenge porn.

Current Study
Understanding what may decrease victim blaming in the revenge porn context may be a key

step in helping to support victims of revenge porn and to reduce the shame and stigma
experienced by the victim. Trust (conversely betrayal) appears to underlie the act of revenge porn;
when an individual sends an intimate image, he or she trusts the recipient to keep the image
private (Bates, 2017; Waldman, 2017). Although the current study did not set out to empirically
test any model of trust, the underlying assumptions of trust were based on theoretical principles.
Developmentally, it is assumed that trust begins with a baseline (some argue around zero) and
develops over time (e.g., Blau, 1964). The formulation of trust within this research has taken a
transformational approach, assuming that there is a difference for business and intimate
relationships, with intimacy developed across three stages: romantic love, evaluative stage,
accommodative stage (Boon & Holmes, 1991). As such, as relationships develop across time,
successive stages will be entered.

Research relating to betrayal suggests that trust violation occurs when an individual has acted
on personal motives (for example, to deliberately hurt someone), rather than being influenced by
situational factors (Larzelere & Huston, 1980; Lewicki & Bunker, 1996). Where a perpetrator
distributes an image without consent, to hurt the victim (Henry & Powell, 2015), this would
therefore be perceived as a breach of trust (Bates, 2017; Burris, 2014; Citron & Franks, 2014;
Waldman, 2017). Observing an act of revenge porn could evoke an emotional response for the
individual observer, and promote feelings of unfairness, resulting in the observer wanting to
punish the perpetrator (cf. victim blame) (Joskowicz-Jabloner & Leiser, 2013). In this research
paper we will explore the potential mechanism between perceived betrayal and victim blame. That is,
we suggest three factors that could interfere with perceptions of betrayal and diminish victim
blame; namely, the mode of transmission of the image, the length of the victim-perpetrator
relationship, and the interpersonal trust exhibited in the observer.

Our first prediction is that the way in which an intimate image is obtained by the perpetrator
has the potential to impact the degree to which perceptions of blame and betrayal occur. Sexting,
transmitting of sexual material through digital communication (Drouin, Vogel, Surbey, & Stills,
2013), can occur through text messaging and has also been found to occur through the
application Snapchat since its launch in 2011 (Gross, 2013; Poltash, 2013). Unlike traditional text
messaging, Snapchat senders can choose to send the image for between 1 and 10 seconds before
being deleted from the device and the Snapchat server (“Snapchat Support”, 2017). When
someone chooses to send an image via Snapchat, the sender is trusting that the image will only be
viewed by the receiver for a number of seconds and a permanent copy will not be obtained.
Snapchat sexting can still lead to revenge porn as the receiver may choose to take a screenshot of
the image in order to obtain a permanent copy, however the screenshot is likely to be seen as a

Starr & Lavis – Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame

430

‘deviant’ step to obtain a copy of the image (Charteris, Gregory, & Masters, 2016). Revenge porn
occurring through Snapchat therefore involves two violations of trust; obtaining a permanent
copy of the image without prior consent (via screenshot), and then distributing it without
consent. In contrast, if an intimate image is sent by text message, the sender is aware that this
mode of delivery allows the receiver to automatically have a permanent copy of the image.

Another factor that may affect perceptions of victim blame and breach of trust is the length of
time that the victim and perpetrator have been in a relationship. Trust in intimate relationships
will change and build over time, and is considered key to the success of a long-term relationship
(Lewicki & Bunker, 1995; Rempel, Holmes, & Zanna, 1985). In the later stages of relationship
progression, trust has become more solidified and partners generally feel more secure within the
relationship (Larzelere & Huston, 1980; Lewicki & Bunker, 1995). Therefore, more established
relationships, of longer duration, would generally have higher levels of trust when compared with
casual or short-term relationships (Larzelere & Huston, 1980). Considering this, it is logical to
suggest that since trust has taken longer to build and develop in a long-term relationship, it would
be a greater betrayal if that trust were breached compared to a new relationship (Joskowicz-
Jabloner & Leiser, 2013). Furthermore, in the new dating relationship there has not been enough

time to build the same degree of trust and therefore the victim may be viewed as naïve and
foolish for sending an intimate picture in the first place. It is logical to predict, therefore, that a
revenge porn victim would be perceived as having their trust betrayed more by the perpetrator if
they had been in a long-term relationship, rather than a short relationship. This would likely lead
to a victim of long-term relationship being blamed less than a victim in a new relationship. In
contrast to our prediction, Bothamley and Tully (2017) found no significant effect of relationship
length on victim blaming in the context of revenge porn, however we noted that relationship

length was defined in terms of “a short while” and “a long time” (Bothamley & Tully, 2017). We

would argue that defining the relationship length explicitly as either “one month” or “one year”
would allow participants to make more meaningful interpretations on the type of relationship.
Furthermore, we have chosen to focus on relationship length in the context of trust and betrayal,
which was not explored in previous research.

One final factor that we predict is likely to play a role in perceptions of blame and betrayal in
revenge porn is the individual level of trust held by the perceiver. Interpersonal trust is defined as
the expectancy that the words or actions of others can be counted on, therefore having greater
interpersonal trust is related to having more positive expectations about the behaviours of others

(Rotter, 1971). Arguably, an individual’s own level of interpersonal trust will impact on their
judgement of a breach of trust exhibited by others (Gobin & Freyd, 2014). Understanding how
interpersonal trust fits within the context of revenge porn is important when considering how
legislation might be interpreted to address revenge porn; notably, predicting how police or jurors
might react to the betrayal and whether they might blame the victim. Research indicates that
individuals with a history of experiencing betrayal and mistrust in others are likely to have low
interpersonal trust (Gobin & Freyd, 2014). Based on this finding, it is logical to predict that police
officers have experience with vengeful, law breaking people through their experiences with
crime, and would therefore have lowered trust in others and negative expectations of the
behaviour of others (Ellison, 2004; Stevens, 2017). Other researchers have found that having low
trust in others is associated with the tendency to view others as selfish and malicious and therefore
we want to understand whether this translates to judgements made about revenge porn victims
(Omodei & McLennan, 2000). We predicted that someone with low interpersonal trust would be
less alarmed by an act of betrayal, such as revenge porn, as this type of person would already

International Journal of Cyber Criminology
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431

expect the worst in others. This could lead to blame being attributed to the victim for being
foolish enough to trust someone in the first place (Wolak & Finkelhor, 2016). We argue that
having less trust in others (lower level of interpersonal trust) could result in revenge porn being
perceived as a less noteworthy breach of trust, and this could consequently lead to increased
victim blaming. Whereas someone who generally has trust in others would feel confronted by the
behaviour of the perpetrator and be more likely to perceive the act as a betrayal that the victim
should not be blamed for.

Aims of the Study

The current study aimed to explore these three factors that may contribute towards victim
blame in the context of revenge porn, and whether the relationship between these factors and
victim blame are mediated by the perceived breach of trust. Participant responses to fictional
revenge porn scenarios were investigated in order to address three predictions. First, whether
using an image obtained via Snapchat (cf. text message) for revenge porn would result in victims
being blamed less, with perpetrators being regarded as having breached the trust of the victim
more so. Second, whether those victims in a longer relationship (one year) would be blamed less
than those in a shorter relationship (one month) with the breach of trust being seen to be greater

for the longer relationship. Finally, whether an individual’s interpersonal trust would impact
perceptions of breach of trust and victim blame, such that higher interpersonal trust would result
in perceptions of a greater breach and less victim blame.

Method

Participants

The sample consisted of 186 participants aged between 18-67, with a mean age of 23.91 (SD =
0.80). The majority of the sample was female (75%, n = 139), and Caucasian (88%, n = 163).
Approximately half of the sample reported that they had both sent and received an intimate image
via text message (47%, n = 86), with slightly more (52%, n = 78) having sent and received
intimate images via Snapchat.

Design and Procedure

An online survey was constructed using Qualtrics Software specifically for this study.
Participants were randomly assigned to view two telephone conversation scenarios in which a
female sent an intimate image of herself to her male partner, via her mobile phone. In one
scenario the male and female had been in a relationship for one month and in the other scenario
they had been in a relationship for one year; the order for the scenarios was counterbalanced.

Therefore, a 2 (message type: text message, Snapchat) × 2 (relationship length: one month, one
year) mixed design was used, with message type as the between subjects variable. After viewing
each scenario, the participants read text describing how a revenge porn incident had occurred,
where the perpetrator had uploaded the image to Facebook. Participants then responded to the
perceived breach of trust measure (the predicted mediator variable) and the victim blame measure
(the dependent variable). Additionally, all participants responded to the General Trust Scale
(Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994) measuring interpersonal trust.

Two different images (of the female victim) were chosen from popular blog site Pinterest to
represent the intimate image sent in the scenario, one for each relationship length level. The

images showed a ‘selfie’ style picture of a girl wearing lingerie, with her body shown from the

Starr & Lavis – Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame

432

neck to the thighs so the face was not visible. The two images were pilot tested on a small group
of individuals (n = 5). Both images were rated similarly on level of attractiveness on a 5-point

scale where 1 indicated “not very attractive” and 5 indicated “extremely attractive” (Brunette:
M = 4.2, SD = 1.3, Blonde: M = 4.2, SD = 0.84). The images were also rated similarly on

degree of nudity on a 5-point scale where 1 indicated “not naked” and 5 indicated “extremely

naked” (Brunette: M = 3.8, SD = 0.84, Blonde: M = 3.6, SD = 0.55).

Measures

The victim blame scale was adapted from previous research measuring victim blaming of rape

victims which was found to have good internal consistency (α = .75) (Abrams, Viki, Masser, &
Bohner, 2003). Mean scores were obtained for each participant, where higher scores on the scale
reflected higher blame placed towards the victim of revenge porn. The perceived breach of trust

measure consisted of two items: “Sophia feels betrayed by Oliver”, and “Oliver broke Sophia’s

trust”, measured on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 “strongly disagree” to 7 “strongly agree”.
Mean scores were obtained for each participant, where higher scores reflected that a more severe
breach of trust was perceived. Finally, participants also completed the General Trust Scale

(Yamagishi & Yamagishi, 1994). Six items were measured on a 5-point scale from 1 “strongly

disagree” to 5 “strongly agree”. The questions covered various facets of trusting others: “most

people are trustworthy”, “most people are basically good and kind”. A mean score was obtained
for each participant where higher scores indicated that the individual is more trusting towards
others.

Results

Table 1. Means (and Standard Deviations) for Victim Blame,
across Message Type and

Relationship Length

Message Type One month

M (SD)

One Year

M (SD)

Snapchat 3.19 (1.03) 2.97 (0.98)

Text Message 3.12 (1.12) 2.99 (1.16)

A mixed between-within subjects ANOVA was conducted to assess whether the length of the

victim-perpetrator relationship (one month, one year) or the type of message (Snapchat, text
message) would impact perceptions of revenge porn, namely victim blame (Table 1). There was a

significant main effect of relationship length F(1,184) = 28.48, p < .001, partial η 2 = .134, which

indicates that victims tended to be blamed less when they were in a one-year relationship
compared with a one-month relationship, as expected. There was no significant difference,
however, between victim blame scores for the Snapchat and text messaging conditions, indicating

that the mode of image delivery was inconsequential; F(1,184) = .034, p = .854, partial η
2
= .000.

International Journal of Cyber Criminology
Vol 12 Issue 2 July – December 2018

433

The interaction between relationship length and message type was also not significant F(1,184) =

2.12, p = .148, partial η
2
= .011.

Next, a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA was conducted to assess whether breach of
trust might play a role in explaining revenge porn; namely, to examine the impact of message type
(Snapchat, Text Message) and relationship length (one month, one year) on perceived breach of
trust (Table 2). Contrary to our predictions, none of the analyses were significant, indicating that
neither the mode of delivery nor length of relationship impacted perceptions of breach of trust;

message type, F(1,184) = 2.140, p = .145, partial η
2
= .011; relationship length, F(1,184) =

2.145, p = .145, partial η
2
= .012, and interaction, F(1,184) = 2.598, p = .109, partial η

2
= .014.

Table 2. Means (and Standard Deviations) for Perceived

Breach of Trust

across Message Type and Relationship Length

Relationship Length
Message Type One month
M (SD)
One Year
M (SD)

Snapchat 6.72 (0.66) 6.83 (0.48)

Text Message 6.66 (0.62) 6.65 (0.65)

Finally, we explored whether interpersonal trust of the individual observer impacted

perceptions of blame for the revenge porn victim, and whether this occurred through
perceptions of breach of trust. Interpersonal trust, perceived breach of trust, and victim blame
were found to be inter-correlated

3
, thus meeting the preconditions for mediation analysis. The

mediating effect was tested using PROCESS 4 (Hayes, 2013)
4
with message type and

relationship length both controlled for. Figure 1 shows the direct effects of interpersonal trust
on the mediator (perceived breach of trust) and the dependent variable (victim blame). The
analyses revealed a significant indirect effect of interpersonal trust on victim blame through
perceived breach of trust, b = -.13, SE = .05, [95% CI (-.24, -.05)]. As anticipated, perceived
breach of trust was found to mediate the relationship between interpersonal trust and victim
blame. Since the direct effect of interpersonal trust on victim blame was not significant, this
demonstrates support for full mediation.

3
Interpersonal trust had a small, significant correlation with perceived breach of trust for the one-month

level of relationship length r(184) = .162, p = .028 and the one-year level of relationship length r(184) =
.208, p = .004. There was a small, negative correlation between interpersonal trust and victim blame at the
one-month level of relationship length r(184) = -.171, p = .020 and the one-year level of relationship
length r(184) = -.153, p = .037. There was a medium negative correlation between perceived breach of
trust and victim blame for both the one-month level, r(184) = -.347, p< .001 and the one-year level, r(184) = -.383, p<.001. 4 PROCESS is a computational tool for SPSS (Hayes, 2013) which permits testing the effect of the independent variable (interpersonal trust), through the mediator (perceived breach of trust), on the outcome variable (victim blame), as well as identifying (relative) indirect, direct and total effects (Hayes, 2013). The analyses were run using a bootstrap estimation of 10,000 samples as suggested by Hayes (2013).

Starr & Lavis – Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame

434

Figure 1. Model Coefficients (Direct Effects) for the Mediated Regression Analysis of
the Effect of Interpersonal Trust on Victim Blame through Perceived Breach of

Trust

Note b’s are unstandardized regression coefficients.
*p < .05

Discussion

The aim of this study was to provide insight into how revenge porn might be perceived,
particularly which factors contribute to increased victim blame. The length of time the victim and
perpetrator had been in a relationship prior to the act of revenge porn directly impacted the
degree to which the victim was blamed for her behaviour in the current research. The results
suggest that when a victim willingly shares an image early in a relationship, they are blamed more
often where that image is then shared by the perpetrator in an act of revenge porn, when
compared with where the image is shared later, in a more established relationship. Interestingly,
this finding is in direct contrast to the earlier research of Bothamley and Tully (2017), who

measured victim blame between subjects, for relationships of “a short while” and “a long time”.
Contrary to our predictions, the present study found that the way the image was obtained by the
perpetrator, through sexting (text message or Snapchat), did not have an effect on victim blame,
nor did it impact perceptions of breach of trust by the perpetrator.

To our knowledge, this was the first study to investigate the link between trust, betrayal, and
victim blame in the context of revenge porn. Interestingly, when we considered the level of
interpersonal trust held by the person adjudicating the revenge porn act, we found that those
individuals with higher levels of interpersonal trust were generally more forgiving of all victims,
with less victim blame, and that this was explained through mediation by an associated increase in
perceived breach of trust (by the perpetrator). This is an important finding which aligns with
previous research outside of the revenge porn arena, where individuals with low interpersonal
trust have often been found to have a history of betrayal and consequently present as less
concerned by observing an act of betrayal given they have learnt to be cynical of others (Gobin &
Freyd, 2014; Omodei & McLennan, 2000). In the context of the present research, it would seem
that some individuals (e.g., police officers) are likely to be less trusting of others when presented
with situations representing betrayal of trust, such as repeated exposure to criminal behaviour and
malicious people (Ellison, 2004; Stevens, 2017). In fact, victims of revenge porn have reported

Interpersonal

Trust

Perceived

Breach of Trust
Victim Blame

b = .21 (.06)*

b = -.62 (.09)*

b = -.18 (.09)

International Journal of Cyber Criminology
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435

being blamed by police officers when seeking help (Wolak & Finkelhor, 2016), reflecting the
findings in the current research study. A next step would be to explore the mechanism between
trust and victim blame by more explicitly framing it in theory. There are various factors which
could be explored, including, but not limited to, consideration of victim similarity. Defensive

attribution theory argues that victim blaming decreases as one’s similarity with the victim
increases, for example, having experience with sexting has been associated with fewer attributions
of responsibility directed towards victims of revenge porn (Scott & Gavin, 2018). Therefore, this
theoretical framework could be drawn upon to explore the current findings related to
interpersonal trust, that is, when people are more trusting of others they can relate to the victim
who was trusting the perpetrator with his/her pictures.

A noteworthy limitation of the current study is that the revenge porn scenarios only focused
on a female victim and male perpetrator who had been in an intimate relationship, where the

female was dressed in lingerie and presented in a static ‘selfie’ pose. Although revenge porn
commonly occurs in heterosexual couples (Branch et al., 2017), it is important to note that real
cases of revenge porn are varied. For example, there have been male victims and female
perpetrators, same-sex couples, as well as perpetrators being former friends or colleagues
motivated by revenge (Henry et al., 2017). It is also noteworthy that the sample in this study was
predominantly female and they were observing a female victim, and we know from previous
research that a sexual double standard exists where women are judged more harshly and deemed
more promiscuous for sexual behaviour than men (Milhausen & Herold, 1999). Furthermore, the
intimate images used in this study depicted a female wearing lingerie, however in some real cases
of revenge porn the intimate image distributed may be more sexually explicit (such as full frontal
nudity or someone performing a sex act) or may be a video of the victim rather than an image
(Citron & Franks, 2014). There is also the possibility that the victims will be photographed or
videoed without their consent. There have also been cases of strangers hacking into phones and
blackmailing victims for money with the threat of distributing the images (Powell & Henry,
2017). Therefore, the findings of this study potentially cannot be generalised to all contexts of
revenge porn but indicate a likely outcome for some instances of revenge porn.

This study has nevertheless provided insight into how revenge porn is likely to be perceived,
including the degree to which victims might be blamed, and gives a starting point for how to
educate potential victims, law enforcement officers and legal professionals about this area. By
showing police officers, for example, how their tendencies to distrust others may affect their
perceptions of victims of revenge porn, the police could be trained to improve their receptivity
towards victims. This is especially important given research has found that sexual assault victims
are often concerned that they would be blamed and are ashamed and embarrassed to report to
police (Weiss, 2010), and revenge porn is akin to cyber rape. The need to create programs and
policies that reduce the stigma and blame experienced by victims of revenge porn and other
sexual assault has been widely addressed in both research and the media (Henry et al., 2017;
Martin, 2015; Sleath & Bull, 2012; Wolak & Finkelhor, 2016).

Conclusion

The current research contributes to a growing area of research on revenge pornography
(image-based abuse) and adds to existing literature related to victim blame for sexual assault
victims. We have uniquely explored the role of trust and betrayal and how these impact
perceptions of revenge porn and victim blame, with promising results. The way in which
individual differences, such as interpersonal trust, influence our observations of revenge porn or
other sexual abuse should be explored in future research in order to understand and reduce victim

Starr & Lavis – Perceptions of Revenge Pornography and Victim Blame

436

blaming. These findings are an initial step in assisting with awareness raising, and implementation
of programs to help support victims of image-based abuse.

References
Abrams, D., Viki, G. T., Masser, B., & Bohner, G. (2003). Perceptions of stranger and

acquaintance rape: The role of benevolent and hostile sexism in victim blame and rape
proclivity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 111-125. doi: 10.1037/0022-
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Sexual Scripts

Take a Minute…
Think of a time when a significant other or a potential partner did something that put you off. Something small, nothing major or abusive, of course, but it just didn’t sit well with you.
If you are not into romantic relationships, think of a friend’s story you may have heard.
What did this person do and what was the situation?
What did you expect them to do?
Analyze your knee jerk reaction and think about why you were immediately repelled.

What are Sexual Scripts?
Sexual Scripts are ideas of how males and females are supposed to interact with each other, including how each gender should behave in sexual or romantic situations. Like a script for a TV show or movie, a sexual script is a mental story detailing specific events and assigning certain roles (parts that each actor plays in the story).
For example, if a male asks a female out to the movies, the sexual script suggests that he is expected to pay for both his ticket and his date’s ticket. If he does not, then he is violating the traditional sexual script for a date. If his date subscribes to the traditional version of this script then he might fail to meet her expectations, with the possible consequence that she will not go out with him again. Sexual scripts are based on shared cultural ideals and social norms. They are learned from and reinforced by our family, friends, church, the media, and other people around us.

Gagnon and Simon
The idea of sexual script brings a new metaphor and imagery for understanding human sexual activity as social and learned interactions. The concept was introduced by sociologists John H. Gagnon and William Simon in their 1973 book Sexual Conduct.
The idea highlights three levels of scripting: cultural/historical, social/interactive and personal/intrapsychic. It draws from a range of theories including symbolic interactionism, discourse theory and feminism.
The theory of sexual scripting brings sociological, cultural, anthropological, historical and social psychological tools to the study of human sexualities.
Whereas human sexuality is usually seen as the province of the biologist and the clinician, scripting helps research and analysis to understand sexualities as less biological and more cultural, historical and social.

Human Interaction
“Scripts are a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behaviour within social life.”
“For behaviour to occur, something resembling scripting must occur on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts.”

Cultural Scenarios
“Cultural scenarios are the instructional guides that exist at the level of collective life. All institutions and institutionalized arrangements can be seen as systems of signs and symbols through which the requirements and the practice of specific roles are given.”
Our socialization is always working in the background

Interpersonal Scripts
“The possibility of a lack of congruence between the abstract scenario and the concrete situation must be resolved by the creation of interpersonal scripts. This is a process that transforms the social actor from being exclusively an actor to being a partial scriptwriter or adapter shaping the materials of relevant cultural scenarios into scripts for behaviour in particular contexts.”
This is where our free will or choice comes in

Intrapsychic Scripting
“The need to script one’s behaviour, as well as the implicit assumption of the scripted nature of the behaviour of others, is what engenders a meaningful ‘internal rehearsal’, which becomes significant when alternative outcomes are available. This intrapsychic scripting creates fantasy in a rich sense of that word: the symbolic reorganization of reality in ways to more fully realize the actor’s many layered and sometimes multivoiced wishes.”
This is the subjective reality that guides us in our interpretations and processing

Society
paradigmatic societies vs. postparadigmatic societies
Essentially this refers to those societies where you have a strict cultural scenario versus those where the cultural scenario acts as a more abstract guideline
“The cultural scenario that loses its coercive powers also loses its predictability and frequently becomes merely a legitimating reference or explanation. The failure of the coercive powers of cultural scenarios occasions anomie, personal alienation and uncertainty. Much of the passionate intensity associated with anomic behaviour might best be interpreted as restorative efforts, often desperate efforts at effecting a restoration of a more cohesive self, reinforced by effective social ties.”

Sexual Behavior
“The significance of some aspect of behaviour does not determine the frequency with which that behaviour occurs, but only the amount and intensity of attention paid to it.”
Again, sex and sexual interactions become tantamount to who we are, to our very happiness, only because we assign them so much significance.
Sociogenic versus ontogenic
When society tells you sex is important versus your own experiences of sex
“Sociogenic and ontogenic factors are closely interrelated. These are societal settings in which the sexual takes on a strong meaning and successful performance or avoidance of what is defined as sexual plays a major role in the evaluation of individual competence and worth.”

Society’s Influence
“The most basic sources of sociogenic influence are the cultural scenarios that explicitly deal with the sexual or those that can implicitly be put to sexual uses. Such cultural scenarios not only specify appropriate objects, aims, and desirable qualities of self/other relations, but also instruct in times, places, sequences of gesture and utterance and, among the most important, what the actor and coparticipants (real or imagined) are assumed to be feeling.”
“These instructions make most of us far more committed and rehearsed at the time of our initial sexual encounters than we realize.”

Society’s Influence
“When there is a fundamental congruence between the sexual as it is defined by prevailing cultural scenarios and experienced intrapsychically, consequent behaviour is symbolic. It is entirely dependent upon the shared significant meanings of collective life. The sexual takes a natural air obscuring that virtually all the cues initiating sexual behaviour are embedded in the external environment.”

Society’s Influence
“A lack of congruence between levels of scripting transforms the sexual into more obscurely metaphoric behaviour, as it may become a vehicle for meaning above and beyond conventionally shared meanings: private sexual cultures grow within the heart of public sexual cultures.”
It may well have been the growing number of individuals in Western societies experiencing such a lack of congruence that made prevailing eighteenth-and nineteenth-century discourses on the nature of the sexual so highly effective in gaining widespread adherence to modern Western sexual values and idealized patterns of behaviour.”

Partners and Desire
“Interpersonal scripting, representing the actor’s response to the external world, draws heavily upon cultural scenarios, invoking symbolic elements expressive of such scenarios. Among other functions, interpersonal scripting serves to lower uncertainty and heighten legitimacy for both the other or others as well as the actor.”
“For virtually all, at one time or other, desire will follow rather than precede behaviour.”
“As might also be said for any significant area of behaviour, there are many more reasons for behaving sexually than there are ways of behaving sexually.”

Sexual Scripts

The History of Sexuality
Volume I: An Introduction

By the same author
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
The Archaeology of Knowledge (and The Discourse on Language)
The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my
brother . . . A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The History of Sexuality
Volume I: An Introduction
by Michel Foucault
Translated from the French
by Robert Hurley
Pantheon Books
New York

English translation Copyright © 1978 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy
right Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon
Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simul
taneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Originally published in France as La Volante de sa voir
by Editions Gallimard, Paris. Copyright © 1976 by Editions
Gallimard.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Foucault, Michel.
The History of Sexuality.
Translation of Histoire de la sexualite.
CONTENTS: v. I. An introduction (translation of La Volonte
de savoir)
I. Sex customs–History–Collected works.
I. Title.
HQI2.F6813 1978 301. 41’7 78-51804
ISBN 0-394-41775-5
Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Doubleday & Com
pany, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from a
poem by Gottfried August BUrger cited by Arthur Seho
penhauer in The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes,
from The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Scho
pen hauer, edited by Richard Taylor.

Contents
PART ONE We “Other Victorians” 1
PART TWO The Repressive Hypothesis 15
Chapter 1 The Incitement to Discourse 17
Chapter 2 The Perverse Implantation 36
PART THREE Scientia Sexualis 51
PART FOUR The Deployment of Sexuality 75
Chapter 1 Objective 8 1
Chapter 2 Method 92
Chapter 3 Domain 103
Chapter 4 Periodization 115
PART FIVE Right of Death and Power over Life 133
Index 1 6 1

PART ONE
Jte “Other Victorians”

For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian
regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today.
Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our
restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain
frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices
had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue
reticence, and things were done without too much conceal
ment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. Codes
regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were
quite lax compared to those ofthe nineteenth century. It was
a time of direct gestures, shameless discourse, and open
transgressions, when anatomies were shown and intermin
gled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the
laughter of adults: it was a period when bodies “made a
display of themselves.”
But twilight soon fell upon this bright day, followed by the
monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality
was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal
family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious
function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence be
came the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid
down the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced
the norm, safeguarded the truth, and reserved the right to
speak while retaining the principle of secrecy. A single locus
of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well as at
the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and
fertile one: the parents’ bedroom. The rest had only to re
main vague; proper demeanor avoided contact with other
bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech. And ster-
3

4 The History of Sexuality
ile behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on
making itself too visible, it would be designated accordingly
and would have to pay the penalty .
Nothing that was not ordered in terms of generation or
transfigured by it could expect sanction or protection. Nor
did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out, denied, and
reduced to silence. Not only did it not exist, it had no right
to exist and would be made to disappear upon its least mani
festation-whether in acts or in words. Everyone knew, for
example, that children had no sex, which was why they were
forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one’s eyes and
stopped one’s ears whenever they came to show evidence to
the contrary, and why a general and studied silence was
imposed. These are the characteristic features attributed to
repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibi
tions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sen
tence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an
affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admis
sion that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing
to.see, and nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our
bourgeois societies with its halting logic. It was forced to
make a few concessions, however. If it was truly necessary
to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let
them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where
they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of produc
tion, at least in those of profit. The brothel and the mental
hospital would be those places of tolerance: the prostitute,
the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and
his hysteric-those “other Victorians,” as Steven Marcus
would say-seem to have surreptitiously transferred the
pleasures that are unspoken into the order of things that are
counted. Words and gestures, quietly authorized, could be
exchanged there at the going rate. Only in those places would
untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized) forms of
reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded
types of discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism im-

We “Other Victorians” 5
posed its triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence.
But have we not liberated ourselves from those two long
centuries in which the history of sexuality must be seen first
of all as the chronicle of an increasing repression? Only to
a slight extent, we are told. Perhaps some progress was made
by Freud; but with such circumspection, such medical pru
dence, a scientific guarantee of innocuousness, and so many
precautions in order to contain everything, with no fear of
“overflow,” in that safest and most discrete of spaces, be
tween the couch and discourse: yet another round of whis
pering on a bed. And could things have been otherwise? We
are informed that if repression has indeed been the funda
mental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since
the e1assical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able
to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: noth
ing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions,
an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within real
ity, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power
will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned
by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired
results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical
discourse, however rigorously pursued. Thus, one denounces
Freud’s conformism, the normalizing functions of psychoa
nalysis, the obvious timidity underlying Reich’s vehemence,
and all the effects of integration ensured by the “science” of
sex and the barely equivocal practices of sexology.
This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well,
owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold. A solemn histori
cal and political guarantee protects it. By placing the advent
of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after
hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one
adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it
becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor
chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremoni
ous history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect
fades from view. A principle of explanation emerges after the

6 The History of Sexuality
fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is
incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative.
At a time when labor capacity was being systematically ex
ploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself
in pleasurable pursuits, except in those-reduced to a mini
mum-that enabled it to reproduce itself? Sex and its effects
are perhaps not so easily deciphered; on the other hand, their
repression, thus reconstructed, is easily analyzed. And the
sexual cause-the demand for sexual freedom, but also for
the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak
about it-becomes legitimately associated with the honor of
a political cause: sex too is placed on the agenda for the
future. A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many
precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impres
sive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness :
a s if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such
a discourse could be formulated or accepted.
But there may be another reason that makes it so gratify
ing for us to define the relationship between sex and power
in terms of repression: something that one might call the
speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to
prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact
that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliber
ate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language
places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power;
he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the com
ing freedom. This explains the solemnity with which one
speaks of sex nowadays. When they had to allude to it, the
first demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth cen
tury thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking
their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base. But for
decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the
subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of
defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we
know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away
the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be

We “Other Victorians” 7
hastened by the contribution we believe we are making.
Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the
coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse
on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of
prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good
agll.(n. Because this repression is affirmed, one can discreetly
bring into coexistence concepts which the fear of ridicule or
the bitterness of history prevents most of us from putting side
by side: revolution and happiness; or revolution and a differ
ent body, one that is newer and more beautiful; or indeed,
revolution and pleasure. What sustains our eagerness to
speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportu
nity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths
and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation,
and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that com
bines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change
the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.
This is perhaps what also explains the market value at
tributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but
also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would
eliminate the effects of repression. Ours is, after all, the only
civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and
sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk
about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so,
have far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that
some individuals have even offered their ears for hire.
But it appears to me that the essential thing is not this
economic factor, but rather the existence in our era of a
discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturn
ing of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come,
and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together.
Today it is sex that serves as a support for the ancient form
-so familiar and important in the West-of preaching. A
great sexual sermon-which has had its subtle theologians
and its popular voices-has swept through our societies over
the last decades; it has chastised the old order, denounced

8 The History of Sexuality
hypocrisy, and praised the rights of the immediate and the
real; it has made people dream of a New City. The Francis
cans are called to mind. And we might wonder how it is
possible that the lyricism and religiosity that long accom
panied the revolutionary project have, in Western industrial
societies, been largely carried over to sex.
The notion of repressed sex is not, therefore, only a theo
retical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never
been more rigorously subj ugated than during the age of the
hypocritical, bustling, and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled
with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal
the truth about sex, modify its economy within reality, sub
vert the law that governs it, and change its future. The
statement of oppression and the form of the sermon refer
back to one another; they are mutually reinforcing. To say
that sex is not repressed, or rather that the relationship be
tween sex and power is not characterized by repression, is to
risk falling into a sterile paradox. It not only runs counter to
a well-accepted argument, it goes against the whole economy
and all the discursive “interests” that underlie this argument.
This is the point at which I would like to situate the series
of historical analyses that will follow, the present volume
being at the same time an introduction and a first attempt at
an overview: it surveys a few historically significant points
and outlines certain theoretical problems. Briefly, my aim is
to examine the case of a society which has been loudly casti
gating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which
speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate
in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it
exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws
that have made it function. I would like to explore not only
these discourses but also the will that sustains them and the
strategic intention that supports them. The question I would
like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather, Why
do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment
against our most recent past, against our present, and against

We “Other Victorians” 9
ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come
to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostenta
tiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something
we silence? And we do all this by formulating the matter in
the most explicit terms, by trying to reveal it in its most
naked reality, by affirming it in the positivity of its power and
its effects. It is certainly legitimate to ask why sex was as
sociated with sin for such a long time-although it would
remain to be discovered how this association was formed,
and one would have to be careful not to state in a summary
and hasty fashion that sex was “condemned” -but we must
also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt
for having once made sex a sin. What paths have brought us
to the point where we are “at fault” with respect to our own
sex? And how have we come to be a civilization so peculiar
as to tell itself that, through an abuse of power which has not
ended, it has long “sinned” against sex? How does one ac
count for the displacement which, while claiming to free us
from the sinful nature of sex, taxes us with a great historical
wrong which consists precisely in imagining that nature to
be blameworthy and in drawing disastrous consequences
from that belief?
It will be said that if so many people today affirm this
repression, the reason is that it is historically evident. And
if they speak of it so abundantly, as they have for such a long
time now, this is because repression is so firmly anchored,
having solid roots and reasons, and weighs so heavily on sex
that more than one denunciation will be required in order to
free ourselves from it; the job will be a long one. All the
longer, no doubt, as it is in the nature of power-particularly
the kind of power that operates in our society-to be repres
sive, and to be especially careful in repressing useless
energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of
behavior. We must not be surprised, then, if the effects of
liberation vis-a-vis this repressive power are so slow to mani
fest themselves; the effort to speak freely about sex and ac-

1 0 The History o f Sexuality
cept it in its reality is so alien to a historical sequence that
has gone unbroken for a thousand years now, and so inimical
to the intrinsic mechanisms of power, that it is bound to
make little headway for a long time before succeeding in its
mission.
One can raise three serious doubts concerning what I shall
term the “repressive hypothesis . ” First doubt: Is sexual re
pression truly an established historical fact? Is what first
comes into view-and consequently permits one to advance
an initial hypothesis-really the accentuation or even the
establishment of a regime of sexual repression beginning in
the seventeenth century? This is a properly historical ques
tion. Second doubt: Do the workings of power, and in partic
ular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies
such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of re
pression? Are prohibition, censorship, and denial truly the
forms through which power is exercised in a general way, if
not in every society, most certainly in our own? This is a
historico-theoretical question. A third and final doubt: Did
the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come
to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had ope
rated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part
of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and
doubtless misrepresents) by calling it “repression”? Was
there really a historical rupture between the age of repression
and the critical analysis of repression? This is a historico
political question. My purpose in introducing these three
doubts is not merely to construct counterarguments that are
symmetrical and contrary to those outlined above; it is not
a matter of saying that sexuality, far from being repressed in
capitalist and bourgeois societies, has on the contrary benefit
ted from a regime of unchanging liberty; nor is it a matter
of saying that power in societies such as ours is more tolerant
than repressive, and that the critique of repression, while it
may give itself airs of a rupture with the past, actually forms
part of a much older process and, depending on how one

We “Other Victorians” II
chooses to understand this process, will appear either as a
new episode in the lessening of prohibitions, or as a more
devious and discreet form of power.
The doubts I would like to oppose to the repressive hy
pothesis are aimed less at showing it to be mistaken than at
putting it back within a general economy of discourses on sex
in modern societies since the seventeenth century. Why has
sexuality been so widely discussed, and what has been said
about it? What were the effects of power generated by what
was said? What are the links between these discourses, these
effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by
them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this
linkage? The object, in short, is to define the regime of power
knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human
sexuality in our part of the world. The central issue, then (at
least in the first instance), is not to determine whether one
says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or
permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its
effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate
it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to
discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints
from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people
to speak about it and which store and distribute the things
that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all “discur
sive fact,” the way in which sex is “put into discourse. ”
Hence, too, my main concern will be to locate the forms of
power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates
in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of
behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely
perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls
everyday pleasure-all this entailing effects that may be
those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incite
ment and intensification: in short, the “polymorphous tech
niques of power.” And finally, the essential aim will not be
to determine whether these discursive productions and these
effects of power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, or

1 2 The History of Sexuality
on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that truth,
but rather to bring out the “will to knowledge” that serves
as both their support and their instrument.
Let there be no misunderstanding: I do not claim that sex
has not been prohibited or barred or masked or misap
prehended since the classical age; nor do I even assert that
it has suffered these things any less from that period on than
. before. I do not maintain that the prohibition of sex is a ruse;
but it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and con
stitutive element from which one would be able to write the
history of what has been said concerning sex starting from
the modern epoch. All these negative elements-defenses,
censorships, denials-which the repressive hypothesis
groups together in one great central mechanism destined to
say no, are doubtless only component parts that have a local
and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse,
a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far
from being reducible to the former.
In short, I would like to disengage my analysis from the
privileges generally accorded the economy of scarcity and
the principles of rarefaction, to search instead for instances
of discursive production (which also administer silences, to
be sure), of the production of power (which sometimes have
the function of prohibiting), of the propagation of knowledge
(which often cause mistaken beliefs or systematic misconcep
tions to circulate); I would like to write the history of these
instances and their transformations. A first survey made
from this viewpoint seems to indicate that since the end of
the sixteenth century, the “putting into discourse of sex,” far
from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has
been subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement; that
the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed
a principle of rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemina
tion and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that
the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of
a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constitut-

We “Other Victorians” 1 3
ing-despite many mistakes, o f course-a science o f sexual
ity. It is these movements that I will now attempt to bring
into focus in a schematic way, bypassing as it were the repres
sive hypothesis and the facts of interdiction or exclusion it
invokes, and starting from certain historical facts that serve
as guidelines for research.

PART TWO
The Repressive
Hypothesis

I
The Incitement
to Discourse
The seventeenth century, then, was the beginning of an age
of repression emblematic of what we call the bourgeois soci
eties, an age which perhaps we still have not completely left
behind. Calling sex by its name thereafter became more diffi
cult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery over it
in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the
level of language, control its free circulation in speech, ex
punge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the
words that rendered it too visibly present. And even these
prohibitions, it seems, were afraid to name it. Without even
having to pronounce the word, modern prudishness was able
to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the
interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another:
instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, im
posed silence. Censorship.
Yet when one looks back over these last three centuries
with their continual transformations, things appear in a very
different light: around and apropos of sex, one sees a veritable
discursive explosion. We must be clear on this point, how
ever. It is quite possible that there was an expurgation-and
a very rigorous one-of the authorized vocabulary. It may
indeed be true that a whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor
was codified. Without question, new rules of propriety
1 7

1 8 The History of Sexuality
screened out some words: there was a policing of statements.
A control over enunciations as well: where and when it was
not possible to talk about such things became much more
strictly defined; in which circumstances, among which
speakers, and within which social relationships. Areas were
thus established, if not of utter silence, at least of tact and
discretion: between parents and children, for instance, or
teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants. This
almost certainly constituted a whole restrictive economy,
one that was incorporated into that politics of language and
speech-spontaneous on the one hand, concerted on the
other-which accompanied the social redistributions of the
classical period.
At the level of discourses and their domains, however,
practically the opposite phenomenon occurred. There was a
steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex-spe
cific discourses, different from one another both by their
form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered
momentum from the eighteenth century onward. Here I am
thinking not so much of the probable increase in “illicit”
discourses, that is, discourses of infraction that crudely
named sex by way of insult or mockery of the new code of
decency; the tightening up of the rules of decorum likely did
produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intensification
of indecent speech. But more important was the multiplica
tion of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of
power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and
to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the
agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to
speak through explicit articulation and endlessly ac
cumulated detail.
Consider the evolution of the Catholic pastoral and the
sacrament of penance after the Council of Trent. Little by
little, the nakedness of the questions formulated by the con
fession manuals of the Middle Ages, and a good number of
those still in use in the seventeenth century, was veiled. One

The Repressive Hypothesis 1 9
avoided entering into that degree of detail which some au
thors, such as Sanchez or Tamburini, had for a long time
believed indispensable for the confession to be complete:
description of the respective positions of the partners, the
postures assumed, gestures, places touched, caresses, the pre
cise moment of pleasure-an entire painstaking review of the
sexual act in its very unfolding. Discretion was advised, with
increasing emphasis. The greatest reserve was counseled
when dealing with sins against purity: “This matter is similar
to pitch, for, however one might handle it, even to cast it far
from oneself, it sticks nonetheless, and always soils. “l And
later, Alfonso de’ Liguori prescribed starting-and possibly
going no further, especially when dealing with children
with questions that were “roundabout and vague.”2
But while the language may have been refined, the scope
of the confession-the confession of the flesh-continually
increased. This was partly because the Counter Reformation
busied itself with stepping up the rhythm of the yearly con
fession in the Catholic countries, and because it tried to
impose meticulous rules of self-examination; but above all,
because it attributed more and more importance in penance
-and perhaps at the expense of some other sins-to all the
insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous ima
ginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and
the soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the
process of confession and guidance. According to the new
pastoral, sex must not be named imprudently, but its aspects,
its correlations, and its effects must be pursued down to their
slenderest ramifications: a shadow in a daydream, an image
too slowly dispelled, a badly exorcised complicity between
the body’s mechanics and the mind’s complacency: every
thing had to be told. A twofold evolution tended to make the
flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important
moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings
IPaolo Segneri, L’Instruction du penitent (French trans. 1695), p. 301.
‘Alfonso de’ Liguori, Pratique des confesseurs (French trans. 1854), p. 140.

20 The History of Sexuality
-so difficult to perceive and formulate-of desire. For this
was an evil that afflicted the whole man, and in the most
secret of forms: “Examine diligently, therefore, all the facul
ties of your soul: memory, understanding, and will. Examine
with precision all your senses as well. . . . Examine, more
over, all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your
actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once
awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally,
do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this,
there is anything trivial or insignificant. “3 Discourse, there
fore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul,
following all its meanderings: beneath the surface of the sins,
it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh. Under
the authority of a language that had been carefully expur
gated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken
charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed
to allow it no obscurity, no respite.
It was here, perhaps, that the injunction, so peculiar to the
West, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a
general constraint. I am not talking about the obligation to
admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by tradi
tional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling
telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything
that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures,
sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the
soul, had some affinity with sex. This scheme for transform
ing sex into discourse had been devised long before in an
ascetic and monastic setting. The seventeenth century made
it into a rule for everyone. It would seem in actual fact that
it could scarcely have applied to any but a tiny elite; the great
majority of the faithful who only went to confession on rare
occasions in the course of the year escaped such complex
prescriptions. But the important point no doubt is that this
obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good
‘Segneri, L’/nstruction du penitent, pp. 30 1-2.

The Repressive Hypothesis 2 1
Christian. A n imperative was established: Not only will you
confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to
transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse. In
sofar as possible, nothing was meant to elude this dictum,
even if the words it employed had to be carefully neutralized.
The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the
task of passing everything having to do with sex through the
endless mill of speech.4 The forbidding of certain words, the
decency of expressions, all the censorings of vocabulary,
might well have been only secondary devices compared to
that great sUbjugation: ways of rendering it morally accept
able and technically useful.
One could plot a line going straight from the seventeenth
century pastoral to what became its projection in literature,
“scandalous” literature at that. “Tell everything,” the direc
tors would say time and again: “not only consummated acts,
but sensual touchings, all impure gazes, all obscene remarks
. . . all consenting thoughts.”j Sade takes up the injunction
in words that seem to have been retranscribed from the
treatises of spirtual direction: “Your narrations must be
decorated with the most numerous and searching details; the
precise way and extent to which we may j udge how the
passion you describe relates to human manners and man’s
character is determined by your willingness to disguise no
circumstance; and what is more, the least circumstance is apt
to have an immense influence upon the procuring of that
kind of sensory irritation we expect from your stories . “6 And
again at the end of the nineteenth century, the anonymous
author of My Secret Life submitted to the same prescription;
outwardly, at least, this man was doubtless a kind of tradi
‘The reformed pastoral also laid down rules, albeit in a more discreet way, for
putting sex into discourse. This notion will be developed in the next volume, The
Body and the Flesh.
‘Alfonso de’ Liguori, Preceptes sur Ie sixieme commandement (French trans. 1835),
p. 5.
‘Donatien-Alphonse de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom. trans. Austryn Wainhouse
and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 271.

22 The History of Sexuality
tional libertine; but he conceived the idea of complementing
his life-which he had almost totally dedicated to sexual
activity-with a scrupulous account of every one of its epi
sodes. He sometimes excuses himself by stressing his concern
to educate young people, this man who had eleven volumes
published, in a printing of only a few copies, which were
devoted to the least adventures, pleasures, and sensations of
his sex. It is best to take him at his word when he lets into
his text the voice of a pure imperative: “I recount the facts,
just as they happened, insofar as I am able to recollect them;
this is all that I can do”; “a secret life must not leave out
anything; there is nothing to be ashamed of . . . one can never
know too much concerning human nature. “7 The solitary
author of My Secret Life often says, in order to justify his
describing them, that his strangest practices undoubtedly
were shared by thousands of men on the surface of the earth.
But the guiding principle for the strangest of these practices,
which was the fact of recounting them all, and in detail, from
day to day, had been lodged in the heart of modern man for
over two centuries. Rather than seeing in this singular man
a courageous fugitive from a “Victorianism” that would have
compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an
epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining dis
cretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way the
most naive representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk
about sex. The historical accident would consist rather of the
reticences of “Victorian puritanism”; at any rate, they were
a digression, a refinement, a tactical diversion in the great
process of transforming sex into discourse.
This nameless Englishman will serve better than his queen
as the central figure for a sexuality whose main features were
already taking shape with the Christian pastoral. Doubtless,
in contrast to the latter, for him it was a matter of augment
ing the sensations he experienced with the details of what he
‘Anonymous, My Secret Life. (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

The Repressive Hypothesis 23
said about them; like Sade, he wrote “for his pleasure alone,”
in the strongest sense of the expression; he carefully mixed
the editing and rereading of his text with erotic scenes which
those writer’s activities repeated, prolonged, and stimulated.
But after all, the Christian pastoral also sought to produce
specific effects on desire, by the mere fact of transforming it
-fully and deliberately-into discourse: effects of mastery
and detachment, to be sure, but also an effect of spiritual
reconversion, of turning back to God, a physical effect of
blissful suffering from feeling in one’s body the pangs of
temptation and the love that resists it. This is the essential
thing: that Western man has been drawn for three centuries
to the task of telling everything concerning his sex; that since
the classical age there has been a constant optimization and
an increasing valorization of the discourse on sex; and that
this carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multi
ple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and
modification of desire itself. Not only were the boundaries of
what one could say about sex enlarged, and men compelled
to hear it said; but more important, discourse was connected
to sex by a complex organization with varying effects, by a
deployment that cannot be adequately explained merely by
referring it to a law of prohibition. A censorship of sex?
There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an
ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of func
tioning and taking effect in its very economy.
This technique might have remained tied to the destiny of
Christian spirituality ifit had not been supported and relayed
by other mechanisms. In the first place, by a “public inter
est . ” Not a collective curiosity or sensibility; not a new men
tality; but power mechanisms that functioned in such a way
that discourse on sex-for reasons that will have to be exam
ined-became essential. Toward the beginning of the eigh
teenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and
technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in
the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of

24 The History of Sexuality
analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of
quantitative or causal studies. This need to take sex “into
account, ” to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not
derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was
sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought
apologies for its own existence. How could a discourse based
on reason speak of that? “Rarely have philosophers directed
a steady gaze to these objects situated between disgust and
ridicule, where one must avoid both hypocrisy and scan
dal.”g And nearly a century later, the medical establishment,
which one might have expected to be less surprised by what
it was about to formulate, still stumbled at the moment of
speaking: “The darkness that envelops these facts, the shame
and disgust they inspire, have always repelled the observer’s
gaze . . . . For a long time I hesitated to introduce the loath
some picture into this study. “9 What is essential is not in all
these scruples, in the “moralism” they betray, or in the hy
pocrisy one can suspect them of, but in the recognized neces
sity of overcoming this hesitation. One had to speak of sex;
one had to speak publicly and in a manner that was not
determined by the division between licit and illicit, even if the
speaker maintained the distinction for himself (which is what
these solemn and preliminary declarations were intended to
show): one had to speak of it as of a thing to be not simply
condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems
of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to
function according to an optimum. Sex was not something
one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was
in the nature of a public potential; it called for management
procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical dis
courses. In the eighteenth century, sex became a “police”
matter-in the full and strict sense given the term at the time:
not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization
‘Condorcet, cited by Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families: parente, maison, sexualite dans
l’ancienne societe, (Paris: Hachette, 1976).
‘Auguste Tardieu, Etude medico-legale sur les attentats aux moeurs (1857), p. 114.

The Repressive Hypothesis 2 5
of collective and individual forces: “We must consolidate and
augment, through the wisdom of its regulations, the internal
power of the state; and since this power consists not only in
the Republic in general, and in each of the members who
constitute it, but also in the faculties and talents of those
belonging to it, it follows that the police must concern them
selves with these means and make them serve the public
welfare. And they can only obtain this result through the
knowledge they have of those different assets. “lO A policing
of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of
regulating sex through useful and public discourses.
A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations
in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the
emergence of “population” as an economic and political
problem : population as wealth, population as manpower or
labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth
and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived
that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with
a “people, ” but with a “popUlation,” with its specific
phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates,
life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of ill
nesses, patterns of diet and habitation. All these variables
were situated at the point where the characteristic move
ments of life and the specific effects of institutions inter
sected: “States are not populated in accordance with the
natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their
industry, their products, and their different institutions.
. . . Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in
proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their
labors.”ll At the heart of this economic and political problem
of population was sex: it was necessary to analyze the birth
rate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate
births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the
ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of un mar
IOJohann von Justi, Elements gene�aux de police (French trans. 1769), p. 20.
llClaude-Jacques Herbert, Essai sur fa police generafe des grains (1753), pp. 320-1.

26 The History of Sexuality
ried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive
practices-of those notorious “deadly secrets” which
demographers on the eve of the Revolution knew were al
ready familiar to the inhabitants of the countryside.
Of course, it had long been asserted that a country had to
be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful; but this was
the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant way,
that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the
number and the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage
rules and family organization, but to the manner in which
each individual made use of his sex. Things went from ritual
lamenting over the unfruitful debauchery of the rich, bache
lors, and libertines to a discourse in which the sexual conduct
of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and
as a target of intervention; there was a progression from the
crudely populationist arguments of the mercantilist epoch to
the much more subtle and calculated attempts at regulation
that tended to favor or discourage-according to the objec
tives and exigencies of the moment-an increasing birthrate.
Through the political economy of population there was
formed a whole grid of observations regarding sex. There
emerged the analysis of the modes of sexual conduct, their
determinations and their effects, at the boundary line of the
biological and the economic domains. There also appeared
those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the tradi
tional means-moral and religious exhortations, fiscal meas
ures-tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into
a concerted economic and political behavior. In time these
new measures would become anchorage points for the differ
ent varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centu
ries. It was essential that the state know what was happening
with its citizens’ sex, and the use they made of it, but also
that each individual be capable of controlling the use he
made of it. Between the state and the individual, sex became
an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of discourses,
special know ledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it.

The R epressive Hypothesis 27
The situation was similar in the case of children’s sex. It
is often said that the classical period consigned it to an
obscurity from which it scarcely emerged before the Three
Essays or the beneficent anxieties of Little Hans. It is true
that a longstanding “freedom” of language between children
and adults, or pupils and teachers, may have disappeared.
No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly ad
vised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the
choice of a good prostitute. And the boisterous laughter that
had accompanied the precocious sexuality of children for so
long-and in all social classes, it seems-was gradually
stifled. But this was not a pl�in and simple imposition of
silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any
less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said
in a different way; it was different people who said them,
from different points of view, and in order to obtain different
results. Silence itself-the things one declines to say, or is
forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between
different speakers-is less the absolute limit of discourse, the
other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary,
than an element that functions alongside the things said, with
them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There
is no binary division to be made between what one says and
what one does not say; we must try to determine the different
ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those
who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of
discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is re
quired in either case. There is not one but many silences, and
they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and
permeate discourses.
Take the secondary schools of the eighteenth century, for
example. On the whole, one can have the impression that sex
was hardly spoken of at all in these institutions. But one only
has to glance over the architectural layout, the rules of disci
pline, and their whole internal organization: the question of
sex was a constant preoccupation. The builders considered it

2 8 The History o f Sexuality
explicitly. The organizers took it permanently into account.
All who held a measure of authority were placed in a state
of perpetual alert, which the fixtures, the precautions taken,
the interplay of punishments and responsibilities, never
ceased to reiterate. The space for classes, the shape of the
tables, the planning of the recreation lessons, the distribution
of the dormitories (with or without partitions, with or with
out curtains), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep
periods-all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the
sexuality of children.12 What one might call the internal
discourse of the institution-the one it employed to address
itself, and which circulated among those who made it func
tion-was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality
existed, that it was precocious, active, and ever present. But
this was not all: the sex of the schoolboy became in the course
of the eighteenth century-and quite apart from that of
adolescents in general-a public problem. Doctors counseled
the directors and professors of educational establishments,
but they also gave their opinions to families; educators de
signed projects which they submitted to the authorities;
schoolmasters turned to students, made recommendations to
them, and drafted for their benefit books of exhortation, full
of moral and medical examples. Around the schoolboy and
his sex there proliferated a whole literature of precepts, opin
ions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for
reform, and plans for ideal institutions. With Basedow and
the German “philanthropic” movement, this transformation
of adolescent sex into discourse grew to considerable dimen
sions. Salzmann even organized an experimental school
12Reglement de police pour les lycees (1809). art. 67: “There shall always be, during
class and study hours, an instructor watching the exterior, so as to prevent students
who have gone out to relieve themselves from stopping and congregating.
art. 68: “After the evening prayer, the students will be conducted back to the
dormitory, where the schoolmasters will put them to bed at once.
art. 69: “The masters will not retire except after having made certain that every
student is in bed.
art. 70: “The beds shall be separated by partitions two meters in height. The
dormitories shall be illuminated during the night.”

The R epressive Hypothesis 29
which owed its exceptional character to a supervision and
education of sex so well thought out that youth’s universal
sin would never need to be practiced there. And with all
these measures taken, the child was not to be simply the mute
and unconscious object of attentions prearranged between
adults only; a certain reasonable, limited, canonical, and
truthful discourse on sex was prescribed for him-a kind of
discursive orthopedics. The great festival organized at the
Philanthropinum in May of 1 776 can serve as a vignette in
this regard. Taking the form of an examination, mixed with
floral games, the awarding of prizes, and a board of review,
this was the first solemn communion of adolescent sex and
reasonable discourse. In order to show the success of the sex
education given the students, Basedow had invited all the
dignitaries that Germany could muster (Goethe was one of
the few to decline the invitation). Before the assembled pub
lic, one of the professors, a certain Wolke, asked the students
selected questions concerning the mysteries of sex, birth, and
procreation. He had them comment on engravings that de
picted a pregnant woman, a couple, and a cradle. The replies
were enlightened, offered without shame or embarrassment.
No unseemly laughter intervened to disturb them-except
from the very ranks of an adult audience more childish than
the children themselves, and whom Wolke severely repri
manded. At the end, they all applauded these cherub-faced
boys who, in front of adults, had skillfully woven the gar�
lands of discourse and sex.1J
It would be less than exact to say that the pedagogical
institution has imposed a ponderous silence on the sex of
children and adolescents. On the contrary, since the eigh
teenth century it has multiplied the forms of discourse on the
subject; it has established various points of implantation for
sex; it has coded contents and qualified speakers. Speaking
IJ Johann Gottlieb Schum mel. Fritzens Reise nach Dessau (1776), cited by Auguste
Pinloche, La Reforme de l’education en Allemagne au XVIII’ siecle (1889), pp.
125-9.

30 The History of Sexuality
about children’s sex, inducing educators, physicians, ad
ministrators, and parents to speak of it, or speaking to them
about it, causing children themselves to talk about it, and
enclosing them in a web of discourses which sometimes ad
dress them, sometimes speak about them, or impose canoni
cal bits of knowledge on them, or use them as a basis for
constructing a science that is beyond their grasp-all this
together enables us to link an intensification of the interven
tions of power to a multiplication of discourse. The sex of
children and adolescents has become, since the eighteenth
century, an important area of contention around which innu
merable institutional devices and discursive strategies have
been deployed. It may well be true that adults and children
themselves were deprived of a certain way of speaking about
sex, a mode that was disallowed as being too direct, crude,
or coarse. But this was only the counterpart of other dis
courses, and perhaps the condition necessary in order for
them to function, discourses that were interlocking, hier
archized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power
relations.
One could mention many other centers which in the eigh
teenth or nineteenth century began to produce discourses on
sex. First there was medicine, via the “nervous disorders”;
next psychiatry, when it set out to discover the etiology of
mental illnesses, focusing its gaze first on “excess,” then
onanism, then frustration, then “frauds against procrea
tion,” but especially when it annexed the whole of the sexual
perversions as its own province; criminal j ustice, too, which
had long been concerned with sexuality, particularly in the
form of “heinous” crimes and crimes against nature, but
which, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, broad
ened its jurisdiction to include petty offenses, minor indecen
cies, insignificant perversions; and lastly, all those social
controls, cropping up at the end of the last century, which
screened the sexuality of couples, parents and children, dan
gerous and endangered adolescents-undertaking to protect,

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 1
separate, and forewarn, signaling perils everywhere, awaken
ing people’s attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up re
ports, organizing therapies. These sites radiated discourses
aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a con
stant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to
talk about it.
One day in 1 867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt,
who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then
there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from
a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor,
sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities.
At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from
a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the
village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood,
or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they
would play the familiar game called “curdled milk. ” So he
was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the
village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the
gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him
over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only
wrote their report but also had it published. 14 What is the
significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the
fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexual
ity, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become,
from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intoler
ance but of a j udicial action, a medical intervention, a careful
clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.
The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the
brainpan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for
possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this person
age who up to that moment had been an integral part of
village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned
him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations,
and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they
\4 H. Bonnet and J. Bulard, Rapport medico-legal sur l ‘etat mental de Ch. -J. Jouy.
January 4, 1968.

32 The History of Sexuality
decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine
and knowledge-an object to be shut away till the end of his
life in the hospital at Mareville, but also one to be made
known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis.
One can be fairly certain that during this same period the
Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to
mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud.
But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the
institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday
bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our
society-and it was doubtless the first in history to take such
measures-assembled around these timeless gestures, these
barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and
alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyz
ing, and investigating.
Between the licentious Englishman, who earnestly re
corded for his own purposes the singular episodes of his
secret life, and his contemporary, this village halfwit who
would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older
ones refused him, there was without doubt a profound con
nection : in any case, from one extreme to the other, sex
became something to say, and to say exhaustively in accord
ance with deployments that were varied, but all, in their own
way, compelling. Whether in the form of a subtle confession
in confidence o� an authoritarian interrogation, sex-be it
refined or rustic-had to be put into words. A great polymor
phous injunction bound the Englishman and the poor Lor
rainese peasant alike. As history would have it, the latter was
named Jouy. *
Since the eighteenth century, sex has not ceased to pro
voke a kind of generalized discursive erethism. And these
discourses on sex did not multiply apart from or against
power, but in the very space and as the means of its exercise.
Incitements to speak were orchestrated from all quarters,
“Jouy sounds like the past participle of jouir, the French verb meaning to enjoy,
to delight in (something), but also to have an orgasm, to come. (Translator’s note)

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 3
apparatuses everywhere for listening and recording, proce
dures for observing, questioning, and formulating. Sex was
driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive
existence. From the singular imperialism that compels every
one to transform their sexuality into a perpetual discourse,
to the manifold mechanisms which, in the areas of economy,
pedagogy, medicine, and j ustice, incite, extract, distribute,
and institutionalize the sexual discourse, an immense verbos
ity is what our civilization has required and organized.
Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated-and
in such a relatively short span of time-a similar quantity of
discourses concerned with sex. It may well be that we talk
about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the
task; we convince ourselves that we have never said enough
on the subj ect, that, through inertia or submissiveness, we
conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what
is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out
once again in search of it. It is possible that where sex is
concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of soci
eties is our own.
But as this first overview shows, we are dealing less with
a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses
produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in diff
erent institutions. The Middle Ages had organized around
the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance a discourse
that was markedly unitary. In the course of recent centuries,
this relative uniformity was broken apart, scattered, and
multiplied in an explosion of distinct discursivities which
took form in demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry,
psychology, ethics, pedagogy, and political criticism. More
precisely, the secure bond that held together the moral theol
ogy of concupiscence and the obligation of confession (equiv
alent to the theoretical discourse on sex and its first-person
formulation) was, if not broken, at least loosened and diver
sified: between the obj ectification of sex in rational dis
courses, and the movement by which each individual was set

34 The History of Sexuality
to the task of recounting his own sex, there has occurred,
since the eighteenth century, a whole series of tensions, con
flicts, efforts at adjustment, and attempts at retranscription.
So it is not simply in terms of a continual extension that we
must speak of this discursive growth; it should be seen rather
as a dispersion of centers from which discourses emanated,
a diversification of their forms, and the complex deployment
of the network connecting them. Rather than the uniform
concern to hide sex, rather than a general prudishness of
language, what distinguishes these last three centuries is the
variety, the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for
speaking about it, for having it be spoken about, for inducing
it to speak of itself, for listening, recording, transcribing, and
tedistributing what is said about it: around sex, a whole
network of varying, specific, and coercive transpositions into
discourse. Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with
the verbal proprieties imposed by the Age of Reason, what
was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement
to discourse.
The objection will doubtless be raised that if so many
stimulations and constraining mechanisms were necessary in
order to speak of sex, this was because there reigned over
everyone a certain fundamental prohibition; only definite
n�essities-economic pressures, political requirements
were able to lift this prohibition and open a few approaches
to the discourse on sex, but these were limited and carefully
coded; so much talk about sex, so many insistent devices
contrived for causing it to be talked about-but under strict
conditions: does this not prove that it was an object of se
crecy, and more important, that there is still an attempt to
keep it that way? But this often-stated theme, that sex is
outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obsta
cle; the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it,
is precisely what needs to be examined. Does it not partake
of the injunction by which discourse is provoked? Is it not
with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made

The Repressive Hypothesis 3 5
t o mirror, a t the outer limit o f every actual discourse, some
thing akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing
abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult
and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge? We must
not forget that by making sex into that which, above all else,
had to be confessed, the Christian pastoral always presented
it as the disquieting enigma: not a thing which stubbornly
shows itself, but one which always hides, the insidious pres
ence that speaks in a voice so muted and often disguised that
one risks remaining deaf to it. Doubtless the secret does not
reside In that basic reality in relation to which all the incite
ments to speak of sex are situated-whether they try to force
the secret, or whether in some obscure way they reinforce it
by the manner in which they speak of it. It is a question
rather of a theme that forms part of the very mechanics of
these incitements: a way of giving shape to the requirement
to speak about the matter, a fable that is indispensable to the
endlessly proliferating economy of the discourse on sex.
What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they
consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated
themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it
as the secret.

2
The Perverse
Implantation
A possible objection: it would be a mistake to see in this
proliferation of discourses merely a quantitative phe}1ome
non, something like a pure increase, as if what was said in
them were immaterial, as if the fact of speaking about sex
were of itself more important than the forms of imperatives
that were imposed on it by speaking about it. For was this
transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the
endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that
were n� amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to
say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures,
to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procrea
tion? Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against
minor perversions were multiplied; sexual irregularity was
annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old age, a norm
of sexual development was defined and all the possible devia
tions were carefully described; pedagogical controls and
medical treatments were organized; around the least fanta
sies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole
emphatic vocabulary of abomination. Were these anything
more than means employed to absorb, for the benefit of a
genitally centered sexuality, all the fruitless pleasures? All
this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality,
is it not motivated by one basic concern : to ensure popula-
36

The Repressive Hypothesis 37
tion, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of
social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is
economically useful and politically conservative?
I still do not know whether this is the ultimate objective.
But this much is certain : reduction has not been the means
employed for trying to achieve it. The nineteenth century
and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a
dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate
forms, a mUltiple implantation of “perversions. ” Our epoch
has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century, three major explic
it codes-apart from the customary regularities and con
straints of opinion-governed sexual practices: canonical
law, the Christian pastoral, and civil law. They determined,
each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit.
They were all centered On matrimonial relations: the marital
obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one
complied with it, the requirements and violences that accom
panied it, the useless or unwarranted caresses for which it
was a pretext, its fecundity or the way one went about mak- ,
ing it sterile, the moments when one demanded it (dangerous
periods of pregnancy or breast-feeding, forbidden times of
Lent or abstinence), its frequency or infrequency, and so on.
It was this domain that was especially saturated with pre
scriptions. The sex of husband and wife was beset by rules
and recommendations. The marriage relation was the most
intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than
anything else; more than any other relation, it was required
to give a detailed accounting of itself. It was under constant
surveillance: if it was found to be lacking, it had to come
forward and plead its case before a witness. The “rest” re
mained a good deal more confused: one only has to think of
the uncertain status of “sodomy,” or the indifference regard
ing the sexuality of children.
Moreover, these different codes did not make a clear dis
tinction between violations of the rules of marriage and

3 8 The History o f Sexuality
deviations with respect to genitality. Breaking the rules of
marriage or seeking strange pleasures brought an equal meas
ure of condemnation. On the list of grave sins, and separated
only by their relative importance, there appeared debauchery
(extramarital relations), adultery, rape, spiritual or carnal
incest, but also sodomy, or the mutual “caress. ” As to the
courts, they could condemn homosexuality as well as infi
delity, marriage without parental consent, or bestiality.
What was taken into account in the civil and religious juris
dictions alike was a general unlawfulness. Doubtless acts
“contrary to nature” were stamped as especially abominable,
but they were perceived simply as an extreme form of acts
“against the law”; they were infringements of decrees which
were just as sacred as those of marriage, and which had been
established for governing the order of things and the plan of
beings. Prohibitions bearing on sex were essentially of a
juridical nature. The “nature” on which they were based was
still a kind of law. For a long time hermaphrodites were
criminals, or crime’s offspring, since their anatomical dispo
sition, their very being, confounded the law that distin
guished the sexes and prescribed their union.
The discursive explosion of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries caused this system centered on legitimate alliance
to undergo two modifications. First, a centrifugal movement
with respect to heterosexual monogamy. Of course, the array
of practices and pleasures continued to be referred to it as
their internal standard; but it was spoken of less and less, or
in any case with a growing moderation. Efforts to find out
its secrets were abandoned; nothing further was demanded
of it than to define itself from day to day. The legitimate
couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discre
tion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter,
perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under
scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women,
and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the
opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great tran-

The Repressive Hypothesis 39
sports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely
noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the
difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were
condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if
regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it
was through a reflux movement, originating in these periph
eral sexualities.
Whence the setting apart of the “unnatural” as a specific
dimension in the field of sexuality. This kind of activity
assumed an autonomy with regard to the other condemned
forms such as adultery or rape (and the latter were con
demned less and less): to marry a close relative or practice
sodomy, to seduce a nun or engage in sadism, to deceive
one’s wife or violate cadavers, became things that were essen
tially different. The area covered by the Sixth Command
ment began to fragment. Similarly, in the civil order, the
confused category of “debauchery, ” which for more than a
century had been one of the most frequent reasons for ad
ministrative confinement, came apart. From the debris, there
appeared on the one hand infractions against the legislation
(or morality) pertaining to marriage and the family, and on
the other, offenses against the regularity of a natural function
(offenses which, it must be added, the law was apt to punish).
Here we have a likely reason, among others, for the prestige
of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased. Under
neath ,the great violator of the rules of marriage-stealer of
wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families, and an insult
to husbands and fathers-another personage can be
glimpsed: the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the
somber madness of sex. Underneath the libertine, the per
vert. He deliberately breaks the law, but at the same time,
something like a nature gone awry transports him far from
all nature; his death is the moment when the supernatural
return of the crime and its retribution thwarts the flight into
counternature. There were two great systems conceived by
the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order

40 The History of Sexuality
of desires-and the life of Don Juan overturned them both.
We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he
was homosexual, narcissistic, or impotent.
Although not without delay and equivocation, the natural
laws of matrimony and the immanent rules of sexuality
began to be recorded on two separate registers. There
emerged a world of perversion which partook of that of legal
or moral infraction, yet was not simply a variety of the latter.
An entire sub-race race was born, different-despite certain
kinship ties-from the libertines of the past. From the end
of the eighteenth century to our own, they circulated through
the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not
always by laws; were often locked up, but not always in
prisons; were sick perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous vic
tims, prey (0 a strange evil that also bore the name of vice
and sometimes crime. They were children wise beyond their
years, precocious little girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious
servants and educators, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary
collectors, ramblers with bizarre impulses; they haunted the
houses of correction, the penal colonies, the tribunals, and
the asylums; they carried their infamy to the doctors and
their sickness to the judges. This was the numberless family
of perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and
akin to madmen. In the course of the century they succes
sively bore the stamp of “moral folly,” “genital neurosis,”
“aberration of the genetic instinct,” “degenerescence,” or
“physical imbalance. ”
What does the appearance of all these peripheral sexuali
ties signify? Is the fact that they could appear in broad day
light a sign that the code had become more lax? Or does the
fact that they were given so much attention testify to a
stricter regime and to its concern to bring them under close
supervision? In terms of repression, things are unclear. There
was permissiveness, if one bears in mind that the severity of
the codes relating to sexual offenses diminished considerably
in the nineteenth century and that law itself often deferred

The Repressive Hypothesis 4 1
t o medicine. But an additional ruse of severity, if one thinks
of all the agencies of control and all the mechanisms of
surveillance that were put into operation by pedagogy or
therapeutics. It may be the case that the intervention of the
Church in conjugal sexuality and its rejection of “frauds”
against procreation had lost much of their insistence over the
previous two hundred years. But medicine made a forceful
entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire
organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of “in
complete” sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of
related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of
“development” and instinctual “disturbances”; and it under
took to manage them.
J
Perhaps the point to consider is not the level of indulgence
or the quantity of repression but the form of power that was
exercised. When this whole thicket of disparate sexualities
was labeled, as if to disentangle them from one another, was
the object to exclude them from reality? It appears, in fact,
that the function of the power exerted in this instance was
not that of interdiction, and that it involved four operations
quite different from simple prohibition.
1 . Take the ancient prohibitions of consanguine marriages
(as numerous and complex as they were) or the condemna
tion of adultery, with its inevitable frequency of occurrence;
or on the other hand, the recent controls through which,
since the nineteenth century, the sexuality of children has
been subordinated and their “solitary habits” interfered
with. It is clear that we are not dealing with one and the same
power mechanism. Not only because in the one case it is a
question of law and penality, and in the other, medicine and
regimentation; but also because the tactics employed is not
‘ the same. On the surface, what appears in both cases is an
effort at elimination that was always destined to fail and
always constrained to begin again. But the prohibition of
“incests” attempted to reach its objective through an asymp
totic decrease in the thing it condemned, whereas the control

42 The History of Sexuality
of infantile sexuality hoped to reach it through a simulta
neous propagation of its own power and of the object on
which it was brought to bear. It proceeded in accordance
with a twofold increase extended indefinitely. Educators and
doctors combatted children’s onanism like an epidemic that
needed to be eradicated. What this actually entailed,
throughout this whole secular campaign that mobilized the
adult world around the sex of children, was using these
tenuous pleasures as a prop, constituting them as secrets
(that is, forcing them into hiding so as to make possible their
discovery), tracing them back to their source, tracking them
from their origins to their effects, searching out everything
that might cause them or simply enable them to exist. Wher
ever there was the chance they might appear, devices of
surveillance were installed; traps were laid for compelling
admissions; inexhaustible and corrective discourses were im
posed; parents and teachers were alerted, and left with the
suspicion that all children were guilty, and with the fear of
being themselves at fault if their suspicions were not suffi
ciently strong; they were kept in readiness in the face of this
recurrent danger; their conduct was prescribed and their
pedagogy recodified; an entire medico-sexual regime took
hold of the family milieu. The child’s “vice” was not so much
an enemy as a support; it may have been designated as the
evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went
into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that
what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to
the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to
disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power
advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target
expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further
into reality at the same pace. In appearance, we are dealing
with a barrier system; but in fact, all around the child, indefi
nite lines of penetration were disposed.
2. This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities en
tailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification

The Repressive Hypothesis 43
of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical
codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpe
trator was nothing more than the j uridical subject of them.
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a
past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a
type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet
anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that
went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexual
ity. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his
actions because it was their insidious and indefi!l.itely active
principle; written immodestly on his face and body because
it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consub
stantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular
nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiat
ric, medical category qf homosexuality was constituted from
the moment it was characterized-Westphal’s famous article
of 1 870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date
of birth I-less by a type of sexual relations than by a certain
quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the
masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality ap
peared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was tran
sposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior
androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had
been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a
species.
So too were all those minor perverts whom nineteenth
century psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange
baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and
zooerasts, Rohleder’s auto-monosexualists; and later, mixo
scopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic in
verts, and dyspareunist women. These fine names for heresies
referred to a nature that was overlooked by the law, but not
so neglectful of itself that it did not go on producing more
species, even where there was no order to fit them into. The
‘Carl Westphal, Archiv for Neurologie, 1 870.

44 The History of Sexuality
machinery of power that focused on this whole alien strain
did not aim to suppress it, but rather to give it an analytical,
visible, and permanent reality: it was implanted in bodies,
slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle
of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison
d ‘hre and a natural order of disorder. Not the exclusion of
these thousand aberrant sexualities, but the specification, the
regional solidification of each one of them. The strategy
behind this dissemination was to strew reality with them and
incorporate them into the individual.
3. More than the old taboos, this form of power demanded
constant, attentive, and curious presences for its exercise; it
presupposed proximities; it proceeded through examination
and insistent observation; it required an exchange of dis
courses, through questions that extorted admissions, and
confidences that went beyond the questions that were asked.
It implied a physical proximity and an interplay of intense
sensations. The medicalization of the sexually peculiar was
both the effect and the instrument of this. Imbedded in bod
ies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddi
ties of sex relied on a technology of health and pathology.
And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicaliz
able object, one had to try and detect it-as a lesion, a
dysfunction, or a symptom-in the depths of the organism,
or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of
behavior. The power which thus took charge of sexuality set
about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, inten
sifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled mo
ments. It wrapped the sexual body in its embrace. There was
undoubtedly an increase in effectiveness and an extension of
the domain controlled; but also a sensualization of power and
a gain of pleasure. This produced a twofold effect: an impetus
was given to power through its very exercise; an emotion
rewarded the overseeing control and carried it further; the
intensity of the confession renewed the quC(stioner’s curios
ity; the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encir-

The R epressive Hypothesis 45
eled it. But so many pressing questions singularized the
pleasures felt by the one who had to reply. They were fixed
by a gaze, isolated and animated by the attention they re
ceived. Power operated as a mechanism of attraction; it drew
out those peculiarities over which it kept watch. Pleasure
spread to the power that harried it; power anchored the
pleasure it uncovered.
The medical examination, the psychiatric inves.!igation,
the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the
over-all and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward
or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function
as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power.
The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions,
monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to
light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at
having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty
it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is
pursuing; and opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleas
ure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting. Capture and
seduction, confrontation and mutual reinforcement: parents
and children, adults and adolescents, educator and students,
doctors and patients, the psychiatrist with his hysteric and
his perverts, all have played this game continually since the
nineteenth century. These attractions, these evasions, these
circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes,
not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of
power and pleasure.
4. Whence those devices of sexual saturation so character
istic of the space and the social rituals of the nineteenth
century. People often say that modern society has attempted
to reduce sexuality to the _couple-the heterosexual and, in
sofar as possible, legitimate couple. There are equal grounds
for saying that it has, if not created, at least outfitted and
made to proliferate, groups with multiple elements and a
circulating sexuality: a distribution of points of power, hier
arc hi zed and placed opposite to one another; “pursued”

46 The History of Sexuality
pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched out; com
partmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged;
proximities that serve as surveillance procedures, and func
tion as mechanisms of intensification; contacts that operate
as inductors. This is the way things worked in the case of the
family, or rather the household, with parents, children, and
in some instances, servants. Was the nineteenth-century fam
ily really a monogamic and conjugal cell? Perhaps to a cer
tain extent. But it was also a network of pleasures and powers
linked together at multiple points and according to trans
formable relationships. The separation of grown-ups and
children, the polarity established between the parents’ bed
room and that of the children (it became routine in the
course of the century when working-class housing construc
tion was undertaken), the relative segregation of boys and
. girls, the strict instructions as to the care of nursing infants
(maternal breast-feeding, hygiene), the attention focused on
infantile sexuality, the supposed dangers of masturbation,
the importance attached to puberty, the methods of surveil
lance suggested to parents, the exhortations, secrets, and
fears, the presence-both valued and feared–of servants: all
this made the family, even when brought down to its smallest
dimensions, a complicated network, saturated with multiple,
fragmentary, and mobile sexualities. To reduce them to the
conjugal relationship, and then to project the latter, in the
form of a forbidden desire, onto the children, cannot account
for this apparatus which, in relation to these sexualities, was
less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying
mechanism. Educational or psychiatric institutions, with
their large populations, their hierarchies, their spatial ar
rangements, their surveillance systems, constituted, along
side the family, another way of distributing the interplay of
powers and pleasures; but they too delineated areas of ex-
. treme sexual saturation, with privileged spaces or rituals
such as the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the con
sultation. The forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sex
uality were drawn there and established.

The Repressive Hypothesis 47
Nineteenth-century “bourgeois” society-and it is doubt
less still with us-was a society of blatant and fragmented
perversion. And this was not by way of hypocrisy, for noth
ing was more manifest and more prolix, or more manifestly
taken over by discourses and institutions. Not because, hav
ing tried to erect too rigid or too general a barri�r · against
sexuality, society succeeded only in giving rise to a whole
perverse outbreak and a long pathology of the sexual instinct.
At issue, rather, is the type of power it brought to bear on
the body and on sex. In point of fact, this power had neither
the form of the law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the
contrary, it acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It
did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various
forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefi
nite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it
in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It did
not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of
spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another.
It did not set up a barrier; it provided places of maximum
saturation. It produced and determined the sexual mosaic.
Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or
as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual
fact, and directly, perverse.
In actual fact. The manifold sexualities-those which ap
pear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the
child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or
practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the
fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relation
ships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and stu
dent, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt
spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)
all form the correlate of exact procedures of power. We must
not imagine that all these things that were formerly tolerated
attracted notice and received a pejorative designation when
the time came to give a regulative role to the one type of
sexuality that was capable of reproducing labor power and
the form of the family. These polymorphous conducts were

48 The History of Sexuality
actually extracted from people’s bodies and from their pleas
ures; or rather, they were solidified in them; they were drawn
out, revealed, isolated, intensified, incorporated, by mul
tifarious power devices. The growth of perversions is not a
moralizing theme that obssessed the scrupulous minds of the
Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a
type of power on bodies and their pleasures. It is possible that
the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleas
ures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices.
But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and
pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a
fixture of this game.
Directly. This implantation of multiple perversions is not
a mockery of sexuality taking revenge on a power that has
thrust on it an excessively repressive law. Neither are we
dealing with ‘paradoxical forms of pleasure that turn back on
power and invest it in the form of a “pleasure to be endured. ”
The implantation of perversions i s an instrument-effect: i t is
through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of
peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and
pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body,
and penetrated modes of conduct. And accompanying this
encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, be
came stuck to an age, a place, a type of practice. A prolifera
tion of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimi
zation of the power to which each of these local sexualities
gave a surface of intervention: this concatenation, particu
larly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and
relayed by the countless economic interests which, with the
help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography,
have tapped into both this analytical multiplication of pleas
ure and this optimization of the power that controls it. Pleas
ure and power do not cancel or turn back against
one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one an
other. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and
devices of excitation and incitement.

The Repressive Hypothesis 49
We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern
industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual
repression. We have not only witnessed a visible exp1osion of
unorthodox sexualities; but-and this is the important point
-a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is
locally dependent on procedures of prohibition, has ensured,
through a network of interconnecting mechanisms, the pro
liferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of dis
parate sexualities. It is said that no society has been more
prudish; never have the agencies of power taken such care to
feign ignorance of the thing they prohibited, as if they were
determined to have nothing to do with it. But it is the oppo
site that has become apparent, at least after a general review
of the facts: never have there existed more centers of power;
never more attention manifested and verbalized; never more
circular contacts and linkages; never more sites where the
intensity of pleasures and the persistency of power catch
hold, only to spread elsewhere.

PART T H RE E
Scientia Sexua]is

I suppose that the first two points will be granted me; I
imagine that people will accept my saying that, for two cen
turies now, the discourse on sex has been multiplied rather
than rarefied; and that if it has carried with it taboos and
prohibitions, it has also, in a more fundamental way, ensured
the solidification and implantation of an entire sexual mo
saic. Yet the impression remains that all this has by and large
played only a defensive role. By speaking about it so much,
by discovering it multiplied, partitioned off, and specified
precisely where one had placed it, what one was seeking
essentially was simply to conceal sex: a screen-discourse, a
dispersion-avoidance. Until Freud at least, the discourse on
sex-the discourse of scholars and theoreticians-never
ceased to hide the thing it was speaking about. We could take
all these things that were said, the painstaking precautions
and detailed analyses, as so many procedures meant to evade
the unbearable, too hazardous truth of sex. And the mere
fact that one claimed to be speaking about it from the rarefied
and neutral viewpoint of a science is in itself significant. This
was in fact a science made up of evasions since, given its
inability or refusal to speak of sex itself, it concerned itself
primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities,
pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations. It was by
the same token a science subordinated .in the main to the
imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under
the guise of the medical norm. Claiming to speak the truth,
it stirred up people’s fears; to the least oscillations of sexual
ity, it ascribed an imaginary dynasty of evils destined to be
passed on for generations; it declared the furtive customs of
the timid, and the moSt solitary of petty manias, dangerous
5 3

5 4 T h e History of Sexuality
for the whole society; strange pleasures, it warned, would
eventually result in nothing short of death: that of individu
als, generations, the species itself.
It thus became associated with an insistent and indiscreet
medical practice, glibly proclaiming its aversions, quick to
run to the rescue of law and public opinion, more servile with
respect to the powers of order than amenable to the require
ments of truth. Involuntarily naive in the best of cases, more
often intentionally mendacious, in complicity with what it
denounced, haughty and coquettish, it established an entire
pornography of the morbid, which was characteristic of the
fin de siecle society. In France, doctors like Garnier, Pouillet,
and Ladoucette were its unglorified scribes and Rollinat its
poet. But beyond these troubled pleasures, it assumed other
powers; it set itself up as the supreme authority in matters
of hygienic necessity, taking up the old fears of venereal
affliction and combining them with the new themes of asep
sis, and the great evolutionist myths with the recent institu
tions of public health; it claimed to ensure the physical vigor
and the moral cleanliness of the social body; it promised to
eliminate defective individuals, degenerate and bastardized
populations. In the name of a biological and historical ur
gency, it j ustified the racisms of the state, which at the time
were on the horizon. It grounded them in “truth . ”
When w e compare these discourses o n human sexuality ·
with what was known at the time about the physiology of
animal and plant reproduction, we are struck by the incon
gruity. Their feeble content from the standpoint of elemen
tary rationality, not to mention scientificity, earns them a
place apart in the history of knowledge. They form a
strangely muddled zone. Throughout the nineteenth cen
tury, sex seems to have been incorporated into two very
distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction,
which developed continuously according to a general scien
tific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite
different rules of formation. From one to the other, there was

Scientia Sexualis 5 5
no real exchange, no reciprocal structuration; the role of the
first with respect to the second was scarcely more than as a
distant and quite fictitious guarantee: a blanket guarantee
under cover of which moral obstacles, economic or political
options, and traditional fears could be recast in a scientific
sounding vocabulary. It is as if a fundamental resistance
blocked the development of a rationally formed discourse
concerning human sex, its correlations, and its effects. A
disparity of this sort would indicate that the aim of such a
discourse was not to state the truth but to prevent its very
emergence. Underlying the difference between the physiol
ogy of reproduction and the medical theories of sexuality, we
would have to see something other and something more than
an uneven scientific development or a disparity in the forms
of rationality; the one would partake of that immense will to
knowledge which has sustained the establishment of scien
tific discourse in the West, whereas the other would derive
from a stubborn will to nonknowledge.
This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that
was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with
age-old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses: a
refusal to see and to understand; but further-and this is the
crucial point-a refusal concerning the very thing that was
brought to light and whose formulation was urgently solic
ited. For there can be no misunderstanding that is not based
on a fundamental relation to truth. Evading this truth, bar
ring access to it, masking it: these were so many local tactics
which, as if by superimposition and through a last-minute
detour, gave a paradoxical form to a fundamental petition to
know. Choosing not to recognize was yet another vagary of
the will to truth. Let Charcot’s Salpetriere serve as an exam
ple in this regard: it was an enormous apparatus for observa
tion, with its examinations, interrogations, and experiments,
but it was also a machinery for incitement, with its public
presentations, its theater of ritual crises, carefully staged
with the help of ether or amyl nitrate, its interplay of dia-

56 The History of Sexuality
logues, palpations, laying on of hands, postures which the
doctors elicited or obliterated with a gesture or a word, its
hierarchy of personnel who kept watch, organized, pro
voked, monitored, and reported, and who accumulated an
immense pyramid of observations and dossiers. It is in the
context of this continuous incitement to discourse and to
truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding (mecon
naissance) operated: thus Charcot’s gesture interrupting a
public consultation where it began to be too manifestly a
question of “that”; and the more frequent practice of delet
ing from the succession of dossiers what had been said and
demonstrated by the patients regarding sex, but also what
had been seen, provoked, solicited by the doctors themselves,
things that were almost entirely omitted from the published
observations.l The important thing, in this affair, is not that
these men shut their eyes or stopped their ears, or that they
were mistaken; it is rather that they constructed around and
apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth,
even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment. The
essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation
and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and false
hood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental,
useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that
sex was constituted as a problem of truth. What needs to be
situated, therefore, is not the threshold of a new rationality
whose discovery was marked by Freud-or someone else
but the progressive formation (and also the transformations)
lCf. . for example, Desire Bourneville, lconographie photographique de fa Safperriere
(1878-1881), pp. 110 If. The unpublished documents dealing with the lessons of
Charcot, which can still be found at the Salpetriere, are again more explicit on this
point than the published texts. The interplay of incitement and elision is clearly
evident in them. A handwritten note gives an account of the session of November
25, 1877. The subject exhibits hysterical spasms; Charcot suspends an attack by
placing first his hand, then the end of a baton, on the woman’s ovaries. He with
draws the baton, and there is a fresh attack, which he accelerates by administering
inhalations of amyl nitrate. The afflicted woman then cries out for the sex-baton in
words that are devoid of any metaphor: “G. is taken away and her delirium
continues. ”

Scientia Sexualis 5 7
of that “interplay of truth and sex” which was bequeathed
to us by the nineteenth century, and which we may have
modified, but, lacking evidence to the contrary, have not rid
ourselves of. Misunderstandings, avoidances, and evasions
were only possible, and only had their effects, against the
background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex.
An endeavor that does not date from the nineteenth century,
even if it was then that a nascent science lent it a singular
form. It was the basis of all the aberrant, naive, and cunning
discourses where knowledge of sex seems to have strayed for
such a long time.
Historically, there have been two great procedures for
producing the truth of sex.
On the one hand, the societies-and they are numerous:
China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies
which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic
art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a
practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not con
sidered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and
the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but
first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as
pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific qual
ity, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.
Moreover, this knowledge must be deflected back into the
sexual practice itself, in order to shape it as though from
within and amplify its effects. In this way, there is formed a
knowledge that must remain secret, not because of an ele
ment of infamy that might attach to its object, but because
of the need to hold it in the greatest reserve, since, according
to tradition, it would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by
being divulged. Consequently, the relationship to the master
who holds the secrets is of paramount importance; only he,
working alone, can transmit this art in an esoteric manner
and as the culmination of an initiation in which he guides the
disciple’s progress with unfailing skill and sev�rity. The

5 8 The History o f Sexuality
effects of this masterful art, which are considerably more
generous than the spareness of its prescriptions would lead
one to imagine, are said to transfigure the one fortunate
enough to receive its privileges: an absolute mastery of the
body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits, the
elixir of life, the exile of death and its threats.
On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars
erotica. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to
practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to
have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the
truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power
strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful
secret: I have in mind the confession.
Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have
established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely
on for the production of truth: the codification of the sacra
ment of penance by the Lateran Council in 1215, with the
resulting development of confessional techniques, the declin
ing importance of accusatory procedures in criminal j ustice,
the abandonment of tests of guilt (sworn statements, duels,
judgments of God) and the development of methods of inter
rogation and inquest, the increased participation of the royal
administration in the prosecution of infractions, at the ex
pense of proceedings leading to private settlements, the set
ting up of tribunals of Inquisition: all this helped to give the
confession a central role in the order of civil and religious
powers. The evolution of the word avowal and of the legal
function it designated is itself emblematic of this develop
ment: from being a guarantee of the status, identity, and
value granted to one person by another, it came to signify
someone’s acknowledgment of his own actions and thoughts.
For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the refer
ence of others and the demonstration of his ties to the com
monweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was
authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged
to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession

Scientia Sexualis 59
was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualiza
tion by power.
In any case, next to the testing rituals, next to the testi
mony of witnesses, and the learned methods of observation
and demonstration, the confession became one of the West’s
most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have
since become a singularly confessing society. The confession
has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice,
medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations,
in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most
solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s
thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes
about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most
difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to
one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one
loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things
it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people
write books about. One confesses-or is forced to confess.
When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal
imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by vio
lence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul,
or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture
has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it
could go no further: the dark twins.2 The most defenseless
tenderness ‘and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need
of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
Whence a metamorphosis in literature: we have passed
from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the
heroic or marvelous narration of “trials” of bravery or saint
hood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of
extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words,
a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like
a shimmering mirage. Whence too this new way of philo
sophizing: seeking the fundamental relation to the true, not
‘Greek law had already coupled torture and confession, at least where slaves were
concerned, and Imperial Roman law had widened the practice.

60 The History of Sexuality
simply in oneself-in some forgotten knowledge, or in a
certain primal trace-but in the self-examination that yields,
through a multitude of fleeting impressions, the basic cer
tainties of consciousness. The obligation to confess is now
relayed through so many different points, ‘is so deeply in
grained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of
a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us
that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only
to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint
holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and
it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of
liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to si
lence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares
an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in phi
losophy, which a “political history of truth” would have to
overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free-nor
error servile-but that its production is thoroughly imbued
with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.
One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of
confession in order to attribute a fundamental role to censor
ship, to taboos regarding speaking and thinking; one has to
have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all
these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization
repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and
what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgot
ten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not
thinking-are speaking to us of freedom. An immense labor
to which the West has submitted generations in order to
produce-while other forms of work ensured the accumula
tion of capital-men’s subj ection: their constitution as sub
jects in both senses of the word. Imagine how exorbitant
must have seemed the order given to all Christians at the
beginning of the thirteenth century, to kneel at least once a
year and confess to all their transgressions, without omitting
a single one. And think of that obscure partisan, seven centu
ries later, who had come to rejoin the Serbian resistance deep

Scientia Sexualis 6 1
in the mountains; his superiors asked him to write his life
story; and when he brought them a few miserable pages,
scribbled in the night, they did not look at them but only said
to him, ” Start over, and tell the truth.” Should those much
discussed language taboos make us forget this millennial
yoke of confession?
From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a
privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we
are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite
particular way, one confessed? Suppose the obligation to
conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it
(concealing it all the more and with greater care as the
confession of it was more important, requiring a stricter
ritual and promising more decisive effects)? What if sex in
our society, on a scale of several centuries, was something
that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession?
The transformation of sex into discourse, which I spoke of
earlier, the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogene
ous sexualities, are perhaps two elements of the same deploy
ment: they are linked together with the help of the central
element of a confession that compels individuals to articulate
their sexual peculiarity-no matter how extreme. In Greece,
truth and sex were linked, in the form of pedagogy, by the
transmission of a precious knowledge from one body to an
other; sex served as a medium for initiations into learning.
For us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined,
through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an indi
vidual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as a medium
for sex and its manifestations.
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speak
ing subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a
ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does
not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a
partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority
who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it,
and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console,

62 The History of Sexuality
and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by
the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order
to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression
alone, independently of its external consequences, produces
intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it
exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of
his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. For
centuries, the truth of sex was, at least for the most part,
caught up in this discursive form. Moreover, this form was
not the same as that of education (sexual education confined
itself to general principles and rules of prudence); nor was it
that of initiation (which remained essentially a silent prac
tice, which the act of sexual enlightenment or deflowering
merely rendered laughable or violent). As we have seen, it is
a form that is far removed from the one governing the “erotic
art . ” By virtue of the power structure immanent in it, the
confessional discourse cannot come from above, as in the ars
erotica, through the sovereign will of a master, but rather
from below, as an obligatory act of speech which, under some
imperious compulsion, breaks the bonds of discretion or for
getfulness. What secrecy it presupposes is not owing to the
high price of what it has to say and the small number of those
who are worthy of its benefits, but to its obscure familiarity
and it§ general baseness. Its veracity is not guaranteed by the
lofty authority of the magistery, nor by the tradition it trans
mits, but by the bond, the basic intimacy in discourse, be
tween the dne who speaks and what he is speaking about. On
the other hand, the agency of domination does not reside in
the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in
the one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who
knows and answers, but in the one who questions and is not
supposed to know. And this discourse of truth finally takes
effect, not in the one who receives it, but in the one from
whom it is wrested. With these confessed truths, we are a
long way from the learned initiations into pleasure, with
their technique and their mystery. On the other hand, we

Scien tia Sexualis 63
belong to a society which has ordered sex’s difficult knowl
edge, not according to the transmission of secrets, but
around the slow surfacing of confidential statements.
The confession was, and still remains, the general standard
governing the production of the true discourse on sex. It has
undergone a considerable transformation, however. For a
long time, it remained firmly entrenched in the practice of
penance. But with the rise of Protestantism, the Counter
Reformation, eighteenth-century pedagogy, and nineteenth
century medicine, it gradually lost its ritualistic and exclu
sive localization; it spread; it has been employed in a whole
series of relationships: children and parents, students and
educators, patients and psychiatrists, delinquents and ex
perts. The motivations and effects it is expected to produce
have varied, as have the forms it has taken : interrogations,
consultations, autobiographical narratives, letters; they have
been recorded, transcribed, assembled into dossiers, pub
lished, and commented on. But more important, the confes
sion lends itself, if not to other domains, at least to new ways
of exploring the existing ones. It is no longer a question
simply of saying what was done-the sexual act-and how
it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the
thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accom
panied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the
pleasure that animated it. For the first time no doubt, a
society has taken upon itself to solicit and hear the imparting
of individual pleasures.
A dissemination, then, of procedures of confession, a mul
tiple localization of their constraint, a widening of their do
main: a great archive of the pleasures of sex was gradually
constituted. For a long time this archive dematerialized as it
was formed. It regularly disappeared without a trace (thus
suiting the purposes of the Christian pastoral) until medi
cine, psychiatry, and pedagogy began to solidify it: Campe,
Salzmann, and especially Kaan, Krafft-Ebing, Tardieu,
Molle, and Havelock Ellis carefully assembled this whole

64 The History of Sexuality
pitiful, lyrical outpouring from the sexual mosaic. Western
societies thus began to keep an indefinite record of these
people’s pleasures. They made up a herbal of them and estab
lished a system of classification. They described their every
day deficiencies as well as their oddities or exasperations.
This was an important time. It is easy to make light of these
nineteenth-century psychiatrists, who made a point of apolo
gizing for the horrors they were about to let speak, evoking
“immoral behavior” or “aberrations of the genetic senses, ”
but I a m more inclined t o applaud their seriousness: they had
a feeling for momentous events. It was a time when the most
singular pleasures were called upon to pronounce a discourse
of truth concerning themselves, a discourse which had to
model itself after that which spoke, not of sin and salvation,
but of bodies and life processes-the discourse of science. It
was enough to make one’s voice tremble, for an improbable
thing was then taking shape: a confessional science, a science
which relied on a many-sided extortion, and took for its
object what was unmentionable but admitted to nonetheless.
The scientific discourse was scandalized, or in any case re
pelled, w�en it had to take charge of this whole discourse
from below. It was also faced with a theoretical and method
ological paradox: the long discussions concerning the possi
bility of constituting a science of the subject, the validity of
introspection, lived experience as evidence, or the presence
of consciousness to itself were responses to this problem that
is inherent in the functioning of truth in our society: can one
articulate the production of truth according to the old j uridi
co-religious model of confession, and the extortion of confi
dential evidence according to the rules of scientific discourse?
Those who believe that sex was more rigorously elided in the
nineteenth century than ever before, through a formidable
mechanism of blockage and a deficiency of discourse, can say
what they please. There was no deficiency, but rather an
excess, a redoubling, too much rather than not enough dis
course, in any case an interference between two modes of

Scientia Sexualis 65
production of truth: procedures of confession, and scientific
discursivity.
And instead of adding up the errors, naivetes, and moral
isms that plagued the nineteenth-century discourse of truth
concerning sex, we would do better to locate the procedures
by which that will to knowledge regarding sex, which cha
racterizes the modern Occident, caused the rituals of confes
sion to function within the norms of scientific regularity: how
did this immense and traditional extortion of the sexual con
fession come to be constituted in scientific terms?
1 . Through a clinical codification of the inducement to
speak. Combining confession with examination, the personal
history with the deployment of a set of decipherable signs
and symptoms; the interrogation, the exacting questionnaire,
and hypnosis, with the recollection of memories and free
association: all were ways of reinscribing the procedure of
confession in a field of scientifically acceptable observations.
2. Through the postulate of a general and diffuse causality.
Having to tell everything, being able to pose questions about
everything, found their justification in the principle that en
dowed sex with an inexhaustible and polymorphous causal
power. The most discrete event in one’s sexual behavior
whether an accident or a deviation, a deficit or an excess
was deemed capable of entailing the most varied conse
quences throughout one’s existence; there was scarcely a
malady or physical disturbance to which the nineteenth cen
tury did not impute at least some degree of sexual etiology.
From the bad habits of children to the phthises of adults, the
apoplexies of old people, nervous maladies, and the degener
ations of the race, the medicine of that era wove an entire
network of sexual causality to explain them. This may well
appear fantastic to us, but the principle of sex as a “cause of
any and everything” was the theoretical underside of a con
fession that had to be thorough, meticulous, and constant,

66 The History of Sexuality
and at the same time operate within a scientific type of
practice. The limitless dangers that sex carried with it jus
tified the exhaustive character of the inquisition to which it
was subjected.
3. Through the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality.
If it was necessary to extract the truth of sex through the
technique of confession, this was not simply because it was
difficult to tell, or stricken by the taboos of decency, but
because the ways of sex were obscure; it was elusive by
nature; its energy and its mechanisms escaped observation,
and its causal power was partly clandestine. By integrating
it into the beginnings of a scientific discourse, the nineteenth
century altered the scope of the confession; it tended no
longer to be concerned solely with what the subject wished
to hide, but with what was hidden from himself, being inca
pable of coming to light except gradually and through the
labor of a confession in which the questioner and the ques
tioned each had a part to play. The principle of a latency
essential to sexuality made it possible to link the forcing of
a difficult confession to a scientific practice. It had to be
exacted, by force, since it involved something that tried to
stay hidden.
4. Through the method of interpretation. If one had to
confess, this was not merely because the person to whom one
confessed had the power to forgive, console, and direct, but
because the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass
through this relationship if it was to be scientifically vali
dated. The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by
confessing, would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted
in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the
one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one
who assimilated and recorded it. It was the latter’s function
to verify this obscure truth: the revelation of confession had
to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said. The one

Scientia Sexualis 67
who listened was not simply the forgiving master, the judge
who condemned or acquitted; he was the master of truth. His
was a hermaneutic function. With regard to the confession,
his power was not only to demand it before it was made, or
decide what was to follow after it, but also to constitute a
discourse of truth on the basis of its decipherment. By no
longer making the confession a test, but rather a sign, and by
making sexuality something to be interpreted, the nineteenth
century gave itself the possibility of causing the procedures
of confession to operate within the regular formation of a
scientific discourse.
5. Through the medicalization of the effects of confession.
The obtaining of the confession and its effects were recodified
as therapeutic operations. Which meant first of all that the
sexual domain was no longer accounted for simply by the
notions of error or sin, excess or transgression, but was
placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological
(which, for that matter, were the transposition of the former
categories); a characteristic sexual morbidity was defined for
the first time; sex appeared as an extremely unstable patho
logical field: a surface of repercussion for other ailments, but
also the focus of a specific nosography, that of instincts,
tendencies, images, pleasure, and conduct. This implied fur
thermore that sex would derive its meaning and its necessity
from medical interventions: it would be required by the doc
tor, necessary for diagnosis, and effective by nature in the
cure. Spoken in time, to the proper party, and by the person
who was both the bearer of it and the one responsible for it,
the truth healed.
Let us consider things in broad historical perspective:
breaking with the traditions of the ars erotica, our society has
equipped itself with
.
a scientia sex ua lis. To be more precise,
it has pursued the task of producing true discourses concern
ing sex, and this by adapting-not without difficulty-the

68 The History of Sexuality
ancient procedure of confession to the rules of scientific dis
course. Paradoxically, the scientia sexualis that emerged in
the nineteenth century kept as its nucleus the singular ritual
of obligatory and exhaustive confession, which in the Chris
tian West was the first technique for producing the truth of
sex. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this rite gradually
detached itself from the sacrament of penance, and via the
guidance of souls and the direction of conscience-the ars
artium-emigrated toward pedagogy, relationships between
adults and children, family relations, medicine, and psychia
try. In any case, nearly one hundred and fifty years have gone
into the making of a complex machinery for producing true
discourses on sex: a deployment that spans a wide segment
of history in that it connects the ancient inj unction of confes
sion to clinical listening methods. It is this deployment that
enables something called “sexuality” to embody the truth of
sex and its pleasures.
“Sexuality” : the correlative of that slowly developed dis
cursive practice which constitutes the scien tia sexualis. The
essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of
a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or
of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to
the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce
its truth. Situated at the point of intersection of a technique
of confession and a scientific discursivity, where certain
major mechanisms had to be found for adapting them to one
another (the listening technique, the postulate of causality,
the principle of latency, the rule of interpretation, the imper
ative of medicalization), sexuality was defined as being “by
. nature” : a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and
hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interven
tions; a field of meanings to decipher; the site of processes
concealed by specific mechanisms; a focus of indefinite causal
relations; and an obscure speech (parole) that had to be
ferreted out and listened to. The “economy” of discourses
their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation,

Scien tia Sexuahs 69
the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie
them and which they transmit-this, and not a system of
representations, is what determines the essential features of
what they have to say. The history of sexuality-that is, the
history of what functioned in the nineteenth century as a
specific field of truth-must first be written from the view
point of a history of discourses.
Let us put forward a general working hypothesis. The
society that emerged in the nineteenth century-bourgeois,
capitalist, or industrial society, call it what you will-did not
confront sex with a fundamental refusal of recognition. On
the contrary, it put into operation an entire machinery for
producing true discourses concerning it. Not only did it
speak of sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to
formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of
harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this produc
tion of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not
only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of
knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great
suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades
our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point
of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the
fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general
signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear
that never ends. And so, in this “question” of sex (in both
senses: as interrogation and problematization, and as the
need for confession and integration into a field of rationality),
two processes emerge, the one always conditioning the other:
we demand that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret
and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for ourselves
the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and
deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth,
or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about our
selves which we think we possess in our immediate con
sciousness. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us
about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part

70 The History of Sexuality
of it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved,
over several centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowl
edge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him,
determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be
ignorant of himself. As unlikely as this may seem, it should
not surprise us when we think of the long history of the
Christian and juridical confession, of the shifts and transfor
mations this form of knowledge-power, so important in the
West, has undergone: the project of a science of the subject
has gravitated, in ever narrowing circles, around the question
of sex. Causality in the subject, the unconscious of the sub
ject, the truth of the subject in the other who knows, the
knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an
opportunity to deploy itself in the discourse of sex. Not,
however, by reason of some natural property inherent in sex
itself, but by virtue of the tactics of power immanent in this
discourse.
Scien tia sexualis versus ars erotica, no doubt. But it should
be noted that the ars erotica did not disappear altogether
from Western civilization; nor has it always been absent from
the movement by which one sought to produce a science of
sexuality. In the Christian confession, but especially in the
direction and examination of conscience, in the search for
spiritual union and the love of God, there was a whole series
of methods that had much in common with an erotic art:
guidance by the master along a path of initiation, the inten
sification of experiences extending down to their physical
components, the optimization of effects by the discourse that
accompanied them. The phenomena of possession and ec
stasy, which were quite frequent in the Catholicism of the
Counter Reformation, were undoubtedly effects that had got
outside the control of the erotic technique immanent in this
subtle science of the flesh. And we must ask whether, since
the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis-under the
guise of its decent positivism-has not functioned, at least to

Scien tia Sexualis 7 1
a certain extent, as an ars erotica. Perhaps this production
of truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model,
multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic
pleasures. It is often said that we have been incapable of
imagining any new pleasures. We have at least invented a
different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure,
the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and expos
ing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating
and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring
it out in the open-the specific pleasure of the true discourse
on pleasure.
The most important elements of an erotic art linked to our
knowledge about sexuality are not to be sought in the ideal,
promised to us by medicine, of a healthy sexuality, nor in the
humanist dream of a complete and flourishing sexuality, and
certainly not in the lyricism of orgasm and the good feelings
of bio-energy (these are but aspects of its normalizing utiliza
tion), but in this multiplication and intensification of pleas
ures connected to the production of the truth about sex. The
learned volumes, written and read; the consultations and
examinations; the anguish of answering questions and the
delights of having one’s words interpreted; all the stories told
to oneself and to others, so much curiosity, so many confi
dences offered in the face of scandal, sustained-but not
without trembling a little-by the obligation of truth; the
profusion of secret fantasies and the dearly paid right to
whisper them to whoever is able to hear them; in short, the
formidable “pleasure of analysis” (in the widest sense of the
latter term) which the West has cleverly been fostering for
several centuries: all this constitutes something like the er
rant fragments of an erotic art that is secretly transmitted by
confession and the science of sex. Must we conclude that our
scientia sexualis is but an extraordinarily subtle form of ars
erotica, and that it is the Western, sublimated version of that
seemingly lost tradition? Or must we suppose that all these
pleasures are only the by-products of a sexual science, a

72 The History of Sexuality
bonus that compensates for its many stresses and strains?
In any case, the hypothesis of a power of repression ex
erted by our society on sex for economic reasons appears to
me quite inadequate if we are to explain this whole series of
reinforcements and intensifications that our preliminary in
quiry has discovered: a proliferation of discourses, carefully
tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the
sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not
only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of
forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure;
the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent
establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an
economy of manifold pleasures. We are dealing not nearly so
much with a negative mechanism of exclusion as with the
operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowl
edges, pleasures, and powers. At issue is not a movement
bent on pushing rude sex back into some obscure and inac
cessible region;but on the contrary, a process that spreads
it over the surface of things and bodies, arouses it, draws it
out and bids it speak, implants it in reality and enjoins it to
tell the truth: an entire glittering sexual array, reflected in a
myriad of discourses, the obstination of powers, and the
interplay of knowledge and pleasure.
All this is an illusion, it will be said, a hasty impression
behind which a more discerning gaze will surely discover the
same great machinery of repression. Beyond these few phos
phorescences, are we not sure to find once more the somber
law that always says no? The answer will have to come out
of a historical inquiry. An inquiry concerning the manner in
which a knowledge of sex has been forming over the last
three centuries; the manner in which the discourses that take
it as their obj ect have multiplied, and the reasons for which
we have come to attach a nearly fabulous price to the truth
they claimed to produce. Perhaps these historical analyses
will end by dissipating what this cursory survey seems to
suggest. But the postulate I started out with, and would like

Scientia Sexualis 7 3
to hold to as long as possible, is that these deployments of
power and knowledge, of truth and pleasures, so unlike those
of repression, are not necessarily secondary and derivative;
and further, that repression is not in any case fundamental
and overriding. We need to take these mechanisms seriously,
therefore, and reverse the direction of our analysis: rather
than assuming a generally acknowledged repression, and an
ignorance measured against what we are supposed to know,
we must begin with these positive mechanisms, insofar as
they produce knowledge, multiply discourse, induce pleas
ure, and generate power; we must investigate the conditions
of their emergence and operation, and try to discover how
the related facts of interdiction or concealment are dis
tributed with respect to them. In short, we must define the
strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowl
edge. As far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to
constitute the “political economy” of a will to knowledge.

PART F OU R
The Deploy ment
of Sexuality

The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe into history
the fable of Les Bijoux indiscrets.
Among its many emblems, our society wears that of the
talking sex. The sex which one c�tches unawares and ques
tions, and which, restrained and loquacious at the same time,
endlessly replies. One day a certain mechanism, which was
so elfin-like that it could make itself invisible, captured this
sex and, in a game that combined pleasure with compulsion,
and consent with inquisition, made it tell the truth about
itself and others as well. For many years, we have all been
living in the realm of Prince Mangogul: under the spell of an
immense curiosity about sex, bent on questioning it, with an
insatiable desire to hear it speak and be spoken about, quick
to invent all sorts of magical rings that might force it to
abandon its discretion. As if it were essential for us to be able
to draw from that little piece of ourselves not only pleasure
but knowledge, and a whole subtle interchange from one to
the other: a knowledge of pleasure, a pleasu’re that comes of
knowing pleasure, a knowledge-pleasure; and as if that fan
tastic animal we accommodate had itself such finely tuned
ears, such searching eyes, so gifted a tongue and mind, as to
know much and be quite willing to tell it, provided we em
ployed a little skill in urging it to speak. Between each of us
and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for
truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth
is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since
sex is what holds it in darkness. But is sex hidden from us,
concealed by a new sense of decency, kept under a bushel by
the grim necessities of bourgeois society? On the contrary, it
shines forth; it is incandescent. Several centuries ago, it was
77

78 The History of Sexuality
placed at the center of a formidable petition to know. A
double petition, in that we are compelled to know how things
are with it, while it is suspected of knowing how things are
with us.
In the space of a few centuries, a certain inclination has
led us to direct the question of what we are, to sex. Not so
much to sex as representing nature, but to sex as history, as
signification and discourse. We have placed ourselves under
the sign of sex, but in the form of a Logic of Sex, rather than
a Physics. _ We must make no mistake here: with the great
series of binary oppositions (body/soul, flesh/spirit, instinct!
reason, drives/consciousness) that seemed to refer sex to a
pure mechanics devoid of reason, the West has managed not
only, or not so much, to annex sex to a field of rationality,
which would not be_ all that remarkable an achievement,
seeing how accustomed we are to such “conquests” since the
.Greeks, but to bring us almost entirely-our bodies, our
“minds, our individuality, our history-under the sway of a
�logic of concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question
of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves
as our master key. It has been several decades since geneti
cists ceased to conceive of life as an organization strangely
equipped with an additional capacity to reproduce itself; they
see in the reproductive mechanism that very element which
introduces the biological dimension: the matrix not only of
the Ii ving, but of life itself. But it was centuries ago that
countless theoreticians and practitioners of the flesh-whose
approach was hardly “scientific,” it is true-made man the
offspring of an imperious and intelligible sex. Sex, the expla
nation for everything.
It is pointless to �sk: Why then is sex so secret? What is
this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only
recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question
it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its
repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowa
days, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and

The Deployment of Sexuality 79
a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if
you can uncover it. Acheronto movebo: an age-old decision.
Ye wise men, high ly, deeply learned,
Who think it out and know,
How, when, and where do all things pair?
Why do they kiss and love?
Ye men of lofty wisdom, say
What happened to me then;
Search out and tell me where, how, when
And why it happened thus. I
It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this
inj unction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the
truth in sex?
In Diderot’s tale, the good genie Cucufa discovers at the
bottom of his pocket, in the midst of worthless things
consecrated seeds, little pagodas made of lead, and moldy
sugar-coated pills-the tiny silver ring whose stone, when
turned, makes the sexes one encounters speak. He gives it to
the curious sultan. Our problem is to know what marvelous
ring confers a similar power on us, and on which master’s
finger it has been placed; what game of power it makes
possible or presupposes, and how it is that each one of us has
become a sort of attentive and imprudent sultan with respect
to his own sex and that of others. It is this magical ring, this
jewel which is so indiscreet when it comes to making others
speak, but so ineloquent concerning one’s own mechanism,
that we need to render loquacious in its turn; it is what we
have to talk about. We must write the history of this will to
truth, this petition to know that for so many centuries has
kept us enthralled by sex: the history of a stubborn and
relentless effort. What is it that we demand of sex, beyond
its possible pleasures, that makes us so persistent? What is
this patience or eagerness to constitute it as the secret, the
‘Gottfried August BUrger, cited by Arthur Schopenhauer in The Metaphysics of the
Love of the Sexes. From The Will to Live: Selected Writings of A rthur Schopenhauer
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), p.69.

80 The History of Sexuality
omnipotent cause, the hidden meaning, the unremitting fear?
And why was the task of discovering this difficult truth
finally turned into an invitation to eliminate taboos and
break free of what binds us? Was the labor then so arduous
that it had to be enchanted by this promise? Or had this
knowledge become so costly-in political, economic, and
ethical terms-that in order to subject everyone to its rule,
it was necessary to assure them, paradoxically, that their
liberation was at ‘stake?
In order to situate the investigations that will follow, let
me put forward some general propositions concerning the
objective, the method, the domain to be covered, and the
periodizations that one can accept in a provisory way.

I
Objective
Why these investigations? I am well aware that an uncer
tainty runs through the sketches I have drawn thus far, one
that threatens to invalidate the more detailed inquiries that
I have proj ected. I have repeatedly stressed that the history
of the last centuries in Western societies did not manifest the
movement of a power that was essentially repressive. I based
my argument on the disqualification of that notion while
feigning ignorance of the fact that a critique has been
mounted from another quarter and doubtless in a more radi
cal fashion: a critique conducted at the level of the theory of
desire. In point of fact, the assertion that sex is not “re
pressed” is not altogether new. Psychoanalysts have been
saying the same thing for some time. They have challenged
the simple little machinery that comes to mind when one
speaks of repression; the idea of a rebellious energy that must
be throttled has appeared to them inadequate for deciphering
the manner in which power and desire are joined to one
another; they consider them to be linked in a more complex
and primary way than through the interplay of a primitive,
natural, and living energy welling up from below, and a
higher order seeking to stand in its way; thus one should not
think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the
law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it
is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is
already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation
8 1

82 The History of Sexuality
for a repression exerted after the event; but vanity as well,
to go questing after a desire that is beyond the reach of
power.
But, in an obstinately confused way, I sometimes spoke,
as though I were dealing with equivalent notions, of repres
sion, and sometimes of law, of prohibition or censorship.
Through stubbornness or neglect, I failed to consider every
thing that can distinguish their theoretical implications. And
I grant that one might j ustifiably say to me: By constantly
referring to positive technologies of power, you are playing
a double game where you hope to win on all counts; you
confuse your adversaries by appearing to take the weaker
position, and, discussing repression alone, you would have us
believe, wrongly, that you have rid yourself of the problem
of law; and yet you keep the essential practical consequence
of the principle of power-as-Iaw, namely the fact that there
is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present,
constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter
it with. As to the idea of a power-repression, you have re
tained its most fragile theoretical element, and this in order
to criticize it; you have retained the most sterilizing political
consequence of the idea of power-law, but only in order to
preserve it for your own use.
The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less
toward a “theory” of power than toward an “analytics” of
power: that is, toward a definition of the specific domain
formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of
the instruments that will make possible its analysis. How
ever, it seems to me that this analytics can be constituted
only if it frees itself completely from a certain representation
of power that I would term-it will be seen later why
“juridico-discursive. ” It is this conception that governs both
the thematics of repression and the theory of the law as
constitutive of desire. In other words, what distinguishes the
analysis made in terms of the repression of instincts from
that made in terms of the law of desire is clearly the way in

The Deployment of Sexuality 83
which they each conceive of the nature and dynamics of the
drives, not the way in which they conceive of power. They
both rely on a common representation of power which, de
pending on the use made of it and the position it is accorded
with respect to desire, leads to two contrary results: either to
the promise of a “liberation,” if power is seen as having only
an external hold on desire, or, if it is constitutive of desire
itself, to the affirmation: you are always-already trapped.
Moreover, one must not imagine that this representation is
peculiar to those who are concerned with the problem of the
relations of power with sex. In fact it is much more general;
one frequently encounters it in political analyses of power,
and it is deeply rooted in the history of the West.
These are some of its principal features:
– The negative relation. It never establishes any connec
tion between power and sex that is not negative: rejection,
exclusion, refusal, blockage, concealment. or mask. Where
sex and pleasure are concerned, power can “do” nothing but
say no to them; what it produces, if anything, is absences and
gaps; it overlooks elements, introduces discontinuities, sepa
rates what is joined, and marks off boundaries. Its effects take
the general form of limit and lack.
– The insistence of the rule. Power is essentially what
dictates its law to sex. Which means first of all that sex is
placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted
and forbidden. Secondly, power prescribes an “order” for sex
that operates at the same time as a form of intelligibility: sex
is to be deciphered on the basis of its relation to the law. And
finally, power acts by laying ‘ down the rule: power’s hold on
sex is maintained through language, or rather through the
act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is
articulated, a rule of law. It speaks, and that is the rule. The
pure form of power resides in the function of the legislator;
and its mode of action with regard to sex is of a j uridico
discursive character.

84 The History of Sexuality
– The cycle of prohibition: thou shalt not go near, thou
shalt not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not
experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not
show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in dark
ness and secrecy. To deal with sex, power employs nothing
more than a law of prohibition. Its objective: that sex re
nounce itself. Its instrument: the threat of a punishment that
is nothing other than the suppression of sex. Renounce your
self or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not appear
if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be
maintained only at the cost of your nullification. Power con
strains sex only through a taboo that plays on the alternative
between two nonexistences.
– The logic of censorship. This interdiction is thought to
take three forms: affirming that such a thing is not permitted,
preventing it from being said, denying that it exists. Forms
that are difficult to reconcile. But it is here that one imagines
a sort of logical sequence that characterizes censorship
mechanisms : it links the inexistent, the illicit, and the inex
pressible in such a way that each is at the same time the
principle and the effect of the others: one must not talk about
what is forbidden until it is annulled in reality; what is inex
istent has no right to show itself, even in the order of speech
where its inexistence is declared; and that which one must
keep silent about is banished from reality as the thing that
is tabooed above all else. The logic of power exerted on sex
is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as
an inj unction of nonexistence, nonmanifestation, and silence.
– The uniformity of the apparatus. Power over sex is exer
cised in the same way at all levels. From top to bottom, in
its over-all decisions . and its capillary interventions alike,
whatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts
in a uniform and comprehensive manner; it operates accord
ing to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of
law, taboo, and censorship: from state to family, from prince
to father, from the tribunal to the small change of everyday

The Deployment of Sexuality 8 5
punishments, from the agencies of social domination to the
structures that constitute the subj ect himself, one finds a
general form of power, varying in scale alone. This form is
the law of transgression and punishment, with its interplay
of licit and illicit. Whether one attributes to it the form of the
prince who f?rmulates rights, of the father who forbids, of
the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states
the law, in any case one schematizes power in a j uridical
form, and one defines its effects as obedience. Confronted by
a power that is law, the subject who is constituted as subject
-who is “subj ected”-is he who obeys. To the formal
homogeneity of power in these various instances corresponds
the general form of submission in the one who is constrained
by it-whether the individual in question is the subject oppo
site the monarch, the citizen opposite the state, the child
opposite the parent, or the disciple opposite the master. A
legislative power on one side, and an obedient subject on the
other.
Underlying both the general theme that power represses
sex and the idea that the law constitutes desire, one encoun
ters the same putative mechanics of power. It is defined in
a strangely restrictive way, in that, to begin with, this power
is poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in
the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly
doomed always to repeat itself. Further, it is a power that
only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say
no; in no condition to produce, capable only of posting limits,
it is basically anti-energy. This is the paradox of its effective
ness: it is incapable of doing anything, except to render what
it dominates incapable of doing anything either, except for
what this power allows it to do. And finally, it is a power
whose model is essentially j uridical, centered on nothing
more than the statement of the law and the operation of
taboos. All the modes of domination, submission, and subju
gation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience.

86 The History of Sexuality
Why is this j uridical notion of power, involving as it does
the neglect of everything that makes for its productive effec
tiveness, its strategic resourcefulness, its positivity, so readily
accepted? In a society such as ours, where the devices of
power are so numerous, its rituals so visible, and its instru
ments ultimately so reliable, in this society that has been
more imaginative, probably, than any other in creating devi
ous and supple mechanisms of power, what explains this
tendency not to recognize the latter except in the negative
and emaciated form of prohibition? Why are the deploy
ments of power reduced simply to the procedure of the law
of interdiction?
Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self
evident: power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a
substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its
aj)ility to hide its own mechanisms. Would power be ac
cepted if it were entirely cynical? For it, secrecy is not in the
nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. Not
only because power imposes secrecy on those whom it domi
nates, but because it is perhaps just as indispensable to the
latter: would they accept it if they did not see it as a mere
limit placed on their desire, leaving a measure of freedom
however slight-intact? Power as a pure limit set on freedom
is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability.
There is, perhaps, a historical reason for this. The great
institutions of power that developed in the Middle Ages
monarchy, the state with its apparatus-rose up on the basis
of a multiplicity of prior powers, and to a certain extent in
opposition to them: dense, entangled, conflicting powers,
powers tied to the direct or indirect dominion over the land,
to the possession of arms, to serfdom, to bonds of suzerainty
and vassalage. If these institutions were able to implant
themselves, if, by profiting from a whole series of tactical
alliances, they were able to gain acceptance, this was because
they presented themselves as agencies of regulation, arbitra
tion, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the

The Deployment of Sexuality 87
midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would
temper them and distribute them according to boundaries
and a. fixed hierarchy. Faced with a myriad of clashing
forces, these great forms of power functioned as a principle
of right that transcended all the heterogeneous claims, mani
festing the triple distinction of forming a unitary regime, of
identifying its will with the law, and of acting through mech
anisms of interdiction and sanction. The slogan of this re
gime, pax et justitia, in keeping with the function it laid claim
to, established peace as the prohibition of feudal or private
wars, and justice as a way of suspending the private settling
of lawsuits. Doubtless there was more to this development of
great monarchic institutions than a pure and simple j uridical
edifice. But such was the language of power, the representa
tion it gave of itself, and the entire theory of public law that
was constructed in the Middle Ages, or reconstructed from
Roman law, bears witness to the fact. Law was not simply
a weapon skillfully wielded by monarchs; it was the mo
narchic system’s mode of manifestation and the form of its
acceptability. In Western societies since the Middle Ages, the
exercise of power has always been formulated in terms of
law.
A tradition dating back to the eighteenth or nineteenth
century has accustomed us to place absolute monarchic
power on the side of the unlawful: arbitrariness, abuse, ca
price, willfulness, privileges and exceptions, the traditional
continuance of accomplished facts. But this is to overlook a
fundamental historical trait of Western monarchies: they
were constructed as systems of law, they expressed them
selves through theories of law, and they made their mech
anisms of power work in the form of law. The old reproach
that Boulainvilliers directed at the French monarchy-that
it used the law and jurists to do away with rights and to bring
down the aristocracy-was basically warranted by the facts.
Through the development of the monarchy and its institu
tions this juridico-political dimension was established. It is

8 8 The History o f Sexuality
by no means adequate to describe the manner in which
power was and is exercised, but it is the code according to
which power presents itself and prescribes that we conceive
of it. The history of the monarchy went hand in hand with
the covering up of the facts and procedures of power by
j uridico-political discourse.
Yet, despite the efforts that were made to disengage the
juridical sphere from the monarchic institution and to free
the political from the juridical, the representation of power
remained caught within this system. Consider the two fol
lowing examples. Criticism of the eighteenth-century mo
narchic institution in France was not directed against the
juridico-monarchic sphere as such, but was made on behalf
of a pure and rigorous juridical system to which all the
mechanisms of power could conform, with no excesses or
irregularities, as opposed to a monarchy which, notwith
standing its own assertions, continuously overstepped the
legal framework and set itself above the laws. Political criti
cism availed itself, therefore, of all the juridical thinking that
had accompanied the development of the monarchy, in order
to condemn the latter; but it did not challenge the principle
which held that law had to be the very form of power, and
that power always had to be exercised in the form of law.
Another type of criticism of political institutions appeared in
the nineteenth century, a much more radical criticism in that
it was concerned to show not only that real power escaped
the rules of jurisprudence, but that the legal system itself was
merely a way of exerting violence, of appropriating that
violence for the benefit of the few, and of exploiting the
dissymmetries and injustices of domination under cover of
general law. But this critique of law is still carried out on the
assumption that, ideally and by nature, power must be exer
cised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness.
At bottom, despite the differences in epochs 3.nd objec
tives, the representation of power has remained under the
spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still

The Deployment of Sexuality 8 9
have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance
that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and
violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially
the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned
insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer
a sovereign individual). To conceive of power on the basis of
these problems is to conceive of it in terms
·
of a historical
form that is characteristic of our societies: the j uridical mon
archy. Characteristic yet transitory. For while many of its
forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been
penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are prob
ably irreducible to the representation of law. As we shall see,
these power mechanisms are, at least in part, those that,
beginning in the eighteenth century, took charge of men’s
existence, men as living bodies. And if it is true that the
j uridical system was useful for representing, albeit in a
nonexhaustive way, a power that was centered primarily
around deduction (prelevement) and death, it is utterly in
congruous with the new methods of power whose operation
is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by
normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods
that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond
the state and its apparatus. We have been engaged for centu
ries in a type of society in which the j uridical is increasingly
incapable of coding power, of serving as its system of repre
sentation. Our historical gradient carries us further and fur
ther away from a reign of law that had already begun to
recede into the past at a time when the French Revolution
and the accompanying age of constitutions and codes seemed
to destine it for a future that was at hand.
It is this j uridical representation that is still at work in
recent analyses concerning the relationships of power to sex.
But the problem is not to know whether desire is alien to
power, whether it is prior to the law as is often thought to
be the case, when it is not rather the law that is perceived as
constituting it. This question is beside the point. Whether

90 The History of Sexuality
desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive
of it in relation to a power that is always j uridical and discur
sive, a power that has its central point in the enunciation of
the law. One remains attached to a certain image of power
law, of power-sovereignty, which was traced out by the
theoreticians of right and the monarchic institution. It is this
image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical
privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power
within the concrete and historical framework of its opera
tion. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer
takes law as a model and a code.
This history of sexuality, or rather this series of studies
concerning the historical relationships of power and the dis
course on sex, is, I realize, a circular project in the sense that
it involves two endeavors that refer back to one another. We
shall try to rid ourselves of a j uridical and negative represen
tation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law,
prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty. But how then do we
analyze what has occurred in recent history with regard to
this thing-seemingly one of the most forbidden areas of our
lives and bodies-that is sex? How, if not by way of prohibi
tion and blockage, does power gain access to it? Through
which mechanisms, or tactics, or devices? But let us assume
in turn that a somewhat careful scrutiny will show that
power in modern societies has not in fact governed sexuality
through law and sovereignty; let us suppose that historical
analysis has revealed the presence of a veritable “technol
ogy” of sex, one that is much more complex and above all
much more positive than the mere effect of a “defense” could
be; this being the case, does this example-which can only
be considered a privileged one, since power seemed in this
instance, more than anywhere else, to function as prohibition
-not compel one to discover principles for analyzing power
which do not derive from the system of right and the form
of law? Hence it is a question of forming a different grid of
historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 1
power; and, at the same time, of advancing little by little
toward a different conception of power through a closer
examination of an entire historical material. We must at the
same time conceive of sex without the law, and power with
out the king.

2
Method
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowl
edge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in
terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to a
number of misunderstandings-misunderstandings with re
spect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not
mean “Power” as a group of institutions and mechanisms
that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state.
By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subj ugation
which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule.
Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domi
nation exerted by one group over another, a system whose
effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire
social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not
assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law,
or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset;
rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It
seems to me that power must be understood in the first
instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the
sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own
organization; as the process which, through ceaseless strug
gles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses
them; as the support which these force relations find in one
another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the con
trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them
from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they
92

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 3
take effect, whose general design or institutional crystalliza
tion is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation
of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power’s condi
tion of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits
one to understand its exercise, even in its more “peripheral”
effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mech
anisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not
be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a
unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and de
scendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of
force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly
engender states of power, but the latter are always local and
unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the
privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible
unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the
next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one
point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it em
braces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
And “Power,” insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert,
and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that
emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that
rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their move
ment. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not
an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain
strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib
utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that
politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to
maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we
should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force rela
tions can be coded-in part but never totally-either in the
form of “war,” or in the form of “politics”; this would imply
two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch
into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogene
ous, unstable, and tense force relations.

94 The History of Sexuality
Continuing this line of discussion, we can advance a cer
tain number of propositions:
-Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared,
something that one holds on to or allows to slip away;
power is exercised from innumerable points, in the inter
play of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.
-Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with
respect to other types of relationships (economic proc
esses, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are
immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of
the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which
occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal
conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are
not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of
prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly pro
ductive role, wherever they come into play.
-Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and
all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at
the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix
-no such duality extending from the top down and react
ing on more and more limited groups to the very depths
of the social body. One must suppose rather that the mani
fold relationships of force that take shape and come into
play in the machinery of production, in families, limited
groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging
effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a
whole. These then form a general line of force that trav
erses the local oppositions and links them together; to be
sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments,
homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences
of the force relations. Major dominations are the hege
monic effects that are .sustained by all these confronta
tions.
-Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If
in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the

The Deployment of Sexuality 9 5
effect of another instance that “explains” them, but rather
because they are imbued, through and through, with cal
culation: there is no power that is exercised without a
series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that
it results from the choice or decision of an individual
subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides
over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor
the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those
who make the most important economic decisions direct
the entire network of power that functions in a society
(and makes it function); the rationality of power is charac
terized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the re
stricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism
of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one an
other, attracting and propagating one another, but finding
their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by
forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly
clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case
that no one is there to have invented them, and few who
can be said to have formulated them: an implicit charac
teristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strate
gies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “in
ventors” or decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy.
-Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or
rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position
of exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that
one is always “inside” power, there is no “escaping” it,
there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because
one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being
the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always
emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the
strictly relational character of power relationships. Their
existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance:
these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle
in power relations. These points of resistance are present
everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single

96 The History of Sexuality
locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all
rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there
is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case:
resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others
that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram
pant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise,
interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist
in the strategic field of power relations. But this does not
mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is
in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat.
Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous prin
ciples; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of
necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of
power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible
opposite. Hence they too are distributed in irregular fash
ion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread
over time and space at varying densities, at times mobiliz
ing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming
certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain
types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures,
massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But
more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory
points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society- that
shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings,
furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up
and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in
them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of
power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes
through apparatuses and institutions, without being ex
actly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of
resistance traverses social stratifications and individual
unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of
these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible,
somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on
the institutional integration of power relationships.

The Deployment of Sexuality 97
It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to
analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape
from the system of Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated
political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that
Machiavelli was among the few-and this no doubt was the
scandal of his “cynicism”-who conceived the power of the
Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go
one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and
decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that
is immanent in force relationships.
To return to sex and the discourses of truth that have
taken charge of it, the question that we must address, then,
is not: Given a specific state structure, how and why is it that
power needs to establish a knowledge of sex? Neither is the
question: What over-all domination was served by the con
cern, evidenced since the eighteenth century, to produce true
discourses on sex? Nor is it: What law presided over both the
regularity of sexual behavior and the conformity of what was
said about it? It is rather: In a specific type’ of discourse on
sex, in a specific form of extortion of truth, appearing histori
cally and in specific places (around the child’s body, apropos
of women’s sex, in connection with practices restricting
births, and so on), what were the most immediate, the most
local power relations at work? How did they make possible
these kinds of discourses, and conversely, how were these
discourses used to support power relations? How was the
action of these power relations modified by their very exer
cise, entailing a strengthening of some terms and a weaken
ing of others, with effects of resistance and counterinvest
ments, so that there has never existed one type of stable
subjugation, given once and for all? How were these power
relations linked to one another according to the logic of a
great strategy, which in retrospect takes on the aspect of a
unitary and voluntarist politics of sex? In general terms:
rather than referring all the infinitesimal violences that are
exerted on sex, all the anxious gazes that are directed at it,

98 The History of Sexuality
and all the hiding places whose discovery is made into an
impossible task, to the unique form of a great Power, we
must immerse the expanding production of discourses on sex
in the field of multiple and mobile power relations.
Which leads us to advance, in a preliminary way, four
rules to follow. But these are not intended as methodological
imperatives; at most they are cautionary prescriptions.
1 . Rule of immanence
One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of
sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and
disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mech
anisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or
ideological requirements of power. If sexuality was con
stituted as an area of investigation, this was only because
relations of power had established it as a possible object; and
conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was
because techniques of knowledge and procedures of dis
course were capable of investing it. Between techniques of
knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority,
even if they have specific roles and are linked together on the
basis of their difference. We will start, therefore, from what
might be called “local centers” of power-knowledge: for ex
ample, the relations that obtain between penitents and
confessors, or the faithful and their directors of conscience.
Here, guided by the theme of the “flesh” that must be mas
tered, different forms of discourse-self-examination, ques
tionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews-were the
vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of
forms of subjugation and schemas of knowledge. Similarly,
the body of the child, under surveillance, surrounded in his
cradle, his bed, or his room by an entire watch-crew of
parents, nurses, servants, educators, and doctors, all atten
tive to the least manifestations of his sex, has constituted,
particularly since the eighteenth century, another ” local cen
ter” of power-knowledge.

The Deployment of Sexuality 99
2. R u les of continual variations
We must not look for who has the power in the order of
sexuality (men, adults, parents, doctors) and who is deprived
of it (women, adolescents, children, patients); nor for who
has the right to know and who is forced to remain ignorant.
We must seek rather the pattern of the modifications which
the relationships of force imply by the very nature of their
process. The “distributions of power” and the “appropria
tions of knowledge” never represent only instantaneous
slices taken from processes involving, for example, a cumula
tive reinforcement of the strongest factor, or a reversal of
relationship, or again, a simultaneous increase of two terms.
Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distri
bution, they are “matrices of transformations. ” The nine
teenth-century grouping made up of the father, the mother,
the educator, and the doctor, around the child and his sex,
was subjected to constant modifications, continual shifts.
One of the more spectacular results of the latter was a strange
reversal: whereas to begin with the child’s sexuality had been
problematized within the relationship established between
doctor and parents (in the form of advice, or recommenda
tions to keep the child under observation, or warnings of
future dangers), ultimately it was in the relationship of the
psychiatrist to the child that the sexuality of adults them
selves was called into question.
3. Rule of double conditioning
No “local center, ” no “pattern of transformation” could
function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventu
ally enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy
could achieve comprehensive effects if did not gain support
from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as its point
of application or final outcome, but as its prop and anchor
point. There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were
dealing with two different levels (one microscopic and the

1 00 The History o f Sexuality
other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if
the one were only the enlarged projection or the miniaturiza
tion of the other); rather, one must conceive of the double
conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tac
tics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them
work. Thus the father in the family is not the “representa
tive” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not
projections of the father on a different scale. The family does
not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the
family. But the family organization, precisely to the extent
that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the
other power mechanisms, was used to support the great
“maneuvers” employed for the Malthusian control of the
birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicali
zation of sex and the psychiatrization of its non genital forms.
4. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses
What is said about sex must not be analyzed simply as the
surface of projection of these power mechanisms. Indeed, it
is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.
And for this very reason, we must conceive discourse as a
series of discontinuous segments whose tactical function is
neither uniform nor stable. To be more precise, we must not
imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted dis
course and excluded discourse, or bet)Veen the dominant
discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of
discursive elements that can come into play in various strate
gies. It is t�is distribution that we must reconstruct, with the
things said and those concealed, the enunciations required
and those forbidden, that it comprises; with the variants and
different effects-according to who is speaking, his position
of power, the institutional context in which he happens to be
situated-that it implies; and with the shifts and reutiliza
tions of identical formulas for contrary objectives that it also
includes. Discourses are not once and for all subservient to

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 0 1
power o r raised u p against it, any more than silences are. We
must make allowance for the complex and unstable process
whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect
of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of
resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Dis
course transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but
also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes
it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy
are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they
also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas
of tolerance. Consider for example the history of what was ,
once “the” great sin against nature. The extreme discretion
of the texts dealing with sodomy-that utterly confused cate
gory-and the nearly universal reticence in talking about it
made possible a twofold operation: on the one hand, there
was an extreme severity (punishment by fire was meted out
well into the eighteenth century, without there being any
substantial protest expressed before the middle of the cen
tury), and on the other hand, a tolerance that must have been
widespread (which one can deduce indirectly from the infre
quency of j udicial sentences, and which one glimpses more
directly through certain statements concerning societies of
men that were thought to exist in the army or in the courts).
There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-cen
tury psychiatry, j urisprudence, and literature of a whole se
ries of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexu
ality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism”
made possible a strong advance of social controls into this
area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation
of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its
own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be
acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same
categories by which it was medically disqualified. There is
not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it,
another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are
tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force

102 The History of Sexuality
relations; there can exist different and even contradictory
discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the con
trary, circulate without changing their form from one strat
egy to another, opposing strategy. We must not expect the
discourses on sex to tell us, above all, what strategy they
derive from, or what moral divisions they accompany, or
what ideology-dominant or dominated-they represent;
rather we must question them on the two levels of their
tactical productivity (what reciprocal effects of power and
knowledge they ensure) and their strategical integration
(what conj unction and what force relationship make their
utilization necessary in a given episode of the various con
frontations that occur).
In short, it is a question of orienting ourselves to a concep
tion of power which replaces the privilege of the law with the
viewpoint of the objective, the privilege of prohibition with
the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty
with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force
relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable,
effects of domination are produced. The strategical model,
rather than the model based on law. And this, not out of a
speculative choice or theoretical preference, but because in
fact it is one of the essential traits of Western societies that
the force relationships which for a long time had found
expression in war, in every form of warfare, gradually be
came invested in the order of political power.

3
Domain
Sexuality must not be described as a stubborn drive, by
nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which
exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control
it entirely. It appears rather as an especially dense transfer
point for relations of power: between men and women, young
people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and
students, priests and laity, an administration and a popula
tion. Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power
relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest
instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of maneuvers
and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin,
for the most varied strategies.
There is no single, all-encompassing strategy, valid for all
of society and uniformly bearing on all the manifestations of
sex. For example, the idea that there have been repeated
attempts, by various means, to reduce all of sex to its repro
ductive function, its heterosexual and adult form, and its
matrimonial legitimacy fails to take into account the mani
fold objectives aimed for, the manifold means employed in
the different sexual politics concerned with the two sexes, the
different age groups and social classes.
In a first approach to the problem, it seems that we can
distinguish four great strategic unities which, beginning in
the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of
knowledge and power centering on sex. These did not come
103

1 04 The History of Sexuality
into being fully developed at that time; but it was then that
they took on a consistency and gained an effectiveness in the
order of power, as well as a productivity in the order of
knowledge, so that it is possible to describe them in their
relative autonomy.
1 . A hysterization of women ‘s bodies: a threefold process
whereby the feminine body was analyzed-qualified and dis
qualified-as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality;
whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical prac
tices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally,
it was placed in organic communication with the social body
(whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the
family space (of which it had to be a substantial and func
tional element), and the life of children (which it produced
and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biologico-moral respon
sibility lasting through the entire period of the children’s
education): the Mother, with her negative image of “nervous
woman,” constituted the most visible form of this hysteriza
tion.
2. A pedagogization of children ‘s sex: a double assertion
that practically all children indulge or are prone to indulge
in sexual activity; and that, being unwarranted, at the same
time “natural” and “contrary to nature,” this sexual activity
posed physical and moral, individual and collective dangers;
children were defined as “preliminary” sexual beings, on this
side of sex, yet within it, astride a dangerous dividing line.
Parents, families, educators, doctors, and eventually psy
chologists would have to take charge, in a continuous way,
of this precious and perilous, dangerous and endangered
sexual potential: this pedagogization was especially evident
in the war against onanism, which in the West lasted nearly
two centuries.
3. A socialization of procreative behavior: an economic so
cialization via all the incitements and restrictions, the “so
cial” and fiscal measures brought to bear on the fertility of

The Deployment of Sexuality 105
couples; a political socialization achieved through the “re
sponsibilization” of couples with regard to the social body as
a whole (which had to be limited or on the contrary rein
vigorated), and a medical socialization carried out by at
tributing a pathogenic value-for the individual and the spe
cies-to birth-control practices.
4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure: the sexual in
stinct was isolated as a separate biological and psychical
instinct; a clinical analysis was made of all the forms of
anomalies by which it could be afflicted; it was assigned a role
of normalization or pathologization with respect to all be
havior; and finally, a corrective technology was sought for
these anomalies.
Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex,
which mounted throughout the nineteenth century-four
privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and
anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge: the hysteri
cal woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple,
and the perverse adult. Each of them corresponded to one of
these strategies which, each in its own way, invested and
made use of the sex of women, children, and men.
What was at issue in these strategies? A struggle against
sexuality? Or were they part of an effort to gain control of
it? An attempt to regulate it more effectively and mask its
more indiscreet, conspicuous, and intractable aspects? A way
of formulating only that measure of knowledge about it that
was acceptable or useful? In actual fact, what was involved,
rather, was the very production of sexuality. Sexuality must
not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries
to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge
tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given
to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult
to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimula
tion of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement

106 The History of Sexuality
to discourse, the formation of special know ledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one
another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowl
edge and power.
It will be granted no doubt that relations of sex gave rise,
in every society, to a deployment of alliance: a system of
marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of
transmission of names and possessions. This deployment of
alliance, with the mechanisms of constraint that ensured its
existence and the complex knowledge it often required, lost
some of its importance as economic processes and political
structures could no longer rely on it as an adequate instru
ment or sufficient support. Particularly from the eighteenth
century onward, Western societies created and deployed a
new apparatus which was superimposed on the previous one,
and which, without completely supplanting the latter, helped
to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment of
sexuality: like the deployment of alliance, it connects up with
the circuit of sexual partners, but in a completely different
way. The two systems can be contrasted term by term. The
deployment of alliance is built around a system of rules
defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the
illicit, whereas the deployment of sexuality operates accord
ing to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of
power. The deployment of alliance has as one of its chief
objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and main
tain the law that governs them; the deployment of sexuality,
on the other hand, engenders a continual extension of areas
and forms of control. For the first, what is pertinent is the
link between partners and definite statutes; the second is
concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of
pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however tenuous or
imperceptible these may be. Lastly, if the deployment of
alliance is firmly tied to the economy due to the role it can
play in the transmission or circulation of wealth, the deploy
ment of sexuality is linked to the economy through numer-

The Deployment of Sexuality 107
ous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the
body-the body that produces and consumes. In a word, the
deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the
social body, which it has the function of maintaining; whence
its privileged link with the law; whence too the fact that the
important phase for it is “reproduction.” The deployment of
sexuality has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself,
but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and
penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in
controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive
way. We are compelled, then, to accept three or four hypoth
eses which run counter to the one on which the theme of a
sexuality repressed by the modern forms of society is based:
sexuality is tied to recent devices of power; it has been ex
panding at an increasing rate since the seventeenth century;
the arrangement that has sustained it is not governed by
reproduction; it has been linked from the outset with an
intensification of the body-with its exploitation as an object
of knowledge and an element in relations of power.
It is not exact to say that the deployment of sexuality
supplanted the deployment of alliance. One can imagine that
one day it will have replaced it. But as things stand at pre
sent, while it does tend to cover up the deployment of alli
ance, it has neither obliterated the latter nor rendered it
useless. Moreover, historically it was around and on the basis
of the deployment of alliance that the deployment of sexual
ity was constructed. First the practice of penance, then that
of the examination of conscience and spiritual direction, was
the formative nucleus : as we have seen, l what was at issue to
begin with at the tribunal of penance was sex insofar as it was
the basis of relations; the questions posed had to do with the
commerce allowed or forbidden (adultery, extramarital rela
tions, relations with a person prohibited by blood or statute,
the legitimate or illegitimate character of the act of sexual
I Cf page 37 above.

1 0 8 The History of Sexuality
congress); then, coinciding with the new pastoral and its
application in seminaries, secondary schools, and convents,
there was a gradual progression away from the problematic
of relations toward a problematic of the “flesh,” that is, of
the body, sensation, the nature of pleasure, the more secret
forms of enjoyment or acquiescence. “Sexuality” was taking
shape, born of a technology of power that was originally
focused on alliance. Since then, it has not ceased to operate
in conjunction with a system of alliance on which it has
depended for support. The family cell, in the form in which
it came to be valued in the course of the eighteenth century,
made it possible for the main elements of the deployment of
sexuality (the feminine body, infantile precocity, the regula
tion of births, and to a lesser extent no doubt, the specifica
tion of the perverted) to develop along its two primary
dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children
axis. The family, in its contemporary form, must not be
understood as a social, economic, and political structure of
alliance that excludes or at least restrains sexuality, that
diminishes it as much as possible, preserving only its useful
functions. On the contrary, its role is to anchor sexuality and
provide it with a permanent support. It ensures the produc
tion of a sexuality that is not homogeneous with the privi
leges of alliance, while making it possible for the systems of
alliance to be imbued with a new tactic of power which they
would otherwise be impervious to. The family is the inter
change of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the
juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it
conveys the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensa
tions in the regime of alliance.
This interpenetration of the deployment of alliance and
that of sexuality in the form of the family allows us to under
stand a number of facts: that since the eighteenth century the
family has become an obligatory locus of affects, feelings,
love; that sexuality has its privileged point of development in
the family; that for this reason sexuality is “incestuous” from

The Deployment of Sexuality 109
the start. It may be that in societies where the mechanisms
of alliance predominate, prohibition of incest is a function
ally indispensable rule. But in a society such as ours, where
the family is the most active site of sexuality, and where it
is doubtless the exigencies of the latter which maintain and
prolong its existence, incest-for different reasons altogether
and in a completely different way-occupies a central place;
it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of
obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispens
able pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden
in the family insofar as the latter functions as a deployment
of alliance; but it is also a thing that is continuously de
manded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant
sexual incitement. If for more than a century the West has
displayed such a strong interest in the prohibition of incest,
if more or less by common accord it has been seen as a social
universal and one of the points through which every society
is obliged to pass on the way to becoming a culture, perhaps
this is because it was found to be a means of self-defense, not
against an incestuous desire, but against the expansion and
the implications of this deployment of sexuality which had
been set up, but which, among its its many benefits, had the
disadvantage of ignoring the laws and j uridical forms of
alliance. By asserting that all societies without exception,
and consequently our own, were subject to this rule of rules,
one guaranteed that this deployment of sexuality, whose
strange effects were beginning to be felt-among them, the
affective intensification of the family space…=…..-would not be
able to escape from the grand and ancient system of alliance.
Thus the law would be secure, even in the new mechanics of
power. For this is the paradox of a society which, from the
eighteenth century to the present, has created so many tech
nologies of power that are foreign to the concept of law: it
fears the effects and proliferations of those technologies and
attempts to recode them in forms of law. If one considers the
threshold of all culture to be prohibited incest, then sexuality

1 1 0 The History of Sexuality
has been, from the dawn of time, under the sway of law and
right. By devoting so much effort to an endless reworking of
the transcultural theory of the incest taboo, anthropology
has proved worthy of the whole modern deployment of sexu
ality and the theoretical discourses it generates.
What has taken place since the seventeenth century can be
interpreted in the following manner: the deployment of
sexuality which first developed on the fringes of familial
institutions (in the direction of conscience and pedagogy, for
example) gradually became focused on the family: the alien,
irreducible, and even perilous effects it held in store for the
deployment of alliance (an awareness of this danger was
evidenced in the criticism often directed at the indiscretion
of the directors, and in the entire controversy, which oc
curred somewhat later, over the private or public, institu
tional or familial education of children2) were absorbed by
the family, a family that was reorganized, restricted no
doubt, and in any case intensified in comparison with the
functions it formerly exercised in the deployment of alliance.
In the family, parents and relatives became the chief agents
of a deployment of sexuality which drew its outside support
from doctors, educators, and later psychiatrists, and which
began by competing with the relations of alliance but soon
“psychologized” or “psychiatrized” the latter. Then these
new personages made their appearance: the nervous woman,
the frigid wife, the indifferent mother-or worse, the mother
beset by murderous obsessions-the impotent, sadistic,
perverse husband, the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the
precocious and already exhausted child, and the young
homosexual who rejects marriage or neglects his wife. These
were the combined figures of an alliance gone bad and an
abnormal sexuality; they were the means by which the dis
turbing factors of the latter were brought into the former;
2 Moliere’s Tartuffe and Jakob Michael Lenz’s Tutor, separated by more than a
century, both depict the interference of the deployment of sexuality in the family
organization, apropos of spiritual direction in TartuJfe and education in The Tutor.

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 1
and yet they also provided an opportunity for the alliance
system to assert its prerogatives in the order of sexuality.
Then a pressing demand emanated from the family: a
plea for help in reconciling these unfortunate conflicts be
tween sexuality and alliance; and, caught in the grip of
this deployment of sexuality which had invested it from
without, contributing to its solidification into its modern
form, the family broadcast the long complaint of its sex
ual suffering to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests,
and pastors, to all the “experts” who would listen. It was
as if it had suddenly discovered the dreadful secret of
what had always been hinted at and inculcated in it: the
family, the keystone of alliance, was the germ of all the
misfortunes of sex. And 10 and behold, from the mid
nineteenth century onward, the family engaged in search
ing out the slightest traces of sexuality in its midst,
wrenching from itself the most difficult confessions, solic
iting an audience with everyone who might know some
thing about the matter, and opening itself unreservedly to
endless examination. The family was the crystal in the de
ployment of sexuality: it seemed to be the source of a sex
uality which it actually only reflected and diffracted. By
virtue of its permeability, and through that process of re
flections to the outside, it became one of the most valu
able tactical components of the deployment.
But this development was not without its tensions and
problems. Charcot doubtless constituted a central figure in
this as well. For many years he was the most noteworthy of
all those to whom families, burdened down as they were with
this sexuality that saturated them, appealed for mediation
and treatment. On receiving parents who brought him their
children, husbands their wives, and wives their husbands,
from the world over, his first concern was to separate the
“patient” from his family, and the better to observe him, he
would pay as little attention as possible to what the family

1 1 2 The History of Sexuality
had to say.3 He sought to detach the sphere of sexuality from
the system of alliance, in order to deal with it directly
through a medical practice whose technicity and autonomy
were guaranteed by the neurological model. Medicine thus
assumed final responsibility, according to the rules of a spe
cific knowledge, for a sexuality which it had in fact urged
families to concern themselves with as an essential task and
a major danger. Moreover, Charcot noted on several occa
sions how difficult it was for families to “yield” the patient
whom they nonetheless had brought to the doctor, how they
laid siege to the mental hospitals where the subject was being
kept out of view, and the ways in which they were constantly
interfering with the doctor’s work. Their worry was unwar
ranted, however: the therapist only intervened in order to
return to them individuals who were sexually compatible
with the family system; and while this intervention manipu
lated the sexual body, it did not authorize the latter to define
itself in explicit discourse. One must not speak of these “geni
tal causes”: so went the phrase-muttered in a muted voice
-which the most famous ears of our time overheard one day
in 1 8 86, from the mouth of Charcot.
This was the context in which psychoanalysis set to work;
but not without substantially modifying the pattern of anxie
ties and reassurances. In the beginning it must have given
rise to distrust and hostility, for, pushing Charcot’s lesson to
the extreme, it undertook to examine the sexuality of in
dividuals outside family control; it brought this sexuality to
light without covering it over again with the neurological
model; more serious still, it called family relations into ques
tion in the analysis it made of them. But despite everything,
J Jean-Martin Charcot, Lerons de Mardi, January 7, 1888: ” I n order to properly
treat a hysterical girl, one must not leave her with her father and mother; she needs
to be placed in a mental hospital. . . . Do you know how long well-behaved little
girls cry for their mothers after they part company? . . . Let us take the average,
if you will; it’s not very long, a half· hour or thereabouts.”
February 21, 1888: “In the case of hysteria of young boys, what one must do is
to separate them from their mothers. So long as they are with their mothers, nothing
is of any use . . . . The father is sometimes j ust as unbearable as the mother; it is
best, then, to get rid of them both.”

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 3
psychoanalysis, whose technical procedure seemed to place
the confession of sexuality outside family j urisdiction, redis
covered the law of alliance, the involved workings of mar
riage and kinship, and incest at the heart of this sexuality, as
the principle of its formation and the key to its intelligibility.
The guarantee that one would find the parents-children rela
tionship at the root of everyone’s sexuality made it possible
-even when everything seemed to point to the reverse proc
ess-to keep the deployment of sexuality coupled to the
system of alliance. There was no risk that sexuality would
appear to be, by nature, alien to the law: it was constituted
only through the law. Parents, do not be afraid to bring your
children to analysis: it will teach them that in any case it is
you whom they love. Children, you really shouldn’t com
plain that you are not orphans, that you always rediscover
in your innermost selves your Obj ect-Mother or the sover
eign sign of your Father: it is through them that you gain
access to desire. Whence, after so many reticences, the enor
mous consumption of analysis in societies where the deploy
ment of alliance and the family system needed strengthening.
For this is one of the most significant aspects of this entire
history of the deployment of sexuality : it had its beginnings
in the technology of the “flesh” in classical Christianity,
basing itself on the alliance system and the rules that gov
erned the latter; but today it fills a reverse function in that
it tends to prop up the old deployment of alliance. From the
direction of conscience to psychoanalysis, the deployments
of alliance and sexuality were involved in a slow process that
had them turning about one another until, more than three
centuries later, their positions were reversed; in the Christian
pastoral, the law of alliance codified the flesh which was just
being discovered and fitted it into a framework that was still
juridical in character; with psychoanalysis, sexuality gave
body and life to the rules of alliance by saturating them with
desire.
Hence the domain we must analyze in the different studies
that will follow the present volume is that deployment of

1 14 The History of Sexuality
sexuality: its formation on the basis of the Christian notion
of the flesh, and its development through the four great
strategies that were deployed in the nineteenth century: the
sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, the
specification of the perverted, and the regulation of popula
tions-all strategies that went by way of a family which must
be viewed, not as a powerful agency of prohibition, but as a
major factor of sexualization.
The first phase corresponded to the need to form a “labor
force” (hence to avoid any useless “expenditure,” any wasted
energy, so that all forces were reduced to labor capacity
alone) and to ensure its reproduction (conjugality, the regu
lated fabrication of children). The second phase corre
sponded to that epoch of Spatkapitalismus in which the
exploitation of wage labor does not demand the same violent
and physical constraints as in the nineteenth century, and
where the politics of the body does not require the elision of
sex or its restriction solely to the reproductive function; it
relies instead on a multiple channeling into the controlled
circuits of the economy-on what has been called a hyper
repressive desublimation.
If the politics of sex makes little use of the law of the taboo
but brings into play an entire technical machinery, if what
is involved is the production of sexuality rather than the
repression of sex, then our emphasis has to be placed else
where; we must shift our analysis away from the problem of
“labor capacity” and doubtless abandon the diffuse energet
ics that underlies the theme of a sexuality repressed for eco
nomIC reasons.

4
Periodization
The history of sexuality supposes two ruptures if one tries
to center it on mechanisms of repression. The first, occurring
in the course of the seventeenth century, was characterized
by the advent of the great prohibitions, the exclusive promo
tion of adult marital sexuality, the imperatives of decency,
the obligatory concealment of the body, the reduction to
silence and mandatory reticences of language. The second, a
twentieth-century phenomenon, was really less a rupture
than an inflexion of the curve: this was the moment when the
mechanisms of repression were seen as beginning to loosen
their grip; one passed from insistent sexual taboos to a rela
tive tolerance with regard to prenuptial or extramarital rela
tions; the disqualification of “perverts” diminished, their
. condemnation by the law was in part eliminated; a good
many of the taboos that weighed on the sexuality of children
were lifted.
We must attempt to trace the chronology of these devices:
the inventions, the instrumental mutations, and the renova
tions of previous techniques. But there is also the calendar
of their utilization to consider, the chronology of their diffu
sion and of the effects (of subjugation and resistance) they
produced. These multiple datings doubtless will not coincide
with the great repressive cycle that is ordinarily situated
between the sev.enteenth and the twentieth centuries.
1 . The chronology of the techniques themselves goes back
1 1 5

1 1 6 The History of Sexuality
a long way. Their point of formation must be sought in the
penitential practices of medieval Christianity, or rather in
the dual series constituted by the obligatory, exhaustive, and
periodic confession imposed on all the faithful by the Lateran
Council and by the methods of asceticism, spiritual exercise,
and mysticism that evolved with special intensity from the
sixteenth century on. First the Reformation, then Tridentine
Catholicism, mark an important mutation and a schism in
what might be called the “traditional technology of the
flesh.” A division whose depth should not be under
estimated; but this did not rule out a certain parallelism in
the Catholic and Protestant methods of examination of con
science and pastoral direction: procedures for analyzing
“concupiscence” and transforming it into discourse were
established in both instances. This was a rich, refined tech
nique which began to take shape in the sixteenth century and
went through a long series of theoretical elaborations until,
at the end of the eighteenth century, it became fixed in ex
pressions capable of symbolizing the mitigated strictness of
Alfonso de’ Liguori in the one case and Wesleyan pedagogy
in the other.
It was during the same period-the end of the eighteenth
century-and for reasons that will have to be determined,
that there emerged a completely new technology of sex; new
in that for the most part it escaped the ecclesiastical institu
tion without being truly independent of the thematics of sin.
Through pedagogy, medicine; and economics, it made sex
not only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well;
to be more exact, sex became a matter that required the social
body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals, to place
themselves under surveillance. New too for the fact that it
expanded along three axes: that of pedagogy, having as its
objective the specific sexuality of children; that of medicine,
whose objective was the sexual physiology peculiar to
women; and last, that of demography, whose objective was
the spontaneous or concerted regulation of births. Thus the

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 7
“sin of youth,” “nervous disorders, ” and “frauds against
procreation” (as those “deadly secrets” were later to be
called) designate three privileged areas of this new technol
ogy. There is no question that in each of these areas, it went
back to methods that had already been formed by Christian
ity, but of course not without modifying them: the sexuality
of children was already problematized in the spiritual
pedagogy of Christianity (it is interesting to note that Molli
ties, the first treatise on sin, was written in the fifteenth
century by an educator and mystic named Gerson, and that
the Onania collection compiled by Dekker in the eighteenth
century repeats word for word examples set forth by the
Anglican pastoral); the eighteenth-century medicine of
nerves and vapors took up in turn a field of analysis that had
already been delimited when the phenomena of possession
fomented a grave crisis in the all too indiscreet practices of
conscience direction and spiritual examination (nervous ill
ness is certainly not the truth of possession, but the medicine
of hysteria is not unrelated to the earlier direction of “ob
sessed” women); and the campaigns apropos of the birthrate
took the place of the control of conjugal relations-in a
different form and at another level-which the Christian
penance had so persistently sought to establish through its
examinations. A visible continuity, therefore, but one that
did not prevent a major transformation: from that time on,
the technology of sex was ordered in relation to the medical
institution, the exigency of normality, and-instead of the
question of death and everlasting punishment-the problem
of life and illness. The flesh was brought down to the level
of the organism.
This mutation took place at the turn of the nineteenth
century; it opened the way for many other transformations
that derived from it. The first of these set apart the medicine
of sex from the medicine of the body; it isolated a sexual
“instinct” capable of presenting constitutive anomalies, ac
quired derivations, infirmities, or pathological processes.

1 1 8 The History of Sexuality
Heinrich Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1 846,
can be used as an indicator: these were the years that saw the
correlative appearance of a medicine, an “orthopedics,”
specific to sex: in a word, the opening up of the great medico
psychological domain of the “perversions,” which was
destined to take over from the old moral categories of de
bauchery and excess. In the same period, the analysis of
heredity was placing sex (sexual relations, venereal diseases,
matrimonial alliances, perversions) in a position of “biologi
cal responsibility” with regard to the species: not only could
sex be affected by its own diseases, it could also, if it was not
controlled, transmit diseases or create others that would
afflict future generations. Thus it appeared to be the source
of an entire capital for the species to draw from. Whence the
medical-but also political-project for organizing a state
management of marriages, births, and life expectancies; sex
and its fertility had to be administered. The medicine of
perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great
innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the
nineteenth century.
Innovations that merged together quite well, for the
theory of “degenerescence” made it possible for them to
perpetually refer back to one another; it explained how a
heredity that was burdened with various maladies (it made
little difference whether these were organic, functional, or
psychical) ended by producing a sexual pervert (look into the
genealogy of an exhibitionist or a homosexual: you will find
a hemiplegic ancestor, a phthisic parent, or an uncle afflicted
with senile dementia); but it went on to explain how a sexual
perversion resulted in the depletion of one’s line of descent
-rickets in the children, the sterility of future generations.
The series composed of perversion-heredity-degenerescence
formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. And
let it not be imagined that this was nothing more than a
medical theory which was scientifically lacking and improp
erly moralistic. Its application was widespread and its im-

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 1 9
plantation went deep. Psychiatry, to be sure, but also juris
prudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the sur
veillance of dangerous or endangered children, all func
tioned for a long time on the basis of “degen
erescence” and the heredity-perversion system. An entire
social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent
form of a state-directed racism, furnished this technology of
sex with a formidable power and far-reaching consequences.
And the strange position of psychiatry at the end of the
nineteenth century would be hard to comprehend if one did
not see the rupture it brought about in the great system of
degenerescence: it resumed the project of a medical technol
ogy appropriate for dealing with the sexual instinct; but it
sought to free it from its ties with heredity, and hence from
eugenics and the various racisms. It is very well to look back
from our vantage point and remark upon the normalizing
impulse in Freud; one can go on to denounce the role played
for many years by the psychoanalytic institution; but the fact
remains that in the great family of technologies of sex, which
goes so far back into the history of the Christian West, of all
those institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to
medicalize sex, it was the one that, up to the decade of the
forties, rigorously opposed the political and institutional
effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.
It is clear that the genealogy of all these techniques, with
their mutations, their shifts, their continuities and ruptures,
does not coincide with the hypothesis of a great repressive
phase that was inaugurated in the course of the classical age
and began to slowly decline in the twentieth. There was
rather a perpetual inventiveness, a steady growth of methods
and procedures, with two especially productive moments in
this proliferating history : around the middle of the sixteenth
century, the development of procedures of direction and
examination of conscience; and at the beginning of the nine
teenth century, the advent of medical technologies of sex.
2. But the foregoing is still only a dating of the techniques

1 20 The History of Sexuality
themselves. The history of their spread and their point of
application is something else again. If one writes the history
of sexuality in terms of repression, relating this repression to
the utilization of labor capacity, one must suppose that sex
ual controls were the more intense and meticulous as they
were directed at the poorer classes; one has to assume that
they followed the path of greatest domination and the most
systematic exploitation: the young adult man, possessing
nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target
of a subjugation destined to shift the energy available for
useless pleasure toward compulsory labor. But this does not
appear to be the way things actually happened. On the con
trary, the most rigorous techniques were formed and, more
particularly, applied first, with the greatest intensity, in the
economically privileged and politically dominant classes.
The direction of consciences, self-examination, the entire
long elaboration of the transgressions of the flesh, and the
scrupulous detection of concupiscence were all subtle proce
dures that could only have been accessible to small groups
of people. It is true that the penitential method of Alfonso
de’ Liguori and the rules recommended to the Methodists by
Wesley ensured that these procedures would be more widely
disseminated, after a fashion; but this was at the cost of a
considerable simplification.
The same can be said of the family as an agency of control
and a point of sexual saturation: it was in the “bourgeois” or
“aristocratic” family that the sexuality of children and
adolescents was first problematized, and feminine sexuality
medicalized; it was the first to be alerted to the potential
pathology of sex, the urgent need to keep it under close
watch and to devise a rational technology of correction. It
was this family that first became a locus for the psychiatriza
tion of sex. Surrendering to fears, creating remedies, appeal
ing for rescue by learned techniques, generating countless
discourses, it was the first to commit itself to sexual erethism.
The bourgeoisie began by considering that its own sex was

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 2 1
something importaIlt, a fragile treasure, a secret that had to
be discovered at all costs. It is worth remembering that the
first figure to be invested by the deployment of sexuality, one
of the first to be “sexualized,” was the “idle” woman. She
inhabited the outer edge of the “world,” in which she always
had to appear as a value, and of the family, where she was
assigned a new destiny charged with conjugal and parental
obligations. Thus there emerged the “nervous” woman, the
woman afflicted with “vapors”; in this figure, the hysteriza
tion of woman found its anchorage point. As for the adoles
cent wasting his future substance in secret pleasures, the
onanistic child who was of such concern to doctors and
educators from the end of the eighteenth century to the end
of the nineteenth, this was not the child of the people, the
future worker who had to be taught the disciplines of the
body, but rather the schoolboy, the child surrounded by
domestic servants, tutors, and governesses, who was in dan
ger of compromising not so much his physical strength as his
intellectual capacity, his moral fiber, and the obligation to
preserve a healthy line of descent for his family and his social
class.
For their part, the working classes managed for a long
time to escape the deployment of “sexuality. ” Of course,
they were subjected in specific ways to the deployment of
“alliances ” : the exploitation of legitimate marriage and fertil
ity, the exclusion of consanguine sexual union, prescriptions
of social and local endogamy. On the other hand, it is un
likely that the Christian technology of the flesh ever had any
importance for them. As for the mechanisms of sexualiza
tion, these penetrated them slowly and apparently in three
successive stages. The first involved the problems of birth
control, when it was discovered, at the end of the eighteenth
century, that the art of fooling nature was not the exclusive
privilege of city dwellers and libertines, but was known and
practiced by those who, being close to nature itself, should
have held it to be more repugnant than anyone else did. Next

1 22 The History of Sexuality
the organization of the “conventional” family came to be
regarded, sometime around the eighteen-thirties, as an indis
pensable instrument of political control and economic regu
lation for the subjugation of the urban proletariat: there was
a great campaign for the “moralization of the poorer
classes. ” The last stage came at the end of the nineteenth
century with the development of the juridical and medical
control of perversions, for the sake of a general protection of
society and the race. It can be said that this was the moment
when the deployment of “sexuality,” elaborated in its more
complex and intense forms, by and for the privileged classes,
spread through the entire social body. But the forms it took
were not everywhere the same, and neither were the instru
ments it employed (the respective roles of medical and judi
cial authority were not the same in both instances; nor was
even the way in which medicine and sexuality functioned).
These chronological reminders-whether we are con
cerned with the invention of techniques or the calendar of
their diffusion-are of some importance. They cast much
doubt on the idea of a repressive cycle, with a beginning and
an end and forming a curve with its point of irtflexion: it
appears unlikely that there was an age of sexual restriction.
They also make it doubtful that the process was homoge
neous at all levels of society and in all social classes: there was
no unitary sexual politics. But above all, they make the
meaning of the process, and its reasons for being, problemati
cal: it seems that the deployment of sexuality was not estab
lished as a principle of limitation of the pleasures of others
by what have traditionally been called the “ruling classes . ”
Rather i t appears t o me that they first tried i t on themselves.
Was this a new avatar of that bourgeois asceticism described
so many times in connection with the Reformation, the new
work ethic, and the rise of capitalism? It seems in fact that
what was involved was not an asceticism, in any case not a
renunciation of pleasure or a disqualification of the flesh, but

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 23
on the contrary an intensification of the body, a problemati
zation of health and its operational terms: it was a question
of techniques for maximizing life. The primary concern was
not repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but
rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of
the classes that “ruled.” This was the purpose for which the
deployment of sexuality was first established, as a new distri
bution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to
be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the
enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthen
ing, and an exaltation that were eventually extended to oth
ers-at the cost of different transformations-as a means of
social control and political subj ugation. With this investment
of its own sex by a technology of power and knowledge
which it had itself invented, the bourgeoisie underscored the
high political price of its body, sensations, and pleasures, its
well-being and survival. Let us not isolate the restrictions,
reticences, evasions, or silences which all these procedures
may have manifested, in order to refer them to some con
stitutive taboo, psychical repression, or death instinct. What
was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an
enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self.
And this was far from being a matter of the class which in
the eighteenth century became hegemonic believing itself
obliged to amputate from its body a sex that was useless,
expensive, and dangerous as soon as it was no longer given
over exclusively to reproduction; we can assert on the con
trary that it provided itself with a body to be cared for,
protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers
and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would
retain its differential value; and this, by equipping itself with
-among other resources-a technology of sex.
Sex is not that part of the body which the bourgeoisie was
forced to disqualify or nullify in order to put those whom it
dominated to work. It is that aspect of itself which troubled
and preoccupied it more than any other, begged and obtained

1 24 The History of Sexuality
its attention, and which it cultivated with a mixture of fear,
curiosity, delight, and excitement. The bourgeoisie made this
element identical with its body, or at least subordinated the
latter to the former by attributing to it a mysterious and
power; it staked its life and its death on sex by
making it responsible for its future welfare; it placed its hopes
for the future in sex by imagining it to have ineluctable effects
on generations to come; it subordinated its soul to sex by
conceiving of it as what constituted the soul’s most secret and
determinant part. Let us not picture the bourgeoisie symboli
cally castrating itself the better to refuse others the right to
have a sex and make use of it as they please. This class must
be seen rather as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth
century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a
specific body based on it, a “class” body with its health,
hygiene, descent, and race: the autosexualization of its body,
the incarnation of sex in its body, the endogamy of sex and
the body.
There were doubtless many reasons for this. First of all,
there was a transposition into different forms of the methods
employed by the nobility for marking and maintaining its
caste distinction; for the aristocracy had also asserted the
special character of its body, but this was in the form of
blood, that is, in the form of the antiquity of its ancestry and
of the value of its alliances; the bourgeoisie on the contrary
looked to its progeny and the health of its organism when it
laid claim to a specific body. The bourgeoisie’s “blood” was
its sex. And this is more than a play on words; many of the
themes characteristic of the caste manners of the nobility
reappeared in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, but in the
guise of biological, medical, or eugenic precepts. The concern
with genealogy became a preoccupation with heredity; but
included in bourgeois marriages were not only economic
imperatives and rules of social homogeneity, not only the
promises of inheritance, but the menaces of heredity; families
wore and concealed a sort of reversed and somber escutcheon

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 2 5
whose defamatory quarters were the diseases o r defects of the
group of relatives-the grandfather’s general paralysis, the
mother’s neurasthenia, the youngest child’s phthisis, the hys
terical or erotomanic aunts, the cousins with bad morals. But
there was more to this concern with the sexual body than the
bourgeois transposition of themes of the nobility for the
purpose of self-affirmation. A different project was also in
volved: that of the indefinite extension of strength, vigor,
health, and life. The emphasis on the body should undoubt
edly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of
bourgeois hegemony: not, however, because of the market
value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the
“cultivation” of its own body could represent politically,
economically, and historically for the present and the future
of the bourgeoisie. Its dominance was in part dependent on
that cultivation; but it was not simply a matter of economy
or ideology, it was a “physical” matter as well. The works,
published in great numbers at the end of the eighteenth
century, on body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of hav
ing healthy children and of keeping them alive as long as
possible, and methods for improving the human lineage, bear
witness to the fact: they thus attest to the correlation of this
concern with the body and sex to a type of “racism . ” But the
latter was very different from that manifested by the nobility
and organized for basically conservative ends. It was a dy
namic racism, a racism of expansion, even if it was still in a
budding state, awaiting the second half of the nineteenth
century to bear the fruits that we have tasted.
May I be forgiven by those for whom the bourgeoisie
signifies the elision of the body and the repression of sexual
ity, for whom class struggle implies the fight to eliminate that
repression; the “spontaneous philosophy” of the bourgeoisie
is perhaps not as idealistic or castrating as is commonly
thought. In any event, one of its primary concerns was to
provide itself with a body and a sexuality-to ensure the
strength, endurance, and secular proliferation of that body

1 26 The History of Sexuality
through the organization of a deployment of sexuality. This
process, moreover, was linked to the movement by which it
asserted its distinctiveness and its hegemony. There is little
question that one of the primordial forms of class conscious
ness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case
for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It con
verted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and
a healthy sexuality. One understands why it took such a long
time and was so unwilling to acknowledge that other classes
had a body and a sex-precisely those classes it was exploit
ing. The living conditions that were dealt to the proletariat,
particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, show
there was anything but concern for its body and sex: l it was
of little importance whether those people lived or died, since
their reproduction was something that took care of itself in
any case. Conflicts were necessary (in particular, conflicts
over urban space: cohabitation, proximity, contamination,
epidemics, such as the cholera outbreak of 1 832, or again,
prostitution and venereal diseases) in order for the proletar
iat to be granted a body and a sexuality; economic emergen
cies had to arise (the development of heavy industry with the
need for a stable and competent labor force, the obligation
to regulate the population flow and apply demographic con
trols); lastly, there had to be established a whole technology
of control which made it possible to keep that body and
sexuality, finally conceded to them, under surveillance
(schooling, the politics of housing, public hygiene, institu
tions of relief and insurance, the general medicalization of
the population, in short, an entire administrative and techni
cal machinery made it possible to safely import the deploy
ment of sexuality into the exploited class; the latter no longer
risked playing an assertive class role opposite the bourgeoi
sie; it would remain the instrument of the bourgeoisie’s
‘ Cf. Karl Marx, “The Greed for Surplus-Labor,” Capital. trans. Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 10, 2,
pp. 235-43.

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 27
hegemony). Whence no doubt the proletariat’s hesitancy to
accept this deployment and its tendency to say that this .
sexuality was the business of the the bourgeoisie and did not
concern it.
Some think they can denounce two symmetrical hypocri
sies at the same time: the primary hypocrisy of the bourgeoi
sie which denies its own sexuality, and the secondary hypoc
risy of the proletariat which in turn rejects its sexuality by
accepting the dominant ideology. This is to misunderstand
the process whereby on the contrary the bourgeoisie en
dowed itself, in an arrogant political affirmation, with a gar
rulous sexuality which the proletariat long refused to accept,
since it was foisted on them for the purpose of subjugation.
If it is true that sexuality is the set of effects produced in
bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deploy
ment deriving from a complex political technology, one has
to admit that this deployment does not operate in symmetri
cal fashion with respect to the social classes, and conse
quently, that it does not produce the same effects in them.
We must return, therefore, to formulations that have long
been disparaged; we must say that there is a bourgeois sexu
ality, and that there are class sexualities. Or rather, that
sexuality is originally, historically bourgeois, and that, in its
successive shifts and transpositions, it induces specific class
effects.
A few more words are in order. As we have noted, the
nineteenth century witnessed a generalization of the deploy
ment of sexuality, starting from a hegemonic center. Eventu
ally the entire social body was provided with a “sexual
body,” although this was accomplished in different ways and
using different tools. Must we speak of the universality of
sexuality, then? It is at this point that one notes the introduc
tion of a new differentiating element. Somewhat similar to
the way in which, at the end of the eighteenth century, the
bourgeoisie set its own body and its precious sexuality

1 2 8 The History o f Sexuality
against the valorous blood of the nobles, at the end of the
nineteenth century it sought to redefine the specific character
of its sexuality relative to that of others, subjecting it to a
thorough differential review, and tracing a dividing line that
would set apart and protect its body. This line was not the
same as the one which founded sexuality, but rather a bar
running through that sexuality; this was the taboo that con
stituted the difference, or at least the manner in which the
taboo was applied and the rigor with which it was imposed.
It was here that the theory of repression-;-which was gradu
ally expanded to cover the entire deployment of sexuality, so
that the latter came to be explained in terms of a generalized
taboo-had its point of origin. This theory is bound up his
torically with the spread of the deployment of sexuality. On
the one hand, the theory would justify its authoritarian and
constraining influence by postulating that all sexuality must
be subject to the law; more precisely, that sexuality owes its
very definition to the action of the law: not only will you
submit your sexuality to the law, but you will have no sexual
ity except by subjecting yourself to the law. But on the other
hand, the theory of repression would compensate for this
general spread of the deployment of sexuality by its analysis
of the differential interplay of taboos according to the social
classes. The discourse which at the end of the eighteenth
century said: “There is a valuable element within us that
must be feared and treated with respect; we must exercise
extreme care in dealing with it, lest it be the cause of count
less evils,” was replaced by a discourse which said: “Our
sexuality, unlike that of others, is subj ected to a regime of
repression so intense as to present a constant danger; not
only is sex a formidable secret, as the directors of conscience,
moralists, pedagogues, and doctors always said to former
generations, not only must we search it out for the truth it
conceals, but if it carries with it so many dangers, this is
because-whether out of scrupulousness, an overly acute
sense of sin, or hypocrisy, no matter-we have too long

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 29
reduced it to silence. ” Henceforth social differentiation
would be affirmed, not by the “sexual” quality of the body,
but by the intensity of its repression.
Psychoanalysis comes in at this juncture: both a theory of
the essential interrelatedness of the law and desire, and a
technique for relieving the effects of the taboo where its rigor
makes it pathogenic. In its historical emergence, psychoanal
ysis cannot be dissociated from the generalization of the
deployment of sexuality and the secondary mechanisms of
differentiation that resulted from it. The problem of incest is
still significant in this regard. On one hand, as we have seen,
its prohibition was posited as an absolutely universal princi
ple which made it possible to explain both the system of
alliance and the regime of sexuality; this taboo, in one form
or another, was valid therefore for every society and every
individual. But in practice psychoanalysis gave itself the task
of alleviating the effects of repression (for those who were in
a position to resort to psychoanalysis) that this prohibition
was capable of causing; it allowed individuals to express their
incestuous desire in discourse. But during the same period,
there was a systematic campaign being organized against the
kinds of incestuous practices that existed in rural areas or in
certain urban quarters inaccessible to psychiatry: an inten
sive administrative and j udicial grid was laid out then to put
an end to these practices. An entire poll tics for die protection
of children or the placing of “endangered” minors under
guardianship had as its partial objective their withdrawal
from families that were suspected-through lack of space,
dubious proximity, a history of debauchery, antisocial
“primitiveness,” or degenerescence-of practicing incest.
Whereas the deployment of sexuality had been intensifying
affective relations and physical proximity since the eigh
teenth century, and although there had occurred a perpetual
incitement to incest in the bourgeois family, the regime of
sexuality applied to the lower classes on the contrary in
volved the exclusion of incestuous practices or at least their

1 30 The History of Sexuality
displacement into another form. At a time when incest was
being hunted out as a conduct, psychoanalysis was busy
revealing it as a desire and alleviating-for those who suff
ered from the desire-the severity which repressed it. We
must not forget that the discovery of the Oedipus complex
was contemporaneous with the juridical organization of loss
of parental authority (in France, this was formulated in the
laws of 1 889 and 1 898). At the moment when Freud was
uncovering the nature of Dora’s desire and allowing it to be
put into words, preparations were being made to undo those
reprehensible proximities in other social sectors; on the one
hand, the father was elevated into an object of compulsory
love, but on the other hand, if he was a loved one, he was
at the same time a fallen one in the eyes of the law. Psychoa
nalysis, as a limited therapeutic practice, thus played a differ
entiating role with respect to other procedures, within a
deployment of sexuality that had come into general use.
Those who had lost the exclusive privilege of worrying over
their sexuality henceforth had the privilege of experiencing
more than others the thing that prohibited it and of possess
ing the method which made it possible to remove the repres
sion.
The history of the deployment of sexuality, as it has
evolved since the classical age, can serve as an archaeology
of psychoanalysis. We have seen in fact that psychoanalysis
plays several roles at once in this deployment: it is a mecha
nism for attaching sexuality to the system of alliance; it
assumes an adversary position with respect to the theory of
degenerescence; it functions as a differentiating factor in the
general technology of sex. Around it the great requirement
of confession that had taken form so long ago assumed the
new meaning of an injunction to lift psychical repression.
The task of truth was now linked to the challenging of
taboos.
This same development, moreover, opened up the possibil
ity of a substantial shift in tactics, consisting in: reinterpret-

The Deployment of Sexuality 1 3 1
ing the deployment of sexuality in terms of a generalized
repression; tying this repression to general mechanisms of
domination and exploitation; and linking together the proc
esses that make it possible to free oneself both of repression
and of domination and exploitation. Thus between the two
world wars there was formed, around Reich, the historico
political critique of sexual repression. The importance of this
critique and its impact on reality were substantial. But the
very possibility of its success was tied to the fact that it
always unfolded within the deployment of sexuality, and not
outside or against it. The fact that so many things were able
to change in the sexual behavior of Western societies without
any of the promises or political conditions predicted by
Reich being realized is sufficient proof that this whole sexual
“revolution,” this whole “anti repressive” struggle, repre
sented nothing more, but nothing less-and its importance
is undeniable-than a tactical shift and reversal in the great
deployment of sexuality. But it is also apparent why one
could not expect this critique to be the grid for a history of
that very deployment. Nor the basis for a movement to dis
mantle it.

PART F I VE
R isht of Death
and Power over Life

For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of
sovereign power was the right to decide life and death. In a
formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria
potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the
right to “dispose” of the life of his children and his slaves;
just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By
the time the right of life and death was framed by the classi
cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form.
It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign
over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un
conditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign’s very
existence was in j eopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he
were threatened by external enemies who s0ught to over
throw him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately
wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense
of the state; without “directly proposing their death,” he was
empowered to “expose their life”: in this sense, he wielded
an “indirect” power over them of life and death. 1 But if
someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws,
then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life:
as punishment, the latter would be put to death. Viewed in
this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute
privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign,
and his own survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as
the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by
every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death
of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was
manifested with the formation of that new juridical being,
I Samuel von Pufendorf. Le Droit de la nature (French trans . • 1734). p. 445.
1 3 5

1 36 The History of Sexuality
the sovereign?2 In any case, in its modern form-relative and
limited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of life
and death is a dis symmetrical one. The sovereign exercised
his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by
refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only
through the death he was capable of requiring. The right
which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was
in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after
all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be re
ferred to a historical type of society in which power was
exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prelevement), a
subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of
the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and
blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was
essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and
ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize
hold of life in order to suppress it.
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very
profound transformation of these mechanisms of power.
“Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of
power but merely one element among others, working to
incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize
the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, mak
ing them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated
to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.
There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least
a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis
tering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that
was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure,
maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody
as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things
2 “Just as a composite body can have propt’rties not found in any of the simple bodies
of which the mixture consists, so a moral body, by virtue of the very union of
persons of which it is composed, can have certain rights which none of the individu
als could expressly claim and whose exercise is the proper function of leaders
alone.” Pufendorf, Le Droit de la nature, p. 452.

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 37
being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts
on their own populations. But this formidable power of death
-and this is perhaps what accounts for part of its force and
the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits
-now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to adminis
ter, optimize, and mUltiply it, subj ecting it to precise controls
and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in
the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire popula
tions are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in
the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is
as managers of life and survival, of bodies _and the race, that
so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars,
causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that
closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them
to tend increasingly toward aU-out destruction, the decision
that initiates thetn and the one that terminates them are in
fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival.
The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process:
the power to expose a whole population to death is the
underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s con
tinued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of bat
tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on
living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of
states. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical
existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence
of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern
powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at
the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale
phenomena of population.
On another level, I might have taken up the example of the
death penalty. Together with war, it was for a long time the
other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply
of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or

1 3 8 The History o f Sexuality
his person. Those who died on the scaffold became fewer and
fewer, in contrast to those who died in wars. But it was for
the same reasons that the latter became more numerous and
the former more and more rare. As soon as power gave itself
the function of administering life, its reason for being and the
logic of its exercise-and not the awakening of humanitarian
feelings-made it more and more difficult to apply the death
penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives
by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure,
sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such
a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal,
and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be
maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime
itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility,
and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those
who represented a kind of biological danger to others.
One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live
was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the
point of death. This is perhaps what explains that disqualifi
cation of death which marks the recent wane of the rituals
that accompanied it. That death is so carefully evaded is
linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable
for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power
have not ceased to turn away from death. In the passage from
this world to the other, death was the manner in which a
terrestrial sovereignty was relieved by another, singularly
more powerful sovereignty; the pageantry that surrounded it
was in the category of political ceremony. Now it is over life,
throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domin
ion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death
becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “pri
vate.” It is not surprising that suicide-once a crime, since
it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign
alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the
right to exercise-became, in the course of the nineteenth
century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of

Right of Death and Power over LIfe 1 39
sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private
right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that
was exercised over life. This determination to die, strange
and yet so persistent and constant in its manifestations, and
consequently so difficult to explain as being due to particular
circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first
astonishments of a society in which political power had as
signed itself the task of administering life.
In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this
power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were
not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles
of development linked together by a whole intermediary
cluster of relations. One of these poles-the first to be
formed, it seems–centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion
of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its
docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic
controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that
characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the
human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused
on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propa
gation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expect
ancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause
these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an
entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio
politics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the
regulations of the population constituted the two poles
around which the organization of power over life was de
ployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of
this great bipolar technology-anatomic and biological, in
dividualizing and specifying, directed toward the perfor
mances of the body, with attention to the processes of life
characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps
no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power

140 The History o f Sexuality
was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life. During the classical . .
period, there was a rapid development o f various disciplines
-universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;
there was also the emergence, in the field of political prac
tices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate,
longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence
there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the SUbjugation of bodies and the control of
populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio
power. ” The two directions taken by its development still
appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.
With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in
institutions such as the army and the schools, and in reflec
tions on tactics, apprenticeship, education, and the nature of
societies, ranging from the strictly military analyses of Mar
shal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As
for population controls, one notes the emergence of demog
raphy, the evaluation of the relationship between resources
and inhabitants, the constructing of tables analyzing wealth
and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, and Sliss
milch. The philosophy of the “Ideologists,” as a theory of
ideas, signs, and the individual genesis of sensations, but also
a theory of the social composition of interests-Ideology
being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of
contracts and the regulated formation of the social body
no doubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one
sought to coordinate these two techniques of power in order
to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however,
they were not to be joined at the level of a speCUlative
discourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agence
ments concrets) that would go to make up the great technol
ogy of power in the nineteenth century: the deployment of
sexuality would be one of them, and one of the most impor
tant.
This bio-power was without question an indispensable ele-

R ight of Death and Power over Life 1 4 1
ment i n the development of capitalism; the latter would not
, have been p0ssible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adj ustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this
was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these
factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimiz
ing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same
time making them more difficult to govern. If the develop
ment of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of
power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the
rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eigh
teenth century as techniques of power present at every level
of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions
(the family and the army, schools and the police, individual
medicine and the administration of collectiv� bodies), ope
rated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,
and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as
factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting
their influence on the respective forces of both these move
ments, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of
hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to
that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to
the expansion of productive forces and the differential alloca
tion of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of
bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The
investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive
management of its forces were at the time indispensable.
One knows how many times the question has been raised
concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first forma”
tion of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth cen
tury in some Western countries, an event bound up with the
development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon hav
ing perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was
nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the
entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species

142 The History of Sexuality
into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of ,
political techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this
was the moment when the first contact between life and
history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure
exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very
strong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the
two great dramatic forms of this relationship that was always
dominated by the menace of death. But through a circular
process, the economic-and primarily agricultural–devel
opment of the eighteenth century, and an increase in produc
tivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic
growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these
profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks, the pe
riod of great ravages from starvation and plague had come
to a close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing
to torment life so directly. But at the same time, the develop
ment of the different fields of knowledge concerned with life
in general, the improvement of agricultural techniques, and
the observations and measures relative to man’s life and
survival contributed to this relaxation: a relative control over
life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space
for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organiz
ing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed
responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control
and modify them. Western man was gradually learning what
it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a
body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individ
ual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and
a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal
manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological
existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living
was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged
from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and
power’s sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be
dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 4 3
dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery
it would be able to exercise over them would have to be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of
life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access
even to the body . If one can apply the term bio- history to the
pressures through which the movements of life and the proc
esses of history interfere with one another, one would have
to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques
that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.
Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale
than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are
perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the
birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society’s
“threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of
the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For
millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living
animal with the additional capacity for a political existence;
modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence
as a living being in question.
This transformation had considerable consequences. It
would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that
occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the
manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man
disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical epis
teme. If the question of man was raised-insofar as he was
a specific living being, and specifically related to other living
beings-the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode
of relation between history and life: in this dual position of
life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its
biological environment, and inside human historicity, pene
trated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power.
There is no need either to lay further stress on the prolifera
tion of political technologies that ensued, investing the body,

1 44 The History o f Sexuality
health, modes of subsistence and habitation, living condi
tions, the whole space of existence.
Another consequence of this development of bio-power
was the growing importance assumed by the action of the
norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law
cannot help but but be armed, and its arm, par excellence,
is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last
resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to
the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life
needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It
is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field
of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of
value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure,
appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its
murderous splendor; it does not have to draw the line that
separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient
subjects; it effects distributions around the norm. I do not
mean to say that the law fades into the background or that
the institutions of j ustice tend to disappear, but rather that
the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the
j udicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a con
tinuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on)
whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normal
izing society is the historical outcome of a technology of
power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical
regression in comparison with the pre-seventeenth-century
societies we are acquainted with; we should not be deceived
by all the Constitutions framed throughout the world since
the French Revolution, the Codes written and revised, a
whole continual and clamorous legislative activity: these
were the forms that made an essentially normalizing power
acceptable.
Moreover, against this power that was still new in the
nineteenth century, the forces that resisted relied for support
on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a
living being. Since the last century, the great struggles that

Right of Death and Power .over Life 1 45
have challenged the general system of power were not guided
by the belief in a return to former rights, or by the age-old
dream of a cycle of time or a Golden Age. One no longer
aspired toward the coming of the emperor of the poor, or the
kingdom of the latter days, or even the restoration of our
imagined ancestral rights; what was demanded and what
served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs,
man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a
plenitude of the possible. Whether or not it was Utopia that
was wanted is of little importance; what we have seen has
been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object
was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against
the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more
than the law that becam,e the issue of political struggles, even
if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to happi
ness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppres
sions or “alienations,” the ” right” to rediscover what one is
and all that one can be, this “right” -which the classical
j uridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending
was the political response to all these new procedures of
power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right
of sovereignty.
This is the background that enables us to understand the
importance assumed by sex as a political issue. It was at the
pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire politi
cal technology of life. On the one hand it was tied to the
disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and
distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of ener
gies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of
populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activ
ity. It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesi
mal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous
orderings of space, indeterminate medical or psychological
examinations, to an entire micro-power concerned with the

1 46 The History of Sexuality
body. But it gave rise as well to comprehensive measures,
statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire
social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means
of access both to the life of the body and the life of the
species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and
as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth
century sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of
individual existences; it was tracked down in behavior, pur
sued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least
follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood;
it became the stamp of individuality-at the same time what
enabled one to analyze the latter and what made it possible
to master it. But one also sees it becoming the theme of
political operations, economic interventions (through incite
ments to or curbs on procreation), and ideological campaigns
for raising standards of morality and responsibility: it was
put forward as the index of a society’s strength, revealing of
both its political energy and its biological vigor. Spread out
from one pole to the other of this technology of sex was a
whole series of different tactics that combined in varying
proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of
regulating populations.
Whence the importance of the four great lines of attack
along which the politics of sex advanced for two centuries.
Each one was a way of combining disciplinary techniques
with regulative methods. The first two rested on the require
ments of regulation, on a whole thematic of the species,
descent, and collective welfare, in order to obtain results at
the level of discipline; the sexualization of children was ac
complished in the form of a campaign for the health of the
race (precocious sexuality was presented from the eighteenth
century to the end of the nineteenth as an epidemic menace
that risked compromising not only the future health of adults
but the future of the entire society and species); the hysteriza
tion of women, which involved a thorough medicalization of
their bodies and their sex, was carried out in the name of the

Right of Death and Power over Life 147
responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the
solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of
society. It was the reverse relationship that applied in the
case of birth controls and the psychiatrization of perversions:
here the intervention was regulatory in nature, but it had to
rely on the demand for individual disciplines and constraints
(dressages). Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the “body”
and the “population,” sex became a crucial target of a power
organized around the management of life rather than the
menace of death.
The blood relation long remained an important element in
the mechanisms of power, its manifestations, and its rituals.
For a society in which the systems of alliance, the political
form of the sovereign, the differentiation into orders and
castes, and the value of descent lines were predominant; for
a society in which famine, epidemics, and violence made
death imminent, blood constituted one of the fundamental
values. It owed its high value at the same time to its instru
mental role (the ability to shed blood), to the way it func
tioned in the order of signs (to have a certain blood, to be of
the same blood, to be prepared to risk one’s blood), and also
to its precariousness (easily spilled, subject to drying up, too
readily mixed, capable of being quickly corrupted). A society
of blood-I was tempted to say, of “sanguinity”-where
power spoke through blood: the honor of war, the fear of
famine, the triumph of death, the sovereign with his sword,
executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality with a sym
bolic function. We, on the other hand, are in a society of
“sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality” : the mechanisms
of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes
it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina,
its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used.
Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of
the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of
sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a
symbol, it was an object and a target. Moreover, its impor-

148 The History of Sexuality
tance was due less to its rarity or its precariousness than to
its insistence, its insidious presence, the fact that it was every
where an object of excitement and fear at the same time.
Power delineated it, aroused it, and employed it as the prolif
erating meaning that had always to be taken control of again
lest it escape; it was an effect with a meaning-value. I do not
mean to say that a substitution of sex for blood was by itself
responsible for all the transformations that marked the
threshold of our modernity. It is not the soul of two civiliza
tions or the organizing principle of two cultural forms that
I am attempting to express; I am looking for the reasons for
which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of
that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused. The
new procedures of power that were devised during the classi
cal age and employed in the nineteenth century were what
caused our societies to go from a symbolics of blood to an
analytics of sexuality. Clearly, nothing was more on the side
of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sove
reignty than blood; just as sexuality was on the side of the
norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, and regula
tions.
Sade and the first eugenists were contemporary with this
transition from “sanguinity” to “sexuality.” But whereas the
first dreams ofthe perfecting of the species inclined the whole
problem toward an extremely exacting administration of sex
(the art of determining good marriages, of inducing the
desired fertilities, of ensuring the health and longevity of
children), and while the new concept of race tended to oblit
erate the aristocratic particularities of blood, retaining only
the controllable effects of sex, Sade carried the exhaustive
analysis of sex over into the mechanisms of the old power of
sovereignty and endowed it with the ancient but fully main
tained prestige of blood; the latter flowed through the whole
dimension of pleasure-the blood of torture and absolute
power, the blood of the caste which was respected in itself
and which nonetheless was made to flow in the major rituals

R ight 0/ Death and Power over Life 149
of parricide and incest, the blood of the people, which was
shed unreservedly since the sort that flowed in its veins was
not even deserving of a name. In Sade, sex is without any
norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own
nature; but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power
which itself knows no other law but its own; if by chance it
is at times forced to accept the order of progressions carefully
disciplined into successive days, this exercise carries it to a
point where it is no longer anything but a unique and naked
sovereignty: an unlimited right of all-powerful monstrosity.
While it is true that the analytics of sexuality and the
symbolics of blood were grounded at first in two very distinct
regimes of power, in actual fact the passage from one to the
other did not come about (any more than did these powers
themselves) without overlappings, interactions, and echoes.
In different ways, the preoccupation with blood and the law
has for nearly two centuries haunted the administration of
sexuality. Two of these interferences are noteworthy, the one
for its historical importance, the other for the problems it
poses. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century,
the thematics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its
entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of politi
cal power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality.
Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, “bi
ologizing,” statist form): it was then that a whole politics of
settlement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social
hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series
of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct,
health, and everyday life, received their color and their jus
tification from the mythical concern with protecting the
purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race.
Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naive
(and the former because of the latter) combination of the
fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power.
A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the
way of extension and intensification of micro-powers, in the

1 50 The History of Sexuality
guise of an unrestricted state control (etatisation), was ac
companied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood; the
latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the
risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice. It is an irony of
history that the Hitlerite politics of sex remained an insignifi
cant practice while the blood myth was transformed into the
greatest blood bath in recent memory.
At the opposite extreme, starting from this same end of the
nineteenth century, we can trace the theoretical effort to
reinscribe the thematic of sexuality in the system of law, the
symbolic order, and sovereignty. It is to the political credit
of psychoanalysis-or at least, of what was most coherent in
it-that it regarded with suspicion (and this from its incep
tion, that is, from the moment it broke away from the neu
ropsychiatry of degenerescence) the irrevocably proliferating
aspects which might be contained in these power mech
anisms aimed at controlling and administering the everyday
life of sexuality: whence the Freudian end�avor (out of reac
tion no doubt to the great surge of racism that was contem
porary with it) to ground sexuality in the law-the law of
alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the Sovereign-Father,
in short, to surround desire with all the trappings of the old
order of power. It was owing to this that psychoanalysis was
-in the main, with a few exceptions-in theoretical and
practical opposition to fascism. But this position of psychoa
nalysis was tied to a specific historical conjuncture. And yet,
to conceive the category of the sexual in terms of the law,
death, blood, and sovereignty-whatever the references
to Sade and Bataille, and however one _might gauge their
“subversive” influence-is in the last analysis a historical
“retro-version.” We must conceptualize the deployment of
sexuality on the basis of the techniques of power that are
contemporary with it.
People are going to say that I am dealing in a historicism
which is more careless than radical; that I am evading the

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 1
biologically established existence of sexual functions for the
benefit of phenomena that are variable, perhaps, but fragile,
secondary, and ultimately superficial; and that I speak of
sexuality as if sex did not exist. And one would be entitled
to object as follows: “You claim to analyze in detail the
processes by which women’s bodies, the lives of children,
family relationships, and an entire network of social relations
were sexualized. You wish to describe that great awakening
of sexual concern since the eighteenth century and our grow
ing eagerness to suspect the presence of sex in everything. Let
us admit as much and suppose that the mechanisms of power
were in fact used more to arouse and ‘excite’ sexuality than
to repress it. But here you remain quite near to the thing you
no doubt believe you have gotten away from; at bottom,
when you point out phenomena of diffusion, anchorage, and
fixation of sexuality, you are trying to reveal what might be
called the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body; it
may well be the case that you have done nothing more than
transpose to the level of diffuse processes mechanisms which
psychoanalysis has identified with precision at the level ofthe
individual. But you pass over the thing on the basis of which
this sexualization was able to develop and which psychoanal
ysis does not fail to recognize-namely, sex. Before Freud,
one sought to localize sexuality as closely as possible: in sex,
in its reproductive functions, in its immediate anatomical
localizations; one fell back upon a biological minimum:
organ, instinct, and finality. You, on the other hand, are in
a symmetrical and inverse position: for you, there remain
only groundless effects, ramifications without roots, a sexual
ity without a sex. What is this if not castration once again?”
Here we need to distinguish between two questions. First,
does the analysis of sexuality necessarily imply the elision of
the body, anatomy, the biological, the functional? To this
question, I think we can reply in the negative. In any case,
the purpose of the present study is in fact to show how
deployments of power are directly connected to the body-

1 52 The History of Sexuality
to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and
pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is
needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the
biological and the historical are not consecutive to one an
other, as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are
bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accord
ance with the development of the modern technologies of
power that take life as their objective. Hence I do not envis
age a “history of mentalities” that would take account of
bodies only through the manner in which they have been
perceived and given meaning and value; but a “history of
bodies” and the manner in which what is most material and
most vital in them has been invested.
Another question, distinct from the first one: this material
ity that is referred to, is it not, then, that of sex, and is it not
paradoxical to venture a history of sexuality at the level of
bodies, without there being the least question of sex? After
all, is the power that is exercised through sexuality not di
rected specifically at that element of reality which is “sex,”
sex in general? That sexuality is not, in relation to power, an
exterior domain to which power is applied, that on the con
trary it is a result and an instrument of power’s designs, is
all very well. But as for sex, is it not the “other” with respect
to power, while being the center around which sexuality
distributes its effects? Now, it is precisely this idea of sex in
itself that we cannot accept without examination. Is “sex”
really the anchorage point that supports the manifestations
of sexuality, or is it not rather a complex idea that was
formed inside the deployment of sexuality? In any case, one
could show how this idea of sex took form in the different
strategies of power and the definite role it played therein.
All along the great lines which the development of the
deployment of sexuality has followed since the nineteenth
century, one sees the elaboration of this idea that there exists
something other than bodies, organs, somatic localizations,
functions, anatomo-physiological systems, sensations, and

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 3
pleasures; something else and something more, with intrinsic
properties and laws of its own: “sex . ” Thus, in the process
of hysterization of women, “sex” was defined in three ways:
as that which belongs in common to men and women; as that
which belongs, par excellence, to men, and hence is lacking
in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself
constitutes woman’s body, ordering it wholly in terms of the
functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agita
tion through the effects of that very function. Hysteria was
interpreted in this strategy as the movement of sex insofar as
it was the “one” and the “other,” whole and part, principle
and lack. In the sexualization of childhood, there was formed
the idea of a sex that was both present (from the evidence of
anatomy) and absent (from the standpoint of physiology),
present too if one considered its activity, and deficient if one
referred to its reproductive finality; or again, actual in its
manifestations, but hidden in its eventual effects, whose path
ological seriousness would only become apparent later. If the
sex of the child was still present in the adult, it was in the
form of a secret causality that tended to nullify the sex of the
latter (it was one of the tenets of eighteenth- and nineteenth
century medicine that precocious sex would eventually result
in sterility, impotence, frigidity, the inability to experience
pleasure, or the deadening of the senses); by sexualizing
childhood, the idea was established of a sex characterized
essentially by the interplay of presence and absence, the visi
ble and the hidden; masturbation and the effects imputed to
it were thought to reveal in a privileged way this interplay
of presence and absence, of the visible and the hidden.
In the psychiatrization of perversions, sex was related to
biological functions and to an anatomo-physiological ma
chinery that gave it its “meaning,” that is, its finality; but it
was also referred to an instinct which, through its peculiar
development and according to the objects to which it could
become attached, made it possible for perverse behavior pat
terns to arise and made their genesis intelligible. Thus “sex”

1 54 The History of Sexuality
was defined by the interlacing of function and instinct, final
ity and signification; moreover, this was the form in which
it was manifested, more clearly than anywhere else, in the
model perversion, in that “fetishism” which, from at least as
early as 1 877, served as the guiding thread for analyzing all
the other deviations. In it one could clearly perceive the way
in which the instinct became fastened to an object in accord
ance with an individual’s historical adherence and biological
inadequacy. Lastly, in the socialization of procreative behav
ior, “sex” was described as being caught between a law of
reality (economic necessity being its most abrupt and imme
diate form) and an economy of pleasure which was always
attempting to circumvent that law-when, that is, it did not
ignore it altogether. The most notorious of “frauds,” coitus
interruptus, represented the point where the insistence of the
real forced an end to pleasure and where the pleasure found
a way to surface despite the economy dictated by the real. It
is apparent that the deployment of sexuality, with its differ
ent strategies, was what established this notion of “sex”; and
in the four major forms of hysteria, onanism, fetishism, and
interrupted coition, it showed this sex to be governed by the
interplay of whole and part, principle and lack, absence and
presence, excess and deficiency, by the function of instinct,
finality, and meaning, of reality and pleasure.
The theory thus generated performed a certain number of
functions that made it indispensable. First, the notion of
“sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial
unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts,
sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of
this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent
meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus
able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal
signified. Further, by presenting itself in a unitary fashion, as
anatomy and lack, as function and latency, as instinct and
meaning, it was able to mark the line of contact between a
knowledge of human sexuality and the biological sciences of

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 5 5
reproduction; thus, without really borrowing anything from
the these sciences, excepting a few doubtful analogies, the
knowledge of sexuality gained through proximity a guaran
tee·of quasi-scientificity; but by virtue of this same proximity,
some of the contents of biology and physiology were able to
serve as a principle of normality for human sexuality. Fi
nally, the notion of sex brought about a fundamental rever
sal; it made it possible to invert the representation of the
relationships of power to sexuality, causing the latter to ap
pear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but
as being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which
power tries as best it can to dominate; thus the idea of “sex”
makes it possible to evade what gives “power” its power; it
enables one to conceive power solely as law and taboo. Sex
-that agency which appears to dominate us and that secret
which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which
enthralls us through the the power it manifests and the
meaning it conceals, and which we ask to reveal what we are
and to free us from what defines us-is doubtless but an ideal
point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality and its
operation. We must not make the mistake of thinking that
sex is an autonomous agency which secondarily produces
manifold effects of sexuality over the entire length of its
surface of contact with power. On the contrary, sex is the
most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a
deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on
bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensa
tions, and pleasures.
It might be added that “sex” performs yet another func
tion that runs through and sustains the ones we have just
examined. Its role in this instance is more practical than
theoretical. It is through sex-in fact, an imaginary point
determined by the deployment of sexuality-that each
individual has to pass in order to have access to his own
intelligibility (seeing that it is both the hidden aspect and the
generative principle of meaning), to the whole of his body

1 5 6 The History o f Sexuality
(since it is a real and threatened part of it, while symbolically
constituting the whole), to his identity (since it joins the force
of a drive to the singularity of a history). Through a reversal
that doubtless had its surreptitious beginnings long ago-it
‘ was already making itself felt at the time of the Christian
pastoral of the flesh-we have arrived at the point where we
expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many
centuries thought of as madness; the plenitude of our body
from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a
wound; our identity from what was perceived as an obscure
and nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to it,
the reverential fear with which we surround it, the care we
take to know it. Hence the fact that over the centuries it has
become more important than our soul, more important al
most than our life; and so it is that all the world’s enigmas
appear frivolous to us compared to this secret, minuscule in
each of us, but of a density that makes it more serious than
any other. The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been
instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as
follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the
truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It
is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued
with the death instinct. When a long while ago the West
discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to
make death acceptable; nowadays it is sex that claims this
equivalence, the highest of all. And while the deployment of
sexuality permits the techniques of power to invest life, the
fictitious point of sex, itself marked by that deployment,
exerts enough charm on everyone for them to accept hearing
the grumble of death within it.
By creating the imaginary element that is “sex,” the de
ployment of sexuality established one of its most essential
internal operating principles: the desire for sex-the desire to
have it, to have access to it, to discover it, to liberate it, to
articulate it in discourse, to formulate it in truth. It con
stituted “sex” itself as something desirable. And it is this

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 57
desirability of sex that attaches each one of us to the injunc
tion to know it, to reveal its law and its power; it is this
desirability that makes us think we are affirming the rights
of our sex against all power, when in fact we are fastened to
the deployment of sexuality that has lifted up from deep
within us a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves
reflected-the dark shimmer of sex.
“It is sex,” said Kate in The Plumed Serpent. “How won
derful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and
it fills the world! like sunshine through and through one!”
So we must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency
of sex; but rather show how “sex” is historically subordinate
to sexuality. We must not place sex on the side of reality, and
sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is
a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the
notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its opera
tion. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says
no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid
out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency
of sex that we must break away from, if we aim-through a
tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality-to
counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleas
ures, and know ledges, in their mUltiplicity and their possibil
ity of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack
against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex
desire, but bodies and pleasures.
“There has been so much action in the past,” said D. H.
Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearying repetition
over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corre
sponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex.
Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more
important than the act itself. ”
Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not
be able to understand how a civilization so intent on develop
ing enormous instruments of production and destruction

1 5 8 The History of Sexuality
found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxi
ously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile
perhaps when they recall that here were men-meaning our
selves-who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as
precious as the one they had already demanded from the
earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought; people
will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went about
pretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every
thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our
regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the
light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment. And
people will ask themselves why we were so bent on ending
the rule of silence regarding what was the noisiest of our
preoccupations. In retrospect, this noise may appear to have
been out of place, but how much stranger will seem our
persistence in interpreting it as but the refusal to speak and
the order t� remain silent. People will wonder what could
have made us so presumptuous; they will look for the reasons
that might explain why we prided ourselves on being the first
to grant sex the importance we say is its due and how we
came to congratulate ourselves for finally-in the twentieth
century-having broken free of a long period of harsh repres
sion, a protracted Christian asceticism, greedily and fastidi
ously adapted to the imperatives of bourgeois economy. And
what we now perceive as the chronicle of a censorship and
the difficult struggle to remove it will be seen rather as the
centuries-long rise of a complex deployment for compelling
sex to speak, for fastening our attention and concern upon
sex, for getting us to believe in the sovereignty of its law when
in fact we were moved by the power mechanisms of sexuality.
People will be amused at the reproach of pansexualism
that was once aimed at Freud and psychoanalysis. But the
ones who will appear to have been blind will perhaps be not
so much those who formulated the objection as those who
discounted it out of hand, as if it merely expressed the fears
of an outmoded prudishness. For the first, after all, were only

Right of Death and Power over Life 1 59
taken unawares by a process which had begun long before
and by which, unbeknown to them, they were already sur
rounded on all sides; what they had attributed solely to the
genius of Freud had already gone through a long stage of
preparation; they had gotten their dates wrong as to the
establishment, in our society, of a general deployment of
sexuality. But the others were mistaken concerning the na
ture of the process; they believed that Freud had at last,
through a sudden reversal, restored to sex the rightful share
which it had been denied for so long; they had not seen how
the good genius of Freud had placed it at one of the critical
points marked out for it since the eighteenth century by the
strategies of knowledge and power, how wonderfully effec
tive he was-worthy of the greatest spiritual fathers and
directors of the classical period-in giving a new impetus to
the secular injunction to study sex and transform it into
discourse. We are often reminded of the countless procedures
which Christianity once employed to make us detest the
body; but let us ponder all the ruses that were employed for
centuries to make us love sex, to make the knowledge of it
desirable and everything said about it precious. Let us con
sider the stratagems by which we were induced to apply all
our skills to discovering its secrets, by which we were at
tached to the obligation to draw out its truth, and made
guilty for having failed to recognize it for so long. These
devices are what ought to make us wonder today. Moreover,
we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in
a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no
longer quite understand how the ruses of sexuality, and the
power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us
to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated
to the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest
of confessions from a shadow.
The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that
our “liberation” is in the balance.

Index
adultery, 3 8 , 4 1
Anglican pastoral, 1 1 7. See also
Christian pastoral
Arabo-Moslem societies, 57
Aristotle, 1 43
ars erotica
compared with confession, 62
vs. scientia sexualis. 67, 70- 1
truth value, 57-8
atomic power, 1 37
auto-monosexualists, 43
Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 2 8 , 29
Bataille, 1 50
bestiality, 3 8
Bijoux indiscrets, Les (Diderot), 77,
79
bio-history, 1 43
bio-power, 1 4 0- 1 , 1 43-4
birth control
pathogenic value, 105
among working classes, 1 2 1
birthrate
and family organization, 100
regulation by state, 25-6, 1 1 6, 1 1 8
blood relations, 124, 1 47-50
body
discipline of, 1 39-40
early seventeenth-century atti
tudes, 3
encroachment of power on, 47-8
intensification of, 107, 1 2 3
perversion seen a s imbedded in,
43, 44
woman’s, 104, 1 2 1 , 1 46–7
Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 87
bourgeoisie
locus of sexual repression, 3-5, 1 7,
1 20- 1 , 1 2 2-7
perversion and, 47
BUrger, Gottfried August, 79
Campe, Joachim Heinrich, 63
capitalism
and bio-power, 1 40-1
and deployment of sexuality, 1 14
and sexual repression, 5-6
Catholic Church
during Counter Reformation, 1 9,
63, 70
Inquisition, 58
Lateran Council, 5 8 , 1 1 6
penitential practices, 1 1 6
waning influence against perver
sion, 4 1
See also Christian pastoral
censorship, 1 7- 1 8 , 2 1 , 84
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 55, 56 and n.,
1 1 1 – 1 2
children
confession guidelines for, 1 9
and hysterization of women’s bod
ies, 1 46–7
under patria potestas, 1 3 5
1 6 1

1 62 Index
and psychoanalysis, I 1 3
sexualization of, 1 5 3
sexual segregation i n nineteenth
century family, 46
children’s sexuality
eighteenth-century attitudes, 27-
30, 3 7
interference with, 4 1 -2
and loci of power, 9 8 , 99
pedagogization, 104
scrutiny of, 38
and socialization of sex, 1 1 6, 1 1 7
Victorian attitude, 4
China, 57
Christian pastoral
evolution after Council of Trent,
1 8-20
and family alliance, 1 1 3- 1 4
obligation t o confess, 20– 1 , 3 5 ,
60– 1
and pleasures of sex, 63
regulation of sexual practices, 37
transformation of desire, 22-3
See also confession
Christian religion
asceticism, 1 58
penitential practices, 1 1 6, 1 1 7
rejection of body, 1 59
technology of the flesh, 1 2 1 , 1 5 6
class structure, and sexual repres-
sion, 1 20–7
coitus interruptus, 1 54
Condorcet, Marquis de, 24
confession
compared with ars erotica, 62
and development of archives of
sexual pleasure, 63-4
historical significance, 1 1 6
in literature, 2 1 -2, 5 9-60
and loss of freedom, 60– 1
manuals of Middle Ages, 1 8
means of scientizing, 65-7
pervasive role, 5 9
privileged theme of, 6 1
and production o f truth, 58-9, 60,
6 1
recent transformation, 63
as ritual of power, 6 1-2
as therapy, 67
transformation of sex into dis
course, 20– 1
of “unnatural” sexuality, 3 8-9
confessor
hermaneutic function, 66-7
power relationship, 6 1 -2
consanguine marriage, 4 1
Council of Trent, 1 9
Counter Reformation, 1 9, 63, 70
criminal justice, 30. See also law
death, 1 3 5ft’.
as limit of power, 1 3 8
loosening grip of, 1 42
suicide, 1 3 8-9
death instinct, 1 5 6
death penalty, l 3 7-8
debauchery, 3 8 , 39
“degenerescence,” 1 1 8- 1 9
Dekker, 1 1 7
desire
relation to power, 8 1 -3 , 86, 89-90
transformation into discourse, 20,
2 1 , 23
Dialogues (Erasmus), 27
Diderot, Denis, 79
discourse
juridico-political, 87-9
tactical polyvalence, 100–2
See also sexual discourse
Don Juan character, 39-40
dreams, 20
dyspareunist women, 43
economy, and sexuality. 1 06-7. 1 14.
See also capitalism
ecstasy. 70
Ellis. Havelock, 63
Erasmus, 27
erotic art. See ars erotica
erotic literature, 2 1 -3
eugenics movement. 1 1 8, 1 1 9,
148-50

Index 1 6 3
family
and deployment of sexuality,
1 0 8 – 1 4
incest taboo, 1 09-10, 1 1 3
as locus of power, 1 00
a s locus o f psychiatrization o f sex,
1 20— 1
penetration of medico-sexual re
gime into, 42
psychoanalytic view of, 1 1 2- 1 3
sexual segregation o f members,
46
Victorian attitudes, 3
fetishism, 1 54
Franciscans, 8
freedom, vs. power, 86
French monarchy, 87-8
French Revolution
constitutions since, 144
effect on public law, 89
end of plague era, 142
status of contraception at time of,
26
Freud, Sigmund
and changing nature of sexual dis
course, 5 3 , 56
conformism, 5
and locus of sexuality, 1 50!
1 5 1
normalization of sex, 1 1 9
Oedipus complex, 1 30
preparation for, 1 5 8-9
Garnier, Pierre, 54
genocide, 1 3 7
German philanthropic movement,
2 8
Gerson, Jean Charlier, 1 1 7
Goethe, Johann Wilhelm yon,
29
Greece (ancient)
linking of sex and learning, 6 1
penal law, 5 9 n.
rational influence, 78
Guibert, Jacques A. H . de, 1 40
gynecomasts, 43
Herbert, Claude-Jacques, 25
heredity
bourgeois concern with, 1 2 1 ,
1 24-5
and sexual technology, 1 1 8- 1 9
hermaphrodism
criminal status, 3 8
and homosexuality, 43
Hitlerism, 1 50
Hobbes, Thomas, 1 3 5
homosexuality
entry into sexual discourse, 1 0 1
initial characterization, 43
and penal law, 38
hygiene, 54
hypnosis, 65
Ideologists, 140
incest
and alliance systems, 1 09-10, 1 1 3
and psychoanalysis, 1 29-30
as sin, 3 8
India, 5 7
infidelity, 3 8
Inquisition, 5 8
institutions
biopolitics of, 1 4 1
power relationships, 8�8
Japan, 57
Jouy case, 3 1 -2
Justi, Johann yon, 25
Kaan, Heinrich, 63, 1 1 8
Krafft-Ebing, Richard yon, 43, 63
Ladoucette, Doctor, 54
language, censorship of sex in, 1 7-
1 8, 2 1 , 84. See also sexual dis
course
Lateran Council of 1 2 1 5, 58, 1 1 6
law
and alliance systems, 1 06-7, 1 08
and incest, 109- 1 0
YS. medical regimentation, 4 1
normalization of, 144
political significance, 87-9

1 64 Index
power over sex, 8 3
of prohibition, 84
and sexual acts “contrary to na
ture,” 38
and sodomy, 43
Lawrence, D. H . , 1 57
Lenz, Jacob Michael, 1 1 0 n.
life
entry into history, 1 4 1-3
as political object, 1 44-5
Liguori, Alfonso de’, 1 9, 1 1 6, 120
literature
confessional, 59-60
sexual discourse in, 2 1 -3
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 97
Malthusian couple
strategic significance, 1 05
Victorian ideal, 3
See also procreation
Marcus, Steven, 4
marriage
and alliance system, 1 06
consanguine, 4 1
protection and surveillance of,
37-8
masturbation
interference with, 42
vs. reproductive sex, 1 5 3
schools designed t o prohibit, 28,
29
See also onanism
medicine
detachment of sexuality from alli
ance system, 1 1 2
development of sexual technolo
gies, 1 1 6– 1 9
early disgust a t sexual discourse,
24
entry into sexual discourse, 30
homosexuality characterized by,
43
interference with children’s sexu
ality, 4 1 , 42
pathological approach to sex, 4 1 ,
54-6
political inadequacy, 5
and power-pleasure spiral, 44-5
therapeutic interest in confession,
67
See also psychiatry
mental hospitals, 4, 46, 55-6
mental illness
and family alliances, 1 1 1 – 1 2
search for sexual causes, 30
and “unnatural” sexuality, 36, 38
Methodists, 1 20
Middle Ages
confession, 1 8, 58
development of public law, 87
institutions of power, 86
sexual discourse in, 3 3
torture, 59
mixoscopophiles, 43
Moheau, (demographer), 140
Moliere, 1 1 0 n.
Molle, 63
Mollities (Gerson), 1 1 7
monarchy, juridical powers, 87-9
My Secret Life (anonymous), 2 1-2
Nazism, 1 49-50
obedience, 85
Oedipus complex, 1 30
Onania (Dekker), 1 1 7
onanism
and class structure, 1 2 1
and sexual discourse, 30
war against, 104
See also masturbation
patria potestas. 1 3 5
peace, aim o f power, 87
penance
and alliance systems, 1 07-8
and sexual discourse, 1 8, 1 9, 20
technological developments, \ \6,
1 1 7
perversion, 36-49
children’s sexuality treated as,
4 1-2
domain of, 40, 1 1 8
fragmentation of, 39

Index 1 6 5
medical view of, 4 1
minor, 43-4
new specifications, 42-4
penal laws, 3 8
psychiatrization of, 30, 105, 1 5 3-5
Philanthropinum, 29
pleasure
“negative relation” of power to, 8 3
and sensualization o f power, 44–5 ,
48-9
of sexual discourse, 7 1
i n truth, 7 1
See also sexual pleasure
Plumed Serpant, The (Lawrence),
1 5 7
population
biological survival, 1 37
biopolitics of, 1 3 9-40
sexual regulation, 25-6, 1 1 6, 1 1 8,
145-7
and war, 1 3 7
possession, 70, 1 1 7
Pouillet, Thesee, 54
power
“analytics” of, 82-3
and blood relations, 1 47-50
over children’s sexuality, 4 1-2
confession as ritual of, 6 1 -2
and desire, 8 3 , 89-90
encroachment on individual bod-
ies, 47-8
generalized locus, 93, 94, 96
in juridico-political discourse,
87-9
-as-law, 82
modes of ruling over sex, 8 3
a s multiplicity o f force relation-
ships, 92-3
“negative relation” to sex, 8 3
and obedience, 85
origin of, 94
and pleasure, spirals of, 44–5 , 48-9
political institutionalization, 86-7
polymorphous techniques, 1 1
and population problem, 25-6
positive relation to sex hypothe-
sized, 90– 1
and prohibition, 84
pure form, 83
question of relation to sexual re-
pression, 1 0
rationality of, 94-5
resistance to, 95-6
and secrecy, 86, 1 0 1
o f sovereign, 1 3 5-6
strategies involving sexuality,
1 03-6
uniformity of apparatus, 84-5
and war, 1 36-7
power relationships
and confession ritual, 6 1-3
continual variations, 99
“double conditioning,” 99-100
as intentional and nonsubjective,
94-5
Machiavellian view, 97
and other relationships, 94
and sexual discourse, 97-8
shifting matrices, 99
strategic vs. legal model, 102
presbyophiles, 43
procreation
political and economic signifi-
cance, 25-6
psychiatric view, 30
socialization of, 105-6
supported in sexual discourse,
36-7
Victorian attitudes, 3-4
See also reproduction
prohibition, cycle of, 84
proletariat, 1 27. See also working
class
prostitution, 4, 27
Protestantism, 6 3 , 1 1 6
psychiatry
and alliance systems, 1 1 0
antirepressive effects, 1 1 9
characterization of homosexual-
ity, 43
classification of pleasure, 63-4
and power-pleasure spiral, 45
and sexual perversion, 30, 105

1 66 Index
and sodomy, 1 0 1
specification o f minor perversions,
43–4
psychoanalysis
antirepressive effects, 1 1 9
denial of repression of Sex, 8 1
and family alliances, 1 1 2-1 3
and incest, 1 29-30
opposition to fascism, 1 50
political inadequacy, 5
Psychopathia Sexualis (Kaan), 1 1 8
Pufendorf, Samuel von, 1 3 6 n.
Quesnay, Fran<;ois, 1 40 racism and blood relations, 1 49-50 and medicalization of sex, 54 and sexual technology, 1 1 9 and state intervention in sex, 26 rape, 3 8 Reformation, 1 1 6, 1 22 Reich, Wilhelm, 5, 1 3 1 relationships of blood, 1 24, 1 47-50 power inherent in, 94 See also power relationships repression. See sexual repression repressive hypothesis, 1 0 - 1 2 and incitement to discourse, 1 7-35 and perversion, 36--49 reproduction biological significance, 54-5, 78 and deployment of alliance, 107 See also procreation ritual, of confession, 6 1 -2 Rohleder, Hermann, 43 Rollinat, Maurice, 54 Rome (ancient) ars erotica, 57 patria potestas, 1 3 5 penal law, 5 9 n . , 87 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse de, 2 1 , 1 48-9, 1 50 Salpetriere, 55-6 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 28, 63 Sanchez, Tomas, 19 Saxe, Marshal de, 140 schools, 27-9, 46 science, approach to sexual dis course, 53--4. See also medicine secrecy in ars erotica, 57 and buried truth of sex, 69-70 exploitation of, 34-5 and power, 86, 1 0 1 surrounding children's sexual practices, 42 Segneri, Paolo, 1 9 , 20 Servan, Joseph-Michel-Antoine, 1 40 sex in art. See ars erotica binary system, 8 3 causal power imputed t o , 65-6 and censorship, 1 7- 1 8 , 2 1 , 84 and death instinct, 1 5 6 desirability, 1 56-7 discourse on. See sexual discourse exploitation of its secrecy, 34-5 intrinsic latency imputed to, 66 in literature, 2 1 -3, 59-60 logic of, 78 medicalization of, 1 1 7- 1 9 . See also medicine "negative relation" of power to, 8 3 as a police matter, 24-5 and political technology, 1 45-7 and population problems, 25-6 as privileged theme of confession, 6 1 as a problem of truth, 5 6-7, 69-70 prohibition of, 84 relation to sexuality, 1 5 1-7 ruled by power, 83 socialization of, 1 1 6- 1 7 technology of, 90, 1 1 9 two orders of knowledge about, 54-5 See also sexuality sex education, 28-9, 42 sexoesthetic inverts, 43 Index 1 67 sexual discourse, 1 7- 3 5 and censorship, 1 7- 1 8, 2 1 , 8 4 about children's sex, 2 7-30 in the confessional, 1 8-2 1 , 3 5 , 6 1 -3. See also confession illicit, 4, 1 8 on incest, 1 29-30 in literature, 2 1- 3 , 59-60 new sources in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 30-1 pervasiveness of, 32-4 and pleasure, 7 1 political incitement to, 1 7- 1 8, 34-5 and power relationships, 97-8 process of scientization, 53-73 and the public interest, 23-6 sanctions against perversion, 36--7 and sodomy, 1 0 1 valorization and enlargement o f boundaries, 2 3 sexual initiation and ars erotica, 57 compared to discourse, 62 sexual pleasure and ars erotica, 58 confessional archives, 63-4 perverse, 1 05 See also pleasure sexual practices and ars erotica, 5 7 seventeenth-century frankness, 3 three major codes regulating, 37-8 sexual repression advent of, 5, 1 7 and class structure, 1 20-2 denial of, 8 1-2 distinguished from legal prohibi tion, 4 economic and political motives, 5-6, 25-6 in eighteenth-century schools, 27-30 vs. expansion of sexual discourse, 1 7- 1 8, 34-5, 72-3 history of, 1 1 5-3 1 liberation from, 5, 1 0 modern discourses o n , 6--9, 10, 1 1 , 1 2 . See also sexual discourse Reich's critique, 1 3 1 See also repressive hypothesis sexuality and alliance systems, 1 06-- 1 3 and blood relations, 1 47-9 of children. See children's sexual- ity and class structure, 1 20-7 as correlative of discourse, 68-9 as historical construct, 105-6, 1 0 8 latency principle, 66 psychoanalysis, role of, 1 29-30 relation to sex, 1 5 1-7 as sin, 9 strategies involving, 103-5 in Victorian era, 3-4 See also sex sin confession of, 1 9-20. See also con fession sexual perversion as, 3 8 Sixth Commandment, 39 sodomy ancient laws, 43 discourse on, 1 0 1 distinguished from homosexuality, 43 as sin, 3 8 uncertain status, 3 7 states policing of sex, 24-6 power strategy, 1 3 7 suicide, 1 3 8-9 Stissmi1ch, Johann Peter, 1 40 Tamburini, Tommaso, 1 9 Tardieu, Auguste, 24, 63 Tartuffe (Moliere), 1 1 0 n. Three Essays (Freud), 27 torture, 59 and n. Tridentine Catholicism, 1 1 6 truth and confession, 58-63 pleasure in, 7 1 Tutor, The (Lenz), 1 1 0 n . 1 68 Index venereal disease, 54, 1 1 8 Victorian era influence on modern sexual dis course, 3-1 3 sexual literature, 2 1 -3 war new technology, 1 36-7 and power, 93, 1 02 sovereign's rights, 1 3 5 Wesley, John, 1 1 6 Westphal, Carl, 43 Wolke (professor at Philanthropi num), 29 women's bodies, hysterization of, 104, 1 2 1 , 1 46-7 working class, spread of repression to, 1 2 1 -2 zooerasts, 43 A bout the A u thor Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1 926. He has lectured in many universities throughout the world and served as Director of the Institut Fran<;ais in Ham burg and the Institut de Philosophie at the Faculte des Lettres in the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He writes frequently for French newspapers and reviews, and is the holder of a chair at France's most prestigious institution, the College de France. In addition to his classic study, Madness and Civiliza tion, M. Foucault is the author of The Order of Things, The A rchaeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, and L Pierre R iviere. His latest book, Discipline and Pun ish: The Birth of the Prison, was published by Pantheon in 1 97 8 .

From Mary to Modern Woman: The Material Basis of Marianismo and Its Transformation
in a Spanish Village
Author(s): Jane F. Collier
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 100-107
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644588
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from Mary to modern woman:
the material basis of Marianismo

and its transformation in a Spanish village

JANE F. COLLIER-Stanford University

In 1963-64, the married women of Los Olivos (pseudonym), a small village in the mountains
of Huelva, southwestern Spain, seemed typical representatives of Mediterranean culture. When
housewives gathered at the public fountain to wash clothes, they wore drab, shapeless outfits,
and many wore mourning. Most were overweight. Washing clothes and attending funerals
were their most public activities. In the evenings married women stayed home or visited the
sick. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1984, the new generation of married women pre-
sented a very different picture. Instead of wearing drab, shapeless clothes, most wore outfits
that showed off their figures. And most had shapely figures. They worried about gaining weight,

although some were notably more successful at dieting than others. Married women no longer
stayed home every evening. Rather, they spent weekend evenings with their husbands in the
local bars, where they sat around tables dressed in their most fashionable outfits, with heavy
makeup and elaborate hairdos.

How do we understand such a radical shift in married women’s presentation of self? The

explanation offered by many ethnographers of Spanish villages-and echoed by residents of
Los Olivos-is that rural Spain has “opened up” (see Aceves and Douglass 1976). Massive
emigration from the countryside and the spread of television into remote villages have exposed
the present generation of rural Spaniards to ideas and choices not available to their parents and

grandparents. Villagers in Los Olivos, for example, say that 20 years ago their village was atra-
sado (backward). People followed outmoded customs, they say, because they did not know
any others. But now everyone has city relatives and a television set, and many people have

cars. Today’s adults have been exposed to city ways. Now everyone below the age of 60 wants
to be “modern.” Married women want to dress nicely and go out with their husbands. And

young adults think that former village customs, such as delaying marriage until age 30, or wear-

ing heavy mourning for 10 years after the death of a parent, are tonterias (stupidities). Such
“backward” village customs are to be discarded.

The “opening up” explanation is not wrong. But it is not very illuminating either. To begin,
the village was not isolated in 1963-64. There may have been only two television sets in town,
but everyone had radios. Women also had excellent knowledge of how urban fashion setters

In one generation, married women in an Andalusian village appeared to have
turned from emulating the Virgin Mary to emulating the modern woman of Spanish
advertisements and TV. Drawing on the notion that gender conceptions are aspects
of cultural systems through which people negotiate relations of inequality within
complex social wholes, I suggest that a concern for female chastity gave way to a
concern for personal capacities and preferences when inequalities in income and
life-style among villagers no longer appeared to rest on inheritance, but on the
urban, salaried jobs people obtained. [Mediterranean society, gender, political
economy, honor code, ideology]

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lived and dressed. Many girls worked as servants for wealthy families before returning to marry

in the village. And glossy magazines depicting royalty and movie stars circulated among village
women. Local dressmakers and hairdressers were, in fact, so successful at copying city fashions
for unmarried women that I had difficulty distinguishing dressed up village maidens from stylish

urban dwellers (see also Martinez-Alier 1971:208).

Given that villagers knew a great deal about the customs and life-styles of middle- and upper-
class urban dwellers in 1963-64, the “opening up” hypothesis cannot explain why married
women’s presentation of self changed drastically in 20 years. Rather, what is needed is an ex-
planation of why city ways became attractive to today’s adults when they had not been so for
their parents. In addition, the “opening up” hypothesis does not explain the content of the
“traditional” and the “modern.” Why should married women in 1963-64 have worn drab
clothes, cultivated plump figures, and stayed home in the evenings? And why should today’s
generation of married women wear bright clothes, try to stay thin, and join their husbands at
bars on weekends? Similarly, why should young people today think it “unnatural” to delay
marriage until age 30, and why should they call village mourning customs “stupidities”?

In this paper, I shall suggest answers to both the content and the change questions. As to
content, I will argue that cultural conceptions of gender must be interpreted as aspects of cul-
tural systems through which people manipulate, interpret, rationalize, resist, and reproduce
relations of inequality within complex social wholes (see Collier and Rosaldo 1981). To un-
derstand conceptions of gender, we cannot look at what men and women are or do, but rather
must ask what people want and fear, what privileges they seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.
To understand gender, we must understand social inequality. And, if gender conceptions are
idioms for interpreting and manipulating social inequality, then we should expect notions of
femininity and masculinity to change when one organization of inequality gives way to an-
other.

Twenty years ago, Los Olivos seemed indistinguishable from the Andalusian village Pitt-
Rivers described in his 1954 book, The People of the Sierra. Their gender system was a typical
example of the Mediterranean values of “honor and shame.” A man’s honor was a function of
his mother’s, sisters’, and wife’s sexual chastity. A family’s reputation depended on the sexual
shame of its women and on the readiness of its men to defend, with violence if need be, its
women’s purity.

A cultural concern for female chastity is not unique to Mediterranean peoples. Rather, all
complex agrarian societies, including India and China, have forms of the “virginity complex”
(Ortner 1976). The association of virginity with agrarian systems thus suggests a first-level ex-
planation for its occurrence: in stratified societies where rights and privileges are vested in sta-

tus groups, female chastity becomes a cultural concern because legitimate birth is the primary
idiom people use to claim, rationalize, and defend status privileges.’ Legitimate birth is, of
course, not the basis of status inequalities. Such inequalities result from unequal access to the
means of production as maintained by coercive force. But individuals living within such soci-
eties rarely have occasion to contemplate the wider structure of inequality. Rather, people en-
gaged in everyday, practical action are concerned with asserting their own rights and privileges
against the challenges of particular others. As a result, people talk and act as if inheritance were
the basis of status inequalities.

In a world where people claim, defend, and justify privileges on the basis of legitimate birth,
illegitimacy is the idiom people use to challenge or deny others’ claims to precedence.2 To
question the chastity of a man’s mother is to question his right to the status he claims as his. In
such a world, women’s bodies appear as gateways to all privileges. But women’s bodies are
gateways any man may enter. Women’s penetrability is their most significant feature. The status

and reputation of a family thus rest on the degree to which its women are protected from pen-
etration-by women’s own sense of sexual shame, by being locked away, and/or by the cour-
age of family men in repelling seducers.

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While an understanding of stratified agrarian societies may provide a first-level explanation

for “virginity complexes,” any particular instance of the complex must be understood within
its specific historical context. Women’s chastity may be a primary idiom used by people in
stratified agrarian societies for negotiating claims to unequal privileges, but it is not the only
idiom. Such societies are complex. They contain many status and ethnic groups. Women’s
chastity may not matter to some. And, as Mediterraneanists realize, the “values of honor and
shame” are not uniform throughout the area (Peristiany 1966; Herzfeld 1980). In order to un-
derstand how “honor and shame” are lived in any particular time and place, therefore, we need

to examine the specific privileges people seek to claim, rationalize, and defend.
In 1963-64, Los Olivos was a small village of less than 800 people where inheritance ap-

peared to determine people’s occupations, incomes, and life-chances. Although the commu-
nity appeared egalitarian (the wealthiest landowners lived outside in nearby, more significant
towns, and beggars rarely stayed overnight), the village was nevertheless divided into three
status groups: (1) a small number of resident landowners who hired workers and did not do
manual labor themselves, (2) a larger number of landowners who worked their own land but
did not have to work for others, and (3) many people with little or no land who worked for
others as day laborers. Long before 1963-64, Los Olivos was integrated into the capitalist world
system. The larger landowners produced for the market, and half the villagers worked for
wages. But inheritance still appeared to be the major determinant of people’s life-chances be-
cause, in a labor-intensive system of mixed-crop agriculture, workers knew as much or more
about the entire agricultural process as their employers.3 As a result, villagers lived in a world
where the most obvious explanation for differences in occupation, income, and life-style was
that some people had inherited capital (land or small industries) while others had not.

Although Los Olivos appeared to be a “traditional” Spanish village, the “tranquil” com-
munity we observed in 1963-64 was, in fact, only one moment in an ongoing historical pro-
cess. As Perez Diaz (1976) notes, change in Spain has been continuous. In Andalusia, a process
of class polarization, begun during the last century and intensifying as the accumulation of land
by entrepreneurial landlords created an increasingly large and impoverished class of landless
rural laborers, was contained by various mechanisms, including naked force (see Martinez-
Alier 1971). For a brief period in the early 1930s class warfare erupted in Los Olivos. An active

union of agrarian socialists wrested control of wages and working conditions from landowners
(Collier n.d.). But during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, all vocal socialists were killed or
exiled and Franco’s victorious troops gave control of village government to the town’s wealth-
iest landowners, who thereafter ruled with the aid of a resident contingent of Civil Guards.

Before the Civil War, working-class women married at a younger age than women of the
propertied class, and many were pregnant at marriage. But after the war, these differences in
behavior by class disappeared (Collier 1983). Not only were many working-class women
forced to delay their marriages by the war and subsequent famine, but the town’s elites, who
enjoyed uncontested control of economic resources, focused on a woman’s virtue when con-
sidering her, or her family’s, requests for aid.4 It was also true that, even for working-class fam-
ilies whose estate consisted of labor power rather than capital, the wealth parents accumulated
determined children’s dowries and the spouses they could attract (see Price and Price 1966b).
In 1963-64, landowners’ uncontested control of village affairs ensured that all people, whether

from propertied families or not, lived in a world where the resources and reputations of parents
appeared to determine the status of their children.

Given the apparent role of inheritance in determining people’s occupations, incomes, and
life-chances, people’s actions, whatever their ostensible purpose, were always open to being
interpreted as statements about a man’s courage or a woman’s sexual modesty. Whatever prac-
tical reasons, for example, a couple may have had to delay marriage until the bride’s 29th or
30th year, such a delay offered visible proof of the bride’s ability to deny and control her sexual
impulses. Similarly, the woman who dutifully observed 10 years of mourning after the death of

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a parent demonstrated-by wearing heavy black wool summer and winter-her ability to mor-
tify the flesh. And the married woman who never spent a perra on herself demonstrated both
her capacity for self-sacrifice and her lack of interest in being sexually attractive to men. On
the other side, of course, the pregnant bride, the mourning woman who laid aside her shawl
while working in the sun, and the wife who bought herself a new dress were all appropriate
targets of gossip.

Although a woman’s sexual modesty was never without significance, maidens enjoyed a
freedom apparently denied to married women.5 Marriage marked a major turning point in peo-
ple’s lives. Due to the system of equal, partible inheritance, family estates were not maintained
through time, but rather constituted anew each generation with the birth of children who united

the separate inheritances of their parents. As a result, marriage, with its possibility for producing

legitimate heirs, marked the point at which a man and woman passed from dependence on
parental estates to responsibility for the future estate their children would divide. Unmarried

young adults, as people without responsibilities, were expected to divertirse (enjoy them-
selves). Maidens were thus encouraged to seek amusement and to follow the latest fashions-
as long as they did not violate community norms of modesty. Married people, in contrast, had

obligaciones (obligations). A married woman was expected to sacrifice herself to build the es-
tate her children would inherit. Divertirse and obligaciones stood in stark contrast. For a mar-
ried woman to “enjoy herself” was, by definition, to squander her children’s inheritance.

By 1984, Los Olivos was a different world. Heavy outmigration has reduced the permanent
population to under 300 and overturned the class structure. The migration of landless workers
to city jobs left landowners with the choice of farming their own land or migrating too. The
poorest and most overworked people in the village are now the landowners who stayed, while

poor workers who migrated first, and so participated in the industrial boom of the 1 960s, enjoy
month-long vacations in village houses they have renovated with cash from city jobs.6

The decisive break occurred in the mid-1 960s. 1963-64 was, in fact, the end of an era. Dur-

ing the 1960s, ongoing developments in Spain became “so acute that the point [was] reached
where the traditional framework, maintained for about a century, [lost] its fundamental char-
acteristics and [disappeared]” (Perez Diaz 1976:123). In Los Olivos, the labor-intensive agri-
cultural system finally collapsed, due to rising wages and competition from capital-intensive
agricultural enterprises elsewhere in Spain. Records beginning at the turn of the century indi-
cate a steady rate of emigration from Los Olivos before 1963-64, but the people who left were
either members of the wealthiest class-who were regionally, rather than locally, based any-
way-or landless laborers, many of whom had, in one way or another, lost their “honor.”
Given high rates of unemployment throughout Andalusia, and the general suspicion of
strangers, most people who could make a living in Los Olivos stayed there. In the mid-1 960s,
however, when the agricultural system collapsed, children of landed and honorable families
began migrating to city jobs. The generation of people who came of age in the 1960s, whether
they emigrated or remained in Los Olivos, thus entered a different world.

For members of this generation and their children, inheritance no longer appears to be the
major determinant of occupation, income, and life-style. Rather, people experience their oc-
cupations and incomes as determined by their personal choices and abilities. Schoolteachers,
nurses, postmen, policemen, and banktellers talk about how hard they studied and how well
they did on national or firm exams. Bus and truck drivers talk of learning to drive and acquiring
licenses. And villagers who inherited small enterprises talk of the skills they acquired and the
capital improvements they made. On the other side, people blame the poor and unemployed
for their failure. Everyone recognizes that Spain has a very high rate of unemployment, espe-
cially among young people, but when explaining why a particular youth has been unable to
find a job, people talk of his poor school record or his lack of initiative.

In short, the people of Los Olivos, both its migrants and those who are still in the village, now
live in a world where personal choice and ability is the primary idiom people use to claim,

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rationalize, and defend inequalities in working conditions, income, and life-style.7 Personal
ability is, of course, not the basis of inequality. The distribution of income and jobs in Spain,
as in most of the developed world, is organized through a market shaped by the fiscal policies

of core state governments, maintained by coercive force. But, just as people living in stratified

agrarian societies talk about legitimate birth, so people facing an array of possible jobs talk
about personal desires and qualifications. And, just as in agrarian societies, a woman’s penetra-
bility is her most important feature, so in industrial societies, a woman’s most important feature

is the “womanliness” that differentiates her from, and makes her attractive to, men.

In a world where people’s inward capacities and preferences appear to determine their oc-
cupations, a woman’s biological capacity to bear children seems to determine her apparently
primary occupation of housewife and mother.8 And, in a world where a homemaker’s life-style

is largely determined by her husband’s income, a woman’s status and life-chances appear to
depend on the kind of man she can attract. As a result, a woman’s physical appearance is al-
ways open to being interpreted as a statement about her moral and social worth. A woman’s
appearance also provides evidence for assessing the judgment and character of the man who

is her husband or lover, although a man’s job tends to be the primary standard by which his
worth is assessed. Whatever a woman’s appearance, therefore, it is never without significance.

The woman who takes care of her body and dresses attractively, particularly as she grows older,

displays her “womanliness” and testifies to the good judgment of her man. The woman of slov-

enly appearance, on the other hand, suggests both inward and outward failure. Among Los
Olivos natives under 60, for example, a fat, uncared-for body and drab clothes are the sign of

a country hick. They proclaim a family’s status as unskilled laborers on the bottom of the social

hierarchy.

Today’s parents are concerned-as their own parents were-to provide their children with
the resources children need for succeeding as adults. But today, education, not property, ap-
pears to be the most important determinant of a child’s future income and status-at least for

this population of working-, and lower-middle-class families. Many parents thus sacrifice them-

selves to enroll their children in private schools, and/or to provide music lessons, English les-

sons, typing lessons, and so forth. “Sacrifice,” however, has a very different meaning to modern

parents. Divertirse and obligaciones are no longer cultural opposites. Because investment in a
child’s education, unlike investment in family property, may or may not pay off, parents who

have done all they can for children see no reason not to spend leftover money on themselves.

More importantly, today’s adults are expected to spend their money and leisure time in ways

that enhance their enjoyment and enrich their experience. The consumer products people buy,

and the uses they make of leisure time, testify to their sense of taste and knowledge of modern

ways.

In this paper, I have focused on gender conceptions, arguing that notions of masculinity and

femininity must be understood with reference to the idioms people use in negotiating practical

social relations within complex social wholes. I suggested that the married women of Los Oli-
vos in 1963-64 wore drab clothes and ran to fat because they lived within a system of inequal-

ity where legitimate birth was the primary idiom people used to claim, rationalize, and defend
unequal privileges. In such a system, a married woman’s drab clothes and sexual unattractive-
ness testified to the legitimacy of her children and to her concern for building their future prop-

erty. As of 1984, in contrast, the people of Los Olivos, both migrants and those still in the vil-
lage, live within a system of inequality where a person’s capacities and desires appear to de-
termine the job or spouse he or she acquires. Today, the woman who keeps her figure and
dresses fashionably testifies to her own worth and to her capacity for attracting and keeping a
desirable man, even as the married woman who visits a bar with her husband demonstrates,
not a lack of interest in her children’s future, but rather her sophistication. Twenty years ago,

the women of Los Olivos were judged according to how well they emulated the Virgin Mary.

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Today they are judged according to how well they emulate the Modern Woman of advertise-
ments and TV.

Although I have used implicit models of “agrarian” and “industrial” societies to analyze the
content of gender conceptions in Los Olivos, I have also argued that the gender conceptions of
particular peoples can be understood only in relation to their specific historical experiences.
The Modern Woman of Spanish advertisements and TV may look a great deal like her North
American counterpart, but the lived experiences of Los Olivos women are not those of their
North American age mates. As Southern Europeans, the modern women of Los Olivos draw on

a different cultural heritage. They seem more concerned with dressing and decorating their
bodies than with their bodies themselves. They also seem-to me, at least-more self-confident
and less dependent on men than American women. Spanish mothers of young children, who
have difficulty finding and keeping jobs, are, like their American counterparts, only one man
away from destitution, but divorces among Los Olivos couples are still infrequent, and the few
women whose husbands left them are not blamed for having failed to keep their men. Even the
enemies of a woman whose husband left her with four small children blame the husband rather

than the wife. Similarly, mothers are pitied, not blamed, when their children turn out badly.
More importantly, the women of Los Olivos have lived, and are living, through a different

history. Today’s adults have, in their lifetimes, experienced a radical cultural break. The women

who came of age in the early 1960s grew up, courted, and perhaps married within the value
system of “honor and shame” (see Price and Price 1966a). They lived out the cultural require-
ment to enjoy themselves, expecting to assume later the obligaciones of marriage and parent-
hood. But their lives turned out differently. As the labor-intensive agricultural system collapsed,
many migrated to cities as workers and/or wives of migrating men, while those who remained

in the village found that farming shifted from a way of life to a way of making a living (see
Harding 1984). The generation of people who came of age in the early 1960s, who grew up
within a cultural system of “honor and shame,” have thus been living their adult lives within a
cultural system that emphasizes personal initiative and abilities.

Not only have today’s adults lived through a cultural break, they continue to live it each day.

Given that Los Olivos was never isolated from outside ideas, I expected to find evidence of a
gradual shift from one cultural system to the other. I thought that people who lived through the
1960s would embrace aspects of both systems, or at least understand them both. But I was
mistaken. Instead, individuals seem to live within one system, and to misunderstand the other.

The cultural break appears gradual because members of both generations act in ways they
hope will please the other. Elderly widows, for example, often exchange their mourning cos-
tumes for dark print dresses in order to please their children, even as younger women whose
parents have died will don black dresses to please elderly relatives, particularly when visiting
the village. But even as young and old act to please others they care about, they seem to lack
a deep understanding of why those others care.

When elderly widows explain why younger women have abandoned mourning costume,
they say that young women fear adverse gossip from urban dwellers who look down on those

who wear black. Young women, however, never mention gossip. Instead, they talk of grief as
an inward feeling. They see no reason to display personal grief publicly by wearing black. And
they actively condemn the “hypocrisy” of those who continue to wear mourning long after
grief could be deeply felt. I have often heard younger women explain their reasons to elderly
mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, but I have never heard an older woman who advanced the

“gossip” explanation either suggest she understood the younger woman or spontaneously pro-
duce the “feeling” explanation herself.

Similarly, young women seem to misunderstand their elders. Even those who came of age in
the 1960s, and so grew up within a cultural system of “honor and shame,” seem to misunder-

stand that system today. When explaining why elders adhere to traditional mourning customs,
young people say elders have otra mentalidad (another mentality). Elders, however, never men-

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tion “mentality.” They say that people must show “respect” for the dead. Following mourning

customs has nothing to do with an individual’s desires, feelings, or intentions. Instead, wearing
mourning testifies to a person’s or family’s reputation. Given elders’ statements, young people
are not wrong when they attribute elders’ actions to their mentalidad. Elders do have a different

“mentality.” But in interpreting elders’ actions as testifying to their inward desires and inten-

tions (their mentality), instead of to the reputations of their families, young people reveal how
thoroughly they live within the cultural system of personal initiative and abilities, and how
thoroughly they fail to comprehend the cultural system of honor and shame.

notes

Acknowledgments. George Collier’s and my 1963-64 research in Los Olivos was supported by a Ful-
bright fellowship, and our research 20 years later was supported by grant HD 17351 from the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, titled “Late Marriage, Family Constellation, Kinship
Change.” This paper, written while I was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, is one piece of a
larger project to examine changing conceptions of the family in Los Olivos. It has benefitted from the com-
ments of George Collier, Louise Lamphere, Roger Rouse, Ann Swidler and Sylvia Yanagisako.

‘ n this paper I suggest that female chastity is an idiom people use to talk about (and fight over) social
inequality in complex agrarian societies with private property where status appears inherited-whether
such societies have effective central governments or appear anarchic. Others have, of course, advanced
different explanations for the “honor and shame” complex in Mediterranean societies (for example,
Schneider 1971; Schneider and Schneider 1976; Pitt-Rivers 1977), and for “virginity complexes” else-
where (for example, Ortner 1976). This paper is too short, however, to compare explanations.

2Female chastity is not a single, coherent idiom with a single cause. Rather, it is a complex, multiply-
determined symbol. In a world where legitimate heirs are distinguished from illegitimate non-heirs, a moth-
er’s chastity guarantees her children’s right to inherit. Where only virgins are eligible to become mothers
of legitimate children, a daughter’s virginity may represent her family’s hopes of upward mobility and po-
litical patronage (see Ortner 1976). Men, as managers of inherited estates, whose life work is to guard such
estates for their children, experience the begetting of bastards on their wives as rendering their lives mean-
ingless. In areas of southern Europe where daughters inherit property, the man who seduces a maiden is,
in a real sense, “stealing” some of her family’s estate. In societies where the presence of a “state” or “civil
society” creates “the family” as a symbolic category, women, as representatives of the “family,” may come
to stand for the family’s status. Their inviolability may then represent the inviolability of the family estate,
in a world where net downward mobility-caused by the fact that rich people produce more living off-
spring than the poor-ensures that most people spend their lives trying to “hang on” to what they have.
And so forth…

3Martinez-Alier, for example, attributes Andalusian laborers’ persisting belief in reparto (agrarian re-
form)-and hence their view of the existing system of land distribution as illegitimate-to their belief that
they are technically competent to manage the estates on which they work, due to their good understanding
of the productive process and the ease with which they become tenants (1971:117).

4Maddox (n.d.:Ch. 7) writes that regional elites before the Civil War glorified the virtues of working-class
women even as they denigrated the honor and moral capacities of working-class males. Elite authors, in
the regional newspaper, represented poor women as guardians of family virtue and piety, whose natural
verguenza (sense of shame) inclined them toward raising patient, humble children who would uphold the
existing order instead of seeking to overthrow it out of “selfish” motives.

5Maidens, in fact, had far less freedom and power than married women. In Los Olivos, the woman who
lacked obligaciones had no culturally valid reason for refusing to do what others requested. Maidens were
thus always at others’ beck and call.

6Outmigration did not completely overturn the class structure of Los Olivos. The most privileged families
in 1963-64 remain the most privileged today, because elites took advantage of their wealth and personal
connections to educate their children for professional positions before the labor-intensive agricultural sys-
tem collapsed. Landowners just below this elite stratum, however, who stayed in the community, are now
among its poorest and most overworked members.

7The idiom of personal choice and ability is, of course, as complex and multiply-determined as the idiom
of inheritance. Individualism, voluntarism, rationalism, and so forth are intersecting discourses whose
usages and consequences vary widely according to historical circumstances. Female chastity also figures
in voluntarist idioms, but with a different significance than in the idiom of inheritance. Within the idiom
of personal choice and ability, a woman’s chastity testifies to her inner capacities and desires, not to her
family’s reputation. So, chaste women may appear “naturally” asexual, within a set of gender conceptions
that casts men as active/rational and women as passive/emotional, or as rationally withholding their sex-
uality in order to trap a man into marriage.

8The casting of housework and childcare as an “occupation” is, of course, also a result of an industrial

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system of inequality. Caring for her casa (house) was, and remains, a major preoccupation of Los Olivos
women, but the meaning of casa has changed drastically. In 1963-64 the woman who cared for her casa
was co-manager of the estate her children would inherit. If her husband abandoned her, she kept the estate.
Today, the woman who cares for her casa is an unpaid homemaker, as economically dependent as her
children on the wage her husband brings home.

references cited

Aceves, Joseph B., and William A. Douglass, eds.
1976 The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. New York: Wiley.

Collier, George A.
1983 Late Marriage and the Uncontested Reign of Property. Paper read at the 1983 meetings of the

American Anthropological Association.
n.d. Socialists of Rural Andalusia, 1930-1950: The Unacknowledged Revolutionaries. Unpublished

ms.

Collier, Jane F., and Michelle Z. Rosaldo
1981 Politics and Gender in Simple Societies. In Sexual Meanings. S. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds.

pp. 275-329. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harding, Susan F.

1984 Remaking Ibieca: Rural Life in Aragon Under Franco. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.

Herzfeld, Michael
1980 Honour and Shame: Problems in the Analysis of Moral Systems. Man (NS) 15:339-351.

Maddox, Richard
n.d. Religion, Honor, Patronage: A Study of Culture and Power in an Andalusian Town. Doctoral dis-

sertation in preparation, Stanford University.
Martinez-Alier, Juan

1971 Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ortner, Sherry

1976 The Virgin and the State. Michigan Discussions in Anthropology 2:1-16; reprinted 1978 in Fem-
inist Studies 4:19-37.

Perez Diaz, Victor M.
1976 Process of Change in Rural Castilian Communities. In The Changing Faces of Rural Spain. Joseph

Aceves and William Douglass, eds. pp. 123-141. New York: Wiley.
Peristiany, J. G., ed.

1966 Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian

1954 The People of the Sierra. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
1977 The Fate of Schechem or the Politics of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Richard, and Sally Price
1966a Noviazgo in an Andalusian Pueblo. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 22(3):302-322.
1966b Stratification and Courtship in an Andalusian Village. Man (NS) 1(4):526-533.

Schneider, Jane
1971 Of Vigilance and Virgins. Ethnology 10:1-24.

Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider
1976 Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press.

Submitted 3 September 1985
Accepted 23 September 1985

from Mary to modern woman 107

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Contents

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Issue Table of Contents

American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 1, Feb., 1986
Front Matter
Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa [pp. 1 – 22]
Batak Tape Cassette Kinship: Constructing Kinship Through the Indonesian National Mass Media [pp. 23 – 42]
Let the Evidence Fit the Crime: Evidence, Law, and “Sociological Truth” among the Dou Donggo [pp. 43 – 61]
“Eat This, It’ll Do You a Power of Good”: Food and Commensality among Durrani Pashtuns [pp. 62 – 79]
The Varieties of Fertility Cultism in New Guinea: Part I [pp. 80 – 99]
From Mary to Modern Woman: The Material Basis of Marianismo and Its Transformation in a Spanish Village [pp. 100 – 107]
Political Activity among Working-Class Women in a U. S. City [pp. 108 – 117]
From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Production and Reproduction in an Industrial Community [pp. 118 – 130]
Review Articles
Agency and Social Theory: A Review of Anthony Giddens [pp. 131 – 137]
The Politics of Representation: Anthropological Discourse and Australian Aborigines [pp. 138 – 153]
Comments and Reflections
Reply to Rosemary Firth [pp. 154 – 155]
The Anthropologist’s Rorschach [pp. 155 – 157]
On “Inalienable Wealth” [pp. 157 – 158]
Further Comments on “Inalienable Wealth” [pp. 158 – 159]
Reviews
untitled [pp. 160 – 161]
untitled [pp. 161 – 162]
untitled [pp. 162 – 163]
untitled [pp. 163 – 164]
untitled [pp. 164 – 166]
untitled [pp. 166 – 167]
untitled [p. 167]
untitled [pp. 168 – 169]
untitled [pp. 169 – 170]
untitled [pp. 170 – 171]
untitled [pp. 171 – 172]
untitled [pp. 172 – 173]
untitled [pp. 173 – 174]
untitled [pp. 174 – 175]
untitled [pp. 175 – 176]
untitled [pp. 176 – 177]
untitled [pp. 177 – 178]
untitled [pp. 178 – 179]
untitled [pp. 179 – 181]
untitled [p. 181]
untitled [pp. 181 – 183]
untitled [pp. 183 – 184]
untitled [pp. 184 – 185]
untitled [pp. 185 – 186]
untitled [pp. 186 – 187]
Back Matter [pp. 188 – 190]

From: Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist
Theory ofthe State; Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989

7 Sexuality

then she says (and this is what I live through over
and over)—she says: I do not know if sex is an
illusion

I do not know
who I was when I did those things
or who I said I was
or whether I willed to feel
what I had read about
or who in fact was there with me
or whether I knew, even then
that there was doubt about these things

-Adrienne Rich

, “Dialogue”

I had always been fond of her in the most innocent, asexual
way. It was as if her body was always entirely hidden behind
her radiant mind, the modesty of her behavior, and her taste
in dress. She had never offered me the slightest chink
through which to view the glow of her nakedness. And now
suddenly the butcher knife of fear had slit her open. She was
as open to me as the carcass of a heifer slit down the middle
and hanging on a hook. There we were . . . and suddenly I
felt a violent desire to make love to her. Or to be more exact,
a violent desire to rape her.

-Milan Kundera, The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting

[S}he had thought of something, something about the body,
about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman
to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked …
telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do
not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet.
The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful-and
yet they are very difficult to define.

-Virginia Woolf, “Professions for
Women”

What is it about women’s experience that produces a. distinctive perspective on social reality? How is an
angle of vision and an interpretive hermeneutics of social life created
in the group, women? What happens to women to give them a
particular interest in social arrangements, something to have a
consciousness of? How are the qualities we know as male and female
socially created and enforced on an everyday level? Sexual objectifica-
tion of women-first in the world, then in the head, first in visual
appropriation, then in forced sex, finally in sexual murder I-provides
answers.

Male dominance is sexual. Meaning: men in particular, if not men
alone, sexualize hierarchy; gender is one. As much a sexual theory of
gender as a gendered theory of sex, this is the theory of sexuality that
has grown out of consciousness raising. Recent feminist work, both
interpretive and empirical, on rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual
abuse of children, prostitution and pornography, support it. 2 These
practices, taken together, express and actualize the distinctive power
of men over women in society; their effective permissibility confirms
and extends it. If one believes women’s accounts of sexual use and
abuse by men;” if the pervasiveness of male sexual violence against
women substantiated in these studies is not denied, minimized, or
excepted as deviant or episodic;” if the fact that only 7.8 percent of
women in the United States are not sexually assaulted or harassed in
their lifetimes is considered not ignorable or inconsequential.? if the
women to whom it happens are not considered expendable; if violation
of women is understood as sexualized on some level-then sexuality
itself can no longer be regarded as unimplicated. Nor can the meaning
of practices of sexual violence be categorized away as violence not sex.
The male sexual role, this information and analysis taken together
suggest, centers on aggressive intrusion on those with less power. Such
acts of dominance are experienced as sexually arousing, as sex itself. 6

They therefore are. The new knowledge on the sexual violation of
women by men thus frames an inquiry into the place of sexuality in
gender and of gender in sexuality.

A feminist theory of sexuality based on these data locates sexuality
within a theory of gender inequality, meaning the social hierarchy of

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128 Method

men over women. To make a theory feminist, it is not enough that it
be authored by a biological female, nor that it describe female
sexuality as different from (if equal to) male sexuality, or as if sexuality
in women ineluctably exists in some realm beyond, beneath, above,
behind-in any event, fundamentally untouched and unmoved by-
an unequal social order. A theory of sexuality becomes feminist
methodologically, meaning feminist in the post-marxist sense, to the
extent it treats sexuality as a social construct of male power: defined by
men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender.
Such an approach centers feminism on the perspective of the subordi-
nation of women to men as it identifies sex-that is, the sexuality of
dominance and submission-as crucial, as a fundamental, as on some
level definitive, in that process. Feminist theory becomes a project of
analyzing that situation in order to face it for what it is, in order to
change it.

Focusing on gender inequality without a sexual account of its
dynamics, as most work has, one could criticize the sexism of existing
theories of sexuality and emerge knowing that men author scripts to
their own advantage, women and men act them out; that men set
conditions, women and men have their behavior conditioned; that
men develop developmental categories through which men develop,
and women develop or not; that men are socially allowed selves hence
identities with personalities into which sexuality is or is not well
integrated, women being that which is or is not integrated, that
through the alterity of which a self experiences itself as having an
identity; that men have object relations, women are the objects of
those relations; and so on. Following such critique, one could attempt
to invert or correct the premises or applications of these theories to
make them gender neutral, even if the reality to which they refer looks
more like the theories-once their gender specificity is revealed-than
it looks gender neutral. Or, one could attempt to enshrine a
distinctive “women’s reality” as if it really were permitted to exist as
something more than one dimension of women’s response to a
condition of powerlessness. Such exercises would be revealing and
instructive, even deconstructive, but to limit feminism to correcting
sex bias by acting in theory as if male power did not exist in fact,
including by valorizing in writing what women have had little choice
but to be limited to becoming in life, is to limit feminist theory the
way sexism limits women’s lives: to a response to terms men set.

Sexuality 129

A distinctively feminist theory conceptualizes social reality, includ-
ing sexual reality, on its own terms. The question is, what are they?
If women have been substantially deprived not only of their own
experience but of terms of their own in which to view it, then a
feminist theory of sexuality which seeks to understand women’s
situation in order to change it must first identify and criticize the
construct “sexuality” as a construct that has circumscribed and defined
experience as well as theory. This requires capturing it in the world,
in its siruated social meanings, as it is being constructed in life on a
daily basis. It must be studied in its experienced empirical existence,
not just in the texts of history (as Foucault does), in the social psyche
(as Lacan does), or in language (as Derrida does). Sexual meaning is not
made only, or even primarily, by words and in texts. It is made in
social relations of power in the world, through which process gender
is also produced. In feminist terms, the fact that male power has power
means that the interests of male sexuality construct what sexuality as
such means, including the standard way it is allowed and recognized
to be felt and expressed and experienced, in a way that determines
women’s biographies, including sexual ones. Existing theories, until
they grasp this, will not only misattribute what they call female
sexuality to women as such, as if it were not imposed on women daily;
they will also participate in enforcing the hegemony of the social
construct “desire,” hence its product, “sexuality,” hence its construct
“woman,” on the world.

The gender issue, in this analysis, becomes the issue of what is
taken to be “sexuality”; what sex means and what is meant by sex,
when, how, with whom, and with what consequences to whom. Such
questions are almost never systematically confronted, even in dis-
courses that purport feminist awareness. What sex is-how it comes to
be attached and attributed to what it is, embodied and practiced as it
is, contextualized in the ways it is, signifying and referring to what it
does-is taken as a baseline, a given, except in explanations of what
happened when it is thought to have gone wrong. It is as if “erotic,”
for example, can be taken as having an understood referent, although
it is never defined, except to imply that it is universal yet individual,
ultimately variable and plastic, essentially indefinable but overwhelm-
ingly positive. “Desire,” the vicissitudes of which are endlessly
extolled and philosophized in culture high and low, is riot seen as
fundamentally problematic or as calling for explanation on the

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I30 Method

concrete, interpersonal operative level, unless (again) it is supposed to
be there and is not. To list and analyze what seem to be the essential
elements for male sexual arousal, what has to be there for the penis to
work, seems faintly blasphemous, like a pornographer doing market
research. Sex is supposed both too individual and too universally
transcendent for that. To suggest that the sexual might be continuous
with something other than sex itself-something like politics-is
seldom done, is treated as detumescent, even by feminists. It is as if
sexuality comes from the stork.

Sexuality, in feminist light, is not a discrete sphere of interaction or
feeling or sensation or behavior in which preexisting social divisions
mayor may not be played out. It is a pervasive dimension of social life,
one that permeates the whole, a dimension along which gender occurs
and through which gender is socially constituted; it is a dimension
along which other social divisions, like race and class, partly play
themselves out. Dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its
masculinity, submission eroticized defines its femininity. So many
distinctive features of women’s status “as second class-the restriction
and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the
self-mutilation and requisite presentation of self as a beautiful thing,
the enforced passivity, the humiliation-are made into the content of
sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it. This
approach identifies not just a sexuality that is shaped under conditions
of gender inequality but reveals this sexuality itself to be the dynamic
of the inequality of the sexes. It is to argue that the excitement at
reduction of a person to a thing, to less than a human being, as socially
defined, is its fundamental motive force. It is to argue that sexual
difference is a function of sexual dominance. It is to argue a sexual
theory of the distribution of social power by gender, in which this
sexuality that is sexuality is substantially what makes the gender
division be what it is, which is male dominant, wherever it is, which
is nearly everywhere.

Across cultures, in this perspective, sexuality is whatever a given
culture or subculture defines it as. The next question concerns its
relation to gender as a division of power. Male dominance appears to
exist cross-culturally, if in locally particular forms. Across cultures, is
whatever defines women as “different” the same as whatever defines
women as “inferior” the same as whatever defines women’s “sexuality”?
Is that which defines gender inequality as merely the sex difference also

Sexuality I3 I

the content of the erotic, cross-culturally? In this view, the feminist
theory of sexuality is its theory of politics, its distinctive contribution
to social and political explanation. To explain gender inequality in
terms of “sexual politics” is to advance not only a political theory of
the sexual that defines gender but also a sexual theory of the political
to which gender is fundamental.

In this approach, male power takes the social form of what men as
a gender want sexually, which centers on power itself, as socially
defined. In capitalist countries, it includes wealth. Masculinity is
having it; femininity is not having it. Masculinity precedes male as
femininity precedes female, and male sexual desire defines both.
Specifically, “woman” is defined by what male desire requires for
arousal and satisfaction and is socially tautologous with “female
sexuality” and “the female sex.” In the permissible ways a woman can
be treated, the ways that are socially considered not violations but
appropriate to her nature, one finds the particulars of male sexual
interests and requirements. In the concomitant sexual paradigm, the
ruling norms of sexual attraction and expression are fused with gender
identity formation and affirmation, such that sexuality equals hetero-
sexuality equals the sexuality of (male) dominance and (female)
submission.

Post-Lacan, actually post-Foucault, it has become customary to
affirm that sexuality is socially constructed. 8 Seldom specified is what,
socially, it is constructed of, far less who does the constructing or how,
when, or where.” When capitalism is the favored social construct,
sexuality is shaped and controlled and exploited and repressed by
capitalism; not, capitalism creates sexuality as we know it. When
sexuality is a construct of discourses of power, gender is never one of
them; force is central to its deployment but through repressing it, not
through constituting it; speech is not concretely investigated for its
participation in this construction process. Power is everywhere there-
fore nowhere, diffuse rather than pervasively hegemonic. “Con-
structed” seems to mean influenced by, directed, channeled, as a
highway constructs traffic patterns. Not: Why cars? Who’s driving?
Where’;’ everybody going? What makes mobility matter? Who can
own a car? Are all these accidents not very accidental? Although there
are partial exceptions (but disclaimers notwithstanding) the typical
model of sexuality which is tacitly accepted remains deeply Freudian lO

and essentialist: sexuality is an innate sui generis primary natural

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I32 Method

prepolitical unconditioned 11 drive divided along the biological gender
line, centering on heterosexual intercourse, that is, penile intromis-
sion, full actualization of which is repressed by civilization. Even if the
sublimation aspect of this theory is rejected, or the reasons for the
repression are seen to vary (for the survival of civilization or to
maintain fascist control or to keep capitalism moving), sexual expres-
sion is implicitly seen as the expression of something that is to a
significanr extent pre-social and is socially denied its full force.
Sexuality remains largely pre-cultural and universally invariant, social
only in that it needs society to take socially specific forms. The
impetus itself is a hunger, an appetite founded on a need; what it is
specifically hungry for and how it is satisfied is then open to endless
cultural and individual variance, like cuisine, like cooking.

Allowed/not allowed is this sexuality’s basic ideological axis. The
fact that sexuality is ideologically bounded is known. That these are its
axes, central to the way its “drive” is. driven, and that this is
fundamental to gender and gender is fundamental to it, is not. 12 Its
basic normative assumption is that whatever is consideredsexuality
should be allowed to be “expressed.” Whatever is called sex is
attributed a normatively positive valence, an affirmative valuation.
This ex cathedra assumption, affirmation of which appears indispens-
able to one’s credibility on any subject that gets near the sexual, means
that sex as such (whatever it is) is good-natural, healthy, positive,
appropriate, pleasurable, wholesome, fine, one’s own, and to be
approved and expressed. This, sometimes characterized as “sex-
positive,” is, rather obviously, a value judgment.

Kinsey and his followers, for example, clearly thought (and think)
the more sex the better. Accordingly, they trivialize even most of
those cases of rape and child sexual abuse they discern as such, decry
women’s sexual refusal as sexual inhibition, and repeatedly interpret
women’s sexual disinclination as “restrictions” on men’s natural sexual
activity, which left alone would emulate (some) animals. 13 Followers
of the neo-Freudian derepression imperative have similarly identified
the frontier of sexual freedom with transgression of social restraints on
access, with making the sexually disallowed allowed, especially male
sexual access to anything. The struggle to have everything sexual
allowed in a society we are told would collapse if it were, creates a
sense of resistance to, and an aura of danger around, violating the
powerless. If we knew the boundaries were phony, existed only to

Sexuality I33

eroticize the targeted transgressable, would penetrating them feel less
sexy? Taboo and crime may serve to eroticize what would otherwise
feel about as much like dominance as taking candy from a baby.
Assimilating actual powerlessness to male prohibition, to male power,
provides the appearance of resistance, which makes overcoming
possible, while never undermining the reality of power, or its dignity,
by giving the powerless actual power. The point is, allowed/not
allowed becomes the ideological axis along which sexuality is experi-
enced when and because sex-gender and sexuality-is about power.

One version of the derepression hypothesis that purports feminism
is: civilization having been male dominated, female sexuality has been
repressed, not allowed. Sexuality as such still centers on what would
otherwise be considered the reproductive act, on intercourse: penetra-
tion of the erect penis into the vagina (or appropriate substitute
orifices), followed by thrusting to male ejaculation. If reproduction
actually had anything to do with what sex was for, it would not
happen every night (or even twice a week) for forty or fifty years, nor
would prostitutes exist. “We had sex three times” typically means the
man entered the woman three times and orgasmed three times. Female
sexuality in this model refers to the presence of this theory’s
“sexuality,” or the desire to be so treated, in biological females;
“female” is somewhere between an adjective and a noun, half
possessive and half biological ascription. Sexual freedom means women
are allowed to behave as freely as men to express this sexuality, to have
it allowed, that is (hopefully) shamelessly and without social con-
straints to initiate genital drive satisfaction through heterosexual
intercourse. 14 Hence, the liberated woman. Hence, the sexual revo-
lution.

The pervasiveness of such assumptions about sexuality throughout
otherwise diverse methodological traditions is suggested by the
following comment by a scholar of violence against women:

If women were to escape the culturally stereotyped role of disinterest in
and resistance to sex and to take on an assertive role in expressing their
own sexuality, rather than leaving it to the assertiveness of men, it
would contribute to the reduction of rape … First, and most
obviously, voluntary sex would be available to more men, thus
reducing the “need” for rape. Second, and probably more important, it
would help to reduce the confounding of sex and aggression. 15

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134 Method

In this view, somebody must be assertive for sex to happen. Voluntary
sex-sexual equality-means equal sexual aggression. If women freely
expressed “their own sexuality,” more heterosexual intercourse would
be initiated. Women’s “resistance” to sex is an imposed cultural
stereotype, not a form of political struggle. Rape is occasioned by
women’s resistance, not by men’s force; or, male force, hence rape, is
created by women’s resistance to sex. Men would rape less if they got
more voluntarily compliant sex from women. Corollary: the force in

rape is not sexual to men.
Underlying this quotation lurks the view, as common as it is tacit,

that if women would just accept the contact men now have to rape to
get-if women would stop resisting or (in one of the pornographers’
favorite scenarios) become sexual aggressors-rape would wither away.
On one level, this is a definitionally obvious truth. When a woman
accepts what would be rape if she did not accept it, what happens is
sex. If women were to accept forced sex as sex, “voluntary sex would
be available to more men.” If such a view is not implicit in this text,
it is a mystery how women equally aggressing against men sexually
would eliminate, rather than double, the confounding of sex and
aggression. Without such an assumption, only the confounding of
sexual aggression with gender would be eliminated. If women no
longer resisted male sexual aggression, the confounding of sex with
aggression would, indeed, be so epistemologically complete that it
would be eliminated. No woman would ever be sexually violated,
because sexual violation would be sex. The situation might resemble
the one evoked by a society categorized as “rape-free” in part because

.’ h” . ,,16 S hthe men assert there IS no rape t ere: our women never resist. uc
pacification also occurs in “rape-prone” societies like the United
States, where some force may be perceived as force, but only above

certain threshold standards. 17
While intending the opposite, some feminists have encouraged and

participated in this type of analysis by conceiving rape as violence, not
sex. 18 While this approach gave needed emphasis to rape’s previously
effaced elements of power and dominance, it obscured its elements of
sex. Aside from failing to answer the rather obvious question, if it is
violence not sex, why didn’t he just hit her? this approach made it
impossible to see that violence is sex when it is practiced as sex. 19 This
is obvious once what sexuality is, is understood as a matter of what it

Sexuality 135

means and how it is interpreted. To say rape is violence not sex
preserves the “sex is good” norm by simply distinguishing forced sex
as “not sex,” whether it means sex to the perpetrator or even, later, to
the victim, who has difficulty experiencing sex without reexperiencing
the rape. Whatever is sex cannot be violent; whatever is violent cannot
be sex. This analytic wish-fulfillment makes it possible for rape to be
opposed by those who would save sexuality from the rapists while
leaving the sexual fundamentals of male dominance intact.

While much previous work on rape has analyzed it as a problem of
inequality between the sexes but not as a problem of unequal sexuality
on the basis of gender, 20 other contemporary explorations of sexuality
that purport to be feminist lack comprehension either of gender as a
form of social power or of the realities of sexual violence. For instance,
the editors of Powers of Desire take sex “as a central form of expression,
one that defines identity and is seen as a primary source of energy and
pleasure. ,,21 This may be how it “is seen,” but it is also how the
editors, operatively, see it. As if women choose sexuality as definitive
of identity. As if it is as much a form of women’s “expression” as it is
men’s. As if violation and abuse are not equally central to sexuality as
women live it.

The Diary of the Barnard conference on sexuality pervasively
equates sexuality with “pleasure.” “Perhaps the overall question we
need to ask is: how do women … negotiate sexual pleasure?”zz As if
women under male supremacy have power to. As if “negotiation” is a
form of freedom. As if pleasure and how to get it, rather than
dominance and how to end it, is the “overall” issue sexuality presents
feminism. As if women do just need a good fuck. In these texts, taboos
are treated as real restrictions-as things that really are not allowed-
instead of as guises under which hierarchy is eroticized. The domain of
the sexual is divided into “restriction, repression, and danger” on the
one hand and “exploration, pleasure, and agency” on the other. 23 This
division parallels the ideological forms through which dominance and
submission are eroticized, variously socially coded as heterosexuality’s
male/female, lesbian culture’s butch/femme, and sadomasochism’s
top/borrorn.j” Speaking in role terms, the one who pleasures in the
illusion of freedom and security within the reality of danger is the
“girl”; the one who pleasures in the reality of freedom and security
within the illusion of danger- is the “boy.” That is, the Diary un-

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critically adopts as an analytic tool the central dynamic of the phe-
nomenon it purports to be analyzing. Presumably, one is to have a
sexual experience of the text.

The terms of these discourses preclude or evade crucial feininist
questions. What do sexuality and gender inequality have to do with
each other? How do dominance and submission become sexualized, or,
why is hierarchy sexy? How does it get attached to male and female?
Why does sexuality center on intercourse, the reproductive act by
physical design? Is masculinity the enjoyment of violation, femininity
the enjoyment of being violated? Is that the social meaning of
intercourse? Do “men love death,,?25 Why? What is the etiology of
heterosexuality in women? Is its pleasure women’s stake in subordi-
nation?

Taken together and taken seriously, feminist inquiries into the
realities of rape, battery, sexual harassment, incest, child sexual abuse,
prostitution, and pornography answer these questions by suggesting a
theory of the sexual mechanism. Its script, learning, conditioning,
developmental logos, imprinting of the microdot, its deus ex machina,
whatever sexual process term defines sexual arousal itself, is force,
power’s expression. Force is sex, not just sexualized; force is the desire
dynamic, not just a response to the desired object when desire’s
expression is frustrated. Pressure, gender socialization, withholding
benefits, extending indulgences, the how-to books, the sex therapy are
the soft end; the fuck, the fist, the street, the chains, the poverty are
the hard end. Hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave,
together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master-
these are the emotions of this sexuality’s excitement. “Sadomasochism
is to sex what war is to civil life: the magnificent experience,” wrote
Susan Sontag. 26 “[IJt is hostility-the desire, overt or hidden, to harm
another person-that generates and enhances sexual excitement,”
wrote Robert Stoller. 27 Harriet jacobs, a slave, speaking of her
systematic rape by her master, wrote, “It seems less demeaning to give
one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.t”” It is clear from the data
that the force in sex and the sex in force is a matter of simple empirical
description-unless one accepts that force in sex is not force anymore,
it is just sex; or, if whenever a woman is forced it is what she really
wants, or it or she does not matter; or, unless prior aversion or
sentimentality substitutes what one wants sex to be, or will condone
or countenance as sex, for what is actually happening.

Sexuality 137

To be clear: what is sexual is what gives a man an erection.
Whatever it takes to make a penis shudder and stiffen with the
experience of its potency is what sexuality means culturally. Whatever
else does this, fear does, hostility does, hatred does, the helplessness of
a child or a student or an infantilized or restrained or vulnerable
woman does, revulsion does, death does. Hierarchy, a constant
creation of person/thing, top/bottom, dominance/subordination rela-
tions, does. What is understood as violation, conventionally penetra-
tion and intercourse, defines the paradigmatic sexual encounter. The
scenario of sexual abuse is: you do what I say. These textualities and
these relations, situated within as well as creating a context of power
in which they can be lived our, become sexuality. All this suggests
that what is called sexuality is the dynamic of control by which male
dominance-in forms that range from intimate to institutional, from
a look to a rape-eroticizes and thus defines man and woman, gender
identity and sexual pleasure. It is also that which maintains and
defines male supremacy as a political system. Male sexual desire is
thereby simultaneously created and serviced, never satisfied once and
for all, while male force is romanticized, even sacralized, potentiated
and naturalized, by being submerged into sex itself.

In contemporary philosophical terms, nothing is “indeterminate” in
the post-structuralist sense here; it is all too determinate. 29 Nor does
its reality provide just one perspective on a relativistic interpersonal
world that could mean anything or its oppositc.i'” The reality of
pervasive sexual abuse and its erotization does not shift relative to
perspective, although whether or not one will see it or accord it
significance may. Interpretation varies relative to place in sexual
abuse, certainly; but the fact that women are sexually abused as
women, located in a social matrix of sexualized subordination, does
not go away because it is often ignored or authoritatively disbelieved
or interpreted out of existence. Indeed, some ideological supports for
its persistence rely precisely upon techniques of social indeterminacy:
no language but the obscene to describe the unspeakable; denial by the
powerful casting doubt on the facticity of the injuries; actually driving
its victims insane. Indeterminacy, in this light, is a nee-Cartesian
mind game that raises acontexrualized interpretive possibilities that
have no real social meaning or real possibility of any, thus dissolving
the ability to criticize the oppressiveness of actual meanings without
making space for new ones. The feminist point is simple. Men are

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women’s material conditions. If it happens to women, it happens.
Women often find ways to resist male supremacy and to expand

their spheres of action. But they are never free of it. Women also
embrace the standards of women’s place in this regime as “our own”
to varying degrees and in varying voices-as affirmation of identity
and right to pleasure, in order to be loved and approved and paid, in
order just to make it through another day. This, not inert passivity,
is the meaning of being a victim. 31 The term is not moral: who is to
blame or to be pitied or condemned or held responsible. It is not
prescriptive: what we should do next. It is not strategic: how to
construe the situation so it can be changed. It is not emotional: what
.one feels better thinking. It is descriptive: who does what to whom
and gets away with it.

Thus the question Freud never asked is the question that defines
sexuality in a feminist perspective: what do men want? Pornography
provides an answer. Pornography permits men to have whatever they
want sexually. It is their “truth about sex. ,,32 It connects the centrality
of visual objectification to both male sexual arousal and male models
of knowledge and verification, objectivity with objectification. It
shows how men see the world, how in seeing it they access and possess
it, and how this is an act of dominance over it. It shows what men
want and gives it to them. From the testimony of the pornography,
what men want is: women bound, women battered, women tortured,
women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed. Or,
to be fair to the soft core, women sexually accessible, have-able, there
for them, wanting to be taken and used, with perhaps just a little light
bondage. Each violation of women-rape, battery, prostitution, child
sexual abuse, sexual harassment-is made sexuality, made sexy, fun,
and liberating of women’s true nature in the pornography. Each
specifically victimized and vulnerable group of women, each tabooed
target group-Black women, Asian women, Latin women, Jewish
women, pregnant women, disabled women, retarded women, poor
women, old women, fat women, women in women’s jobs, prostitutes,
little girls-distinguishes pornographic genres and subthemes, clas-
sified according to diverse customers’ favorite degradation. Women are
made into and coupled with anything considered lower than human:
animals, objects, children, and (yes) other women. Anything women
have claimed as their own-motherhood, athletics, traditional men’s

Sexuality I39

jobs, lesbianism, feminism-is made specifically sexy, dangerous,
provocative, punished, made men’s in pornography.

Pornography is a means through which sexuality is socially con-
structed, a site of construction, a domain of exercise. It constructs
women as things for sexual use and constructs its consumers to
desperately want women to desperately want possession and cruelty
and dehumanization. Inequality itself, subjection itself, hierarchy
itself, objectification itself, with self-determination ecstatically relin-
quished, is the apparent content of women’s sexual desire and
desirability. “The major theme of pornography as a genre,” writes
Andrea Dworkin, “is male power. ,,33 Women are in pornography to
be violated and taken, men to violate and take them, either on screen
or by camera or pen, on behalf of the viewer. Not that sexuality in life
or in media never expresses love and affection; only that love and
affection are not what is sexualized in this society’s actual sexual
paradigm, as pornography testifies to it. Violation of the powerless,
intrusion on women, is. The milder forms, possession and use, the
mildest of which is visual objectification, are. This sexuality of
observation, visual intrusion and access, of entertainment, makes sex
largely a spectator sport for its participants.

If pornography has not become sex to and from the male point of
view, it is hard to explain why the pornography industry makes a
known ten billion dollars a year selling it as sex mostly to men; why
it is used to teach sex to child prostitutes, to recalcitrant wives and
girlfriends and daughters, to medical students, and to sex offenders;
why it is nearly universally classified as a subdivision of “erotic
literature”; why it is protected and defended as if it were sex itself. 34
And why a prominent sexologist fears that enforcing the views of
feminists against pornography in society would make men “erotically
inert wimps. ,,35 No pornography, no male sexuality.

A feminist critique of sexuality in this sense is advanced in Andrea
Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Building on her earlier
identification of gender inequality as a system of social meaning.P” an
ideology lacking basis in anything other than the social reality its
power constructs and maintains, she argues that sexuality is a
construct of that power, given meaning by, through, and in pornog-
raphy. In this perspective, pornography is not harmless fantasy or a
corrupt and confused misrepresentation of otherwise natural healthy

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sex, nor is it fundamentally a distortion, reflection, projection,
expression, representation, fantasy, or symbol of it.

37
Through

pornography, among other practices, gender inequality becomes both
sexual and socially real. Pornography “reveals that male pleasure is
inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting.” “Dominance in
the male system is pleasure.” Rape is “the defining paradigm of
sexuality,” to avoid which boys choose manhood and homophobia. 38

Women, who are not given a choice, are objectified; or, rather, “the
object is allowed to desire, if she desires to be an object. ,,39 Psychology
sets the proper bounds of this objectification by terming its improper
excesses “fetishism,” distinguishing the uses from the abuses of
women. 40 Dworkin shows how the process and content of women’s
definition as women, as an under-class, are the process and content of
their sexualization as objects for male sexual use. The mechanism is
(again) force, imbued with meaning because it is the means to death;41
and death is the ultimate sexual act, the ultimate making of a person

into a thing.
Why, one wonders at this point, is intercourse “sex” at all? In

pornography, conventional intercourse is one act among many;
penetration is crucial but can be done with anything; penis is crucial
but not necessarily in the vagina. Actual pregnancy is a minor
subgeneric theme, about as important in pornography as reproduction
is in rape. Thematically, intercourse is incidental in pornography,
especially when compared with force, which is primary. From
pornography one learns that forcible violation of women is the essence
of sex. Whatever is that and does that is sex. Everything else is
secondary. Perhaps the reproductive act is considered sexual because it
is considered an act of forcible violation and defilement of the female
distinctively as such, not because it “is” sex a priori.

To be sexually objectified means having a social meaning imposed
on your being that defines you as to be sexually used, according to your
desired uses, and then using you that way. Doing this is sex in the
male system. Pornography is a sexual practice of this because it exists
in a social system in which sex in life is no less mediated than it is in
representation. There is no irreducible essence, no “just sex.” If sex is
a social construct of sexism, men have sex with their image of a
woman. Pornography creates an accessible sexual object, the possession
and consumption of which is male sexuality, to be possessed and
consumed as which is female sexuality. This is not because pornogra-

Sexuality I4I

phy depicts objectified sex, but because it creates the experience of a
sexuality which is itself objectified. The appearance of choice or
consent, with their attribution to inherent nature, is crucial in
concealing the reality of force. Love of violation, variously termed
female masochism and consent, comes to define female sexuality.Y
legitimating this political system by concealing the force on which it
is based.

In this system, a victim, usually female, always feminized, is “never
forced, only actualized. ,,43 Women whose attributes particularly fixate
men-such as women with large breasts-are seen as full of sexual
desire. Women men want, want men. Women fake vaginal orgasms,
the only “mature” sexuality, because men demand that women enjoy
vaginal penetration. 44 Raped women are seen as asking for it: if a man
wanted her, she must have wanted him. Men force women to become
sexual objects, “that thing which causes erection, then hold themselves
helpless and powerless when aroused by her. ,,45 Men who sexually
harass say women sexually harass them. They mean they are aroused by
women who turn them down. This elaborate projective system of
demand characteristics-taken to pinnacles like fantasizing a clitoris
in a woman’s throat46 so that men can enjoy forced fellatio in real life,
assured that women do too-is surely a delusional structure deserving
of serious psychological study. Instead, it is women who resist it who
are studied, seen as in need of explanation and adjustment, stigmatized
as inhibited and repressed and asexual. The assumption that in matters
sexual women really want what men want from women, makes male
force against women in sex invisible. It makes rape sex. Women’s
sexual “reluctance, dislike, and frigidity,” women’s puritanism and
prudery in the face of this sex, is “the silent rebellion of women against
the force of the penis . . . an ineffective rebellion, but a rebellion
nonetheless. ,,47

Nor is homosexuality without stake in this gendered sexual system.
Putting to one side the obviously gendered content of expressly
adopted roles, clothing, and sexual mimicry, to the extent the gender
of a sexual object is crucial to arousal, the structure of social power
which stands behind and defines gender is hardly irrelevant, even if it
is rearranged. Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here
simply women having sex with women, not with men-solves the
problem of gender by eliminating men from women’s voluntary sexual

48 Y , 1″ d dencounters. et women s sexua Ity remains constructe un er con-

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dirions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women
in relation to men; the definition of women as men’s inferiors remains
sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or
not. To the extent gay men choose men because they are men, the
meaning of masculinity is affirmed as well as undermined. It may also
be that sexuality is so gender marked that it carries dominance and
submission with it, whatever the gender of its participants.

Each structural requirement of this sexuality as revealed in pornog-
raphy is professed in recent defenses of sadomasochism, described by
proponents as that sexuality in which “the basic dynamic . . . is the
power dichotomy. ,,49 Exposing the prohibitory underpinnings on
which this violation model of the sexual depends, one advocate says:
“We select the most frightening, disgusting or unacceptable activities
and transmute them into pleasure.” The relational dynamics of
sadomasochism do not even negate the paradigm of male dominance,
but conform precisely to it: the ecstasy in domination (“I like to hear
someone ask for mercy or protection”); the enjoyment of inflicting
psychological as well as physical torture (“I want to see the confusion,
the anger, the turn-on, the helplessness”); the expression of belief in
the inferior’s superiority belied by the absolute contempt (“the bottom
must be my superior … playing a bottom who did not demand my
respect and admiration would be like eating rotten fruit”); the
degradation and consumption of women through sex (“she feeds me
the energy I need to dominate and abuse her”); the health and personal
growth rationale (“it’s a healing process”); the anti-puritan radical
‘therapy justification (“I was taught to dread sex … It is shocking
and profoundly satisfying to commit this piece of rebellion, to take
pleasure exactly as I want it, to exact it like tribute”); the bipolar
doublethink in which the top enjoys “sexual service” while “the will
to please is the bottom’s source of pleasure.” And the same bottom line
of all top-down sex: “I want to be in control.” The statements are from
a female sadist. The good news is, it is not biological.

As pornography connects sexuality with gender in social reality, the
feminist critique of pornography connects feminist work on violence
against women with its inquiry into women’s consciousness and
gender roles. It is not only that women are the principal targets of
rape, which by conservative definition happens to almost half of all-
women at least once in their lives. It is not only that over one-third of
all women are sexually molested by older trusted male family members

Sexuality I43

or friends or authority figures as an early, perhaps initiatory, inter-
personal sexual encounter. It is not only that at least the same
percentage, as adult women, are battered in homes by male intimates.
It is not only that about one-fifth of American women have been or are
known to be prostitutes, and most cannot get out of it. It is not only
that 85 percent of working women will be sexually harassed on the
job, many physically, at some point in their working lives. 50 All this
documents the extent and terrain of abuse and the effectively
unrestrained and systematic sexual aggression by less than one-half of
the population against the other more than half. It suggests that it is
basically allowed.

It does not by itself show that availability for this treatment defines
the identity attributed to that other half of the population; or, that
such treatment, all this torment and debasement, is socially considered
not only rightful but enjoyable, and is in fact enjoyed by the dominant
half; or, that the ability to engage in such behaviors defines the
identity of that half. And not only of that half. Now consider the
content of gender roles. All the social requirements for male sexual
arousal and satisfaction are identical with the gender definition of
“female.” All the essentials of the male gender role are also the
qualities sexualized as “male” in male dominant sexuality. If gender is
a social construct, and sexuality is a social construct, and the question
is, of what is each constructed, the fact that their contents are
identical-not to mention that the word sex refers to both-might be
more than a coincidence.

As to gender, what is sexual about pornography is what is unequal
about social life. To say that pornography sexualizes gender and
genders sexuality means that it provides a concrete social process
through which gender and sexuality become functions of each other.
Gender and sexuality, in this view, become two different shapes taken
by the single social equation of male with dominance and female with
submission. Feeling this as identity, acting it as role, inhabiting and
presenting it as self, is the domain of gender. Enjoying it as the erotic,
centering upon when it elicits genital arousal, is the domain of
sexuality. Inequality is what is sexualized through pornography; it is
what is sexual about it. The more unequal, the more sexual. The
violence against women in pornography is an expression of gender
hierarchy, the extremity of the hierarchy expressed and created
through the extremity of the abuse, producing the extremity of the

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male sexual response. Pornography’s multiple vanations on and
departures from the male dominant/female submissive sexual/gendet
theme are not exceptions to these gender regularities. They affirm
them. The capacity of gender reversals (dominatrixes) and inversions
(homosexuality) to stimulate sexual excitement is derived precisely
from their mimicry or parody or negation or reversal of the standard
arrangement. This affirms rather than undermines or qualifies the
standard sexual arrangement as the standard sexual arrangement, the
definition of sex, the standard from which all else is defined, that in
which sexuality as such inheres.

Such formal data as exist on the relationship between pornography
and male sexual arousal tend to substantiate this connection between
gender hierarchy and male sexuality. Normal men viewing pornogra-
phy over time in laboratory settings become more aroused to scenes of
rape than to scenes of explicit but not expressly violent sex, even if
(especially if?) the woman is shown as hating it. 5 1 As sustained
exposure perceptually inures subjects to the violent component in
expressly violent sexual material, its sexual arousal value remains or
increases. “On the first day, when they see women being raped and
aggressed against, it bothers them. By day five, it does not bother
them at all, in fact, they enjoy it.”52 Sexual material that is seen as
nonviolent, by contrast, is less arousing to begin with and becomes
progressively less arousing over time, after which exposure to sexual
violence is sexually arousing. 53 Viewing sexual material containing
express aggression against women makes normal men more willing to
aggress against women. 54 It also makes them see a female rape victim
as less human, more objectlike, less worthy, less injured, and more to
blame for the rape. Sexually explicit material that is not seen as
expressly violent but presents women as hysterically responsive to male
sexual demands, in which women are verbally abused, dominated and
degraded, and treated as sexual things, makes men twice as likely to
report willingness to sexually aggress against women than they were
before exposure. So-called nonviolent materials like these make men
see women as less than human, as good only for sex, as objects, as
worthless and blameworthy when raped, as really wanting to be raped,
and as unequal to meri ..55 As to material showing violence only, it
might be expected that rapists would be sexually aroused to scenes of
violence against women, and they are. 56 But many normal male

Sexuality 145

subjects, too, when seeing a woman being aggressed against by a man,
perceive the interaction to be sexual even if no sex is shown. 57

Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women
and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent.
If violence is seen as occupying the most fully achieved end of a
dehumanization continuum on which objectification occupies the least
express end, one question that is raised is whether some form of
hierarchy-the dynamic of the continuum-is currently essential for
male sexuality to experience itself. If so, and if gender is understood
to be a hierarchy, perhaps the sexes are unequal so that men can be
sexually aroused. To put it another way, perhaps gender must be
maintained as a social hierarchy so that men will be able to get.
erections; or, part of the male interest in keeping women down lies in
the fact that it gets men up. Maybe feminists are considered castrating
because equality is not sexy.

Recent inquiries into rape support such suspicions. Men often rape
women, it turns our, because they want to and enjoy it. The act,
including the dominance, is sexually arousing, sexually affirming, and
supportive of the perpetrator’s masculinity. Many unreported rapists
report an increase in self-esteem as a result of the rape. 58 Indications
are that reported rapists perceive that getting caught accounts for most
of the unpleasant effects of raping. 59 About one-third of all men say
they would rape a woman if they knew they would not get caught. 60
That the low conviction rate may give them confidence is supported by
the prevalence rate. 6 1 Some convicted rapists see rape as an “exciting”
form of interpersonal sex, a recreational activity or “adventure,” or as
a means of revenge or punishment on all women or some subgroup of
women or an individual woman. Even some of those who did the act
out of bad feelings make it clear that raping made them feel better.
“Men rape because it is rewarding to do so. ,,62 If rapists experience
rape as sex, does that mean there can be nothing wrong with it?

Once an act is labeled rape there is an epistemological problem with
seeing it as sex. 6 3 Indeed, this is a major social function served by
labeling acts rape. Rape becomes something a rapist does, as if he were
a separate species. But no personality disorder distinguishes most
rapists from normal men. 64 Psychopaths do rape, but only about 5
percent of all known rapists are diagnosed psychopathic. 65 In spite of
the numbers of victims, the normalcy of rapists, and even given the

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fact that most women are raped by men they know (making it most
unlikely that a few lunatics know around half of the women in the
United States), rape remains considered psychopathological and there-
fore not about sexuality.

Add this to rape’s pervasiveness and permissibility, together with
the belief that it is both rare and impermissible. Combine this with
the similarity between the patterns, rhythms, roles, and emotions, not
to mention acts, which make up rape (and battery) on the one hand
and intercourse on the other. All this makes it difficult to sustain the
customary distinctions between pathology and normalcy, parophilia
and nomophilia, violence and sex, in this area. Some researchers have
previously noticed the centrality of force to the excitement value of
pornography but have tended to put it down to perversion. Robert
Stoller, for example, observes that pornography today depends upon
hostility, voyeurism, and sadomasochism and calls perversion “the
erotic form of hatred. ,,66 If the perverse in this context is seen not as
the other side of a bright normal/abnormal line but as an undiluted
expression of a norm that permeates many ordinary interactions,
hatred of women-that is, misogyny-becomes a dynamic of sexual
excitement itself.

Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex. They
look a Iot alike. 67 Compare victims’ reports of rape with what
pornography says is sex. They look a lot alike. 68 In this light, the
major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is
that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see
anything wrong with it. Which also means that anything sexual that
happens often and one cannot get anyone to consider wrong is
intercourse, not rape, no matter what was done. The distinctions that
purport to divide this territory look more like the ideological supports
for normalizing the usual male use and abuse of women as “sexuality”
through authoritatively pretending that whatever is exposed of it is
deviant. This may have something to do with the conviction rate in
rape cases (making all those unconvicted men into normal men, and all
those acts into sex). It may have something to do with the fact that
most convicted rapists, and many observers, find rape convictions
incornprehensible.Y And with the fact that marital rape is considered
by many to be a contradiction in terms (“But if you can’t rape your
wife, who can you rape?”).70 And with the fact that so many rape
victims have trouble with sex afterward. 71

Sexuality I47

What effect does the pervasive reality of sexual abuse of women by
men have on what are deemed the more ordinary forms of sexual
interaction? How do these material experiences create interest and
point of view? Consider women. Recall that more than one-third of all
girls experience sex, perhaps are sexually initiated, under conditions
that even this society recognizes are forced or at least unequal. 72
Perhaps they learn this process of sexualized dominance as sex.
Top-down relations feel sexual. Is sexuality throughout life then ever
not on some level a reenactment of, a response to, that backdrop?
Rape, adding more women to the list, can produce similar resonance.
Sexually abused women-most women-seem to become either sex-
ually disinclined or compulsively promiscuous or both in series, trying
to avoid the painful events, or repeating them over and over almost
addictively, or both, in an attempt to reacquire a sense of control or to
make them come out right. Women also widely experience sexuality
as a means to male approval; male approval translates into nearly all
social goods. Violation can be sustained, even sought out, to this end.
Sex can, then, be a means of trying to feel alive by redoing what has
made one feel dead, of expressing a denigrated self-image seeking its
own reflection in self-action in order to feel fulfilled, or of keeping up
one’s stock with the powerful.

Many women who have been sexually abused (like many survivors of
concentration camps and ritual torture) report having distanced and
split themselves as a conscious strategy for coping with the abuse.
With women, this dissociation often becomes a part of their sexuality
per se and of their experience of the world, especially their experience
of men. Women widely report having this sensation during sex. Not
feeling pain, including during sex, has a similar etiology. As one
pornography model put it,

0: I had quite a bit of difficulty as a child. I was suicidal for a time,
because I never felt attached to my body. I just felt completely
detached from my body; I felt like a completely separate entity
from it. I still see my body as a tool, something to be used.

DR: Give me an example of how today you sense not being attached
to your body.

0: I don’t feel pain.
DR: What do you mean, literally?
0: I really don’t feel pain . . .

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DR: When there is no camera and you are having sexual relations,
are you still on camera?

0: Yes. I’m on camera 24 hours a day …
DR: Who are you?
0: Who? Olympia Dancing-Doll: The Sweet with the Super-

Supreme.
DR: What the hell is that?
0: That’s the title of my act.
DR: [pointing to her} This is a body. Is it your body?
0: Yes.
DR: Are you your body?
0: No. I’m not my body, but it is my body.73.

Women often begin alienating themselves from their body’s self-
preserving reactions under conditions under which they cannot stop
the pain from being inflicted, and then find the deadening process
difficult to reverse. Some then seek out escalating pain to feel sexual
or to feel alive or to feel anything at all. One particularly devastating
and confusing consequence of sexual abuse for women’s sexuality-and
a crisis for consciousness-occurs when one’s body experiences abuse as
pleasurable. Feeling loved and aroused and comforted during incest, or
orgasm during rape, are examples. Because body is widely regarded as
access to unmediated truth in this culture, women feel betrayed by
their bodies and seek mental justifications (Freudian derepression
theory provides an excellent one) for why their body’s reactions are
their own true reactions, and their values and consciousness (which
interprets the event as a violation) are socially imposed. That is, they
come to believe they really wanted the rape or the incest and interpret
violation as their own sexuality. 74

Interpreting women’s responses to pornography, in which there is
often a difference between so-called objective indices of arousal, such
as vaginal secretions, and self-reported arousal, raises similar issues.
Repression is the typical explanation.f? It seems at least as likely that
women disidentify with their bodies’ conditioned responses. Not to be
overly behavioral, but does anyone think Pavlov’s dogs were really
hungry every time they salivated at the sound of the bell? If it is
possible that hunger is inferred from salivation, perhaps humans
experience/” sexual arousal from pornographic cues and, since sexuality
is social, that is sexual arousal. Identifying that as a conditioned

Sexuality 149

response to a set of social cues, conditioned to what it is for political
reasons, is not the same as considering the response proof of sexual
truth simply because it, physically happens. Further, research shows
that sexual fetishism can be experimentally induced readily in
“normal” subjects. 77 If this can be done with sexual responses that the
society does not condone out front, why is it so unthinkable that the
same process might occur with those sexual responses it does?

If the existing social model and reality of sexuality center on male
force, and if that sex is socially learned and ideologically considered
positive and is rewarded, what is surprising is that not all women
eroticize dominance, not all love pornography, and many resent rape.
As Valerie Heller has said of her use in incest and pornography, both
as a child and as an adult, “I believed I existed only after I was turned
on, like a light switch by another person. When I needed to be
nurtured I thought I wanted to be used . . . Marks and bruises and
being used was the way I measured my self worth. You must
remember that I was ‘taught that because men were fucking my body
and using it for their needs it meant I was loved .” 78 Given the
pervasiveness of such experiences, the truly interesting question
becomes why and how sexuality in women is ever other than
masochistic.

All women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water.
Given the statistical realities, all women live all the time under the
shadow of the threat of sexual abuse. The question is, what can life as
a woman mean, what can sex mean, to targeted survivors in a rape
culture? Given the statistical realities, much of women’s sexual lives
will occur under post-traumatic stress. Being surrounded by
pornography-which is not only socially ubiquitous but often directly
used as part of sex79-makes this a relatively constant condition.
Women cope with objectification through trying to meet the male
standard, and measure their self-worth by the degree to which they
succeed. Women seem to cope with sexual abuse principally by denial
or fear. On the denial side, immense energy goes into defending
sexuality as just fine and getting better all the time, and into trying
to make sexuality feel all right, the way it is supposed to feel. Women
who are compromised, cajoled, pressured, tricked, blackmailed, or
outright forced into sex (or pornography) often respond to the
unspeakable humiliation, coupled with the sense of having lost some
irreplaceable integrity, by claiming that sexuality as their own. Faced

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with no alternatives, the strategy to acquire self-respect and pride is:
I chose it.

Consider the conditions under which this is done. This is a culture
in which women: are socially expected-and themselves necessarily
expect and want-to be able to distinguish the socially, epistemolog-
ically, indistinguishable. Rape and intercourse are not authoritatively
separated by any difference between the physical acts or amount of
force involved but only legally, by a standard that centers on the man’s
interpretation of the encounter. Thus, although raped women, that is,
most women, are supposed to be able to feel every day and every night
that they have some meaningful determining part in having their sex
life-their life, period-not be a series of rapes, the most they provide
is the raw data for the man to see as he sees it. And he has been seeing
pornography. Similarly, “consent” is supposed to be the crucial line
between rape and intercourse, but the legal standard for it is so
passive, so acquiescent, that a woman can be dead and have consented
under it. The mind fuck of all of this makes liberalism’s complicitous
collapse into “I chose it” feel like a strategy for sanity. It certainly
makes a woman at one with the world.

On the fear side, if a woman has ever been beaten in a relationship,
even if “only once,” what does that do to her everyday interactions, or
her sexual interactions, with that man? With other men? Does her
body ever really forget that behind his restraint he can do that any
time she pushes an issue, or for no reason at all? Does her vigilance
ever really relax? If she tried to do something about it, as many women
do, and if nothing was done, as it usually is not, does she ever forget
that that is what can be done to her at any time and nothing will be
done about it? Does she smile at men less-or more? If she writes at
all, does she imitate men less-or more? If a woman has ever been
raped, ever, does a penis ever enter her without some body memory,
if not a flashback then the effort of keeping it back; or does she hurry
up or keep trying, feeling something gaining on her, trying to make
it come out right? If a woman has ever been raped, does she ever fully
regain the feeling of physical integrity, of self-respect, of having what
she wants count somewhere, of being able to make herself clear to
those who have not gone through what she has gone through, ofliving
in a fair society, of equality?

Given the effects of learning sexuality through force or pressure or
imposition; given the constant roulette of sexual violence; given the

Sexuality I5 I

daily sexualization of every aspect of a woman’s presence-for a woman
to be sexualized means constant humiliation or threat of it, being
invisible as human being and center stage as sex object, low pay, and
being a target for assault or being assaulted. Given that this is the
situation of all women, that one never knows for sure that one is not
next on the list of victims until the moment one dies (and then, who
knows?), it does not seem exaggerated to say that women are sexual,
meaning that women exist, in a context of terror. Yet most profes-
sionals in the area of sexuality persist in studying the inexplicabilities
of what is termed female sexuality acontextually, outside the context
of gender inequality and its sexual violence-navel gazing, only
slightly further down. 8 o

The general theory of sexuality emerging from this feminist critique
does not consider sexuality to be an inborn force inherent in
individuals, nor cultural in the Freudian sense, in which sexuality
exists in a cultural context but in universally invariant stages and
psychic representations. It appears instead to be culturally specific,
even if so far largely invariant because male supremacy is largely
universal, if always in specific forms. Although some of its abuses (like
prostitution) are accentuated by poverty, it does not vary by class,
although class is one hierarchy it sexualizes. Sexuality becomes, in this
view, social and relational, constructing and constructed of power.
Infants, though sensory, cannot be said to possess sexuality in this
sense because they have not had the experiences (and do not speak the
language) that give it social meaning. Since sexuality is its social
meaning, infant erections, for example, are clearly sexual in the sense
that this society centers its sexuality on them, but to relate to a child
as though his erections mean what adult erections have been condi-
tioned to mean is a form of child abuse. Such erections have the
meaning they acquire in social life only to observing adults.

When Freud changed his mind and declared that women were not
telling the truth about what had happened to them when they said
they were abused as children, he attributed their accounts to
“fantasy. ,,81 This was regarded as a theoretical breakthrough. Under
the aegis of Freud, it is often said that victims of sexual abuse imagine
it, that it is fantasy, not real, and their sexuality caused it. The
feminist theory of sexuality suggests that it is the doctors who, because
of their sexuality, as constructed, imagine that sexual abuse is a fantasy
when it is real-real both in the sense that the sex haooened anrl in th,.

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152 Method

sense that it was abuse. Pornography is also routinely defended as
“fantasy,” meaning not real. But it is real: the sex that makes it is real
and is often abuse, and the sex that it makes is sex and is often abuse.
Both the psychoanalytic and the pornographic “fantasy” worlds are
what men imagine women imagine and desire because they are what
men, raised on pornography, imagine and desire about women. Thus
is psychoanalysis used to legitimate pornography, calling it fantasy,
and pornography used to legitimate psychoanalysis, to show what
women really want. Psychoanalysis and pornography, seen as epistemic
sites in the same ontology, are mirrors of each other, male supremacist
sexuality looking at itself looking at itself.

Perhaps the Freudian process of theory-building occurred like this:
men heard accounts of child abuse, felt aroused by the account, and
attributed their arousal to the child who is now a woman. Perhaps men
respond sexually when women give an account of sexual violation
because sexual words are a sexual reality, in the same way that men
respond to pornography, which is (among other things) an account of
the sexual violation of a woman. Seen in this way, much therapy as
well as court testimony in sexual abuse cases is live oral pornography.
Classical psychoanalysis attributes the connection between the expe-
rience of abuse (hers) and the experience of arousal (his) to the fantasy
of the girl child. When he does it, he likes it, so when she did it, she
must have liked it, or she must have thought it happened because she
as much enjoys thinking about it happening to her as he enjoys
thinking about it happening to her. Thus it cannot be abusive to her.
Because he wants to do it, she must want it done.

Feminism also doubts the mechanism of repression in the sense that
unconscious urges are considered repressed by social restrictions. Male
sexuality is expressed and expressed and expressed, with a righteous-
ness driven by the notion that something is trying to keep it from
expressing itself. Too, there is a lot of doubt both about biology and
about drives. Women are less repressed than oppressed, so-called
women’s sexuality largely a construct of male sexuality searching for
,someplace to happen, repression providing the reason for women’s
inhibition, meaning unwillingness to be available on demand. In this
view, one function of the Freudian theory of repression (a function
furthered rather than qualified by nco-Freudian adaptations) is ideo-
logically to support the freeing of male sexual aggression while
delegitimating women’s refusal to respond.

Sexuality 153

There may be a feminist unconscious, but it is not the Freudian one.
Perhaps equality lives there. Its laws, rather than a priori, objective,
or universal, might as well be a response to the historical regularities
of sexual subordination, which under bourgeois ideological conditions
require that the truth of male dominance be concealed in order to
preserve the belief that women are sexually self-acting: that women
want it. The feminist psychic universe certainly recognizes that people
do not always know what they want, have hidden desires and
inaccessible needs, lack awareness of motivation, have contorted and
opaque interactions, and have an interest in obscuring what is really
going on. But this does not essentially conceal that what women really
want is more sex. It is true, as Freudians have persuasively observed,
that many things are sexual that do not present themselves as such.
But in ways Freud never dreamed.

At risk of further complicating the issues, perhaps it would help to
think of women’s sexuality as women’s like Black culture is Blacks’: it
is, and it is not. The parallel cannot be precise in part because, owing
to segregation, Black culture developed under more autonomous
conditions than women, intimately integrated with men by force,
have had. Still, both can be experienced as a source of strength, joy,
expression, and as an affirmative badge of pride.

8 2
Both remain

nonetheless stigmatic in the sense of a brand, a restriction, a definition
as less. This is not because of any i~trinsic content or value, but
because the social reality is that their shape, qualities, texture,
imperative, and very existence are a response to powerlessness. They
exist as they do because of lack of choice. They are created out of social
conditions of oppression and exclusion. They may be part of a strategy
for survival or even of change. But, as is, they are not the whole world,
and it is the whole world that one is entitled to. This is why
interpreting female sexuality as an expression of women’s agency and
autonomy, as if sexism did not exist, is always denigrating and bizarre
and reductive, as it would be to interpret Black culture as if racism did
not exist. As if Black culture just arose freely and spontaneously on the
plantations and in the ghettos of North America, adding diversity to

American pluralism.
So long as sexual inequality remains unequal and sexual, attempts

to value sexuality as women’s, possessive as if women possess it, will
remain part of limiting women to it, to what women are now defined
as being. Outside of truly rare and contrapuntal glimpses (which most

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people think they live almost their entire sex life within), to seek an
equal sexuality without political transformation is to seek equality
under conditions of inequality. Rejecting this, and rejecting the
glorification of settling for the best that inequality has to offer or has
stimulated the resourceful to invent, are what Ti-Grace Atkinson
meant to reject when she said: “I do not know any feminist worthy of
that name who, if forced to choose between freedom and sex, would
choose sex. She’d choose freedom every time. »83

III. THE STATE

A nation and a woman are not forgiven the unguarded hour
in which the first adventurer that came along could violate
them.

-Karl Marx

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more
essential change to human society than the seizing of the
means of production by workers. The female body has been
both territory and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited
and assembly-line turning out life. We need to imagine a
world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her
own body. In such a world, women will truly create new life,
bring forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the
visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and
alter human existence-s-a new relationship to the universe.
Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work,
community, intimacy will develop new meanings. Thinking
itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

-Adrienne Rich

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Regulating online erotica – ethnographic
observations of a UK-based adult
entertainment provider

Axel Klein

Axel Klein is a Team Leader at
the Cocaine Route Monitoring
and Support Project,
CHSS, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK.

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to throw a new light on the online adult entertainment industry and
help remove the stigma associated with it.
Design/methodology/approach – An ethnographic approach was taken, with participant observation and
in-depth interviews with a number of informants.
Findings – This is an environment where female performers can enjoy good income opportunities and work
in a safe environment. It also provides a high level of job security for technical support staff.
Research limitations/implications – The study used a sample sample size with no access to clients.
Practical implications – It is important that UK regulation remains light handed to avoid pushing the
industry off shore.
Originality/value – The paper provides new data on the working environment in camming studios and
positive aspects of job security and the equitable distribution of profits.

Keywords Regulation, Online, Sex work, Adult entertainment, Camming, Erotica

Paper type Viewpoint

One of the first things that a Studio 66 performer has to establish with a client is that they will
never meet. For some punters this is a deal breaker and they take their fancies elsewhere.
But enough find the prospect of a digital relationship sufficiently satisfactory to make this TV
channel a profitable enterprise. The services provided range from daytime chat through to
one-to-one explicit adult interaction with striptease and simulated masturbation after 11 p.m.
In return clients pay between £1.50 and £5 per minute.

Filmed at the company’s studio in London the shows appear on three live satellite TV channels. There
are also a website and webcam channels that allow the performers more flexibility as they can work
from home or any other location. For them, modern erotica provides a rare opportunity for cashing in
on good looks and the defiance of social convention to achieve life style aspirations. Pay-to-view real
life erotic performances by a single performer[1] that are transmitted via web camera have become
the latest and hottest development in the adult entertainment sector. The sheer scale of the industry
has confounded social commentators and is setting a new challenge to regulatory authorities. The
activities are continuously derided as pornography or prostitution, terms that according to Primetime
TV[2] (UK)’s Managing Director, are deeply injurious because of their negative connotations[3],
arguing that men have celebrated the physical beauty of women since time immemorial.

Not shying away from classical comparisons, he suggests that the Studio 66 platform has
sprung from the same impulse that inspired Botticelli to paint Venus stepping out of a shell. They
work in a different medium perhaps, and to different social mores, but there is the same
relationship between viewer and viewed, client and performer and the same frisson.

Received 23 June 2016
Revised 6 July 2016
Accepted 7 July 2016

PAGE 222 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016, pp. 222-227, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1745-9265 DOI 10.1108/DAT-06-2016-0017

Technology is driving the development of the sector and leading to adaptations. Just as the
proliferation of pirate recordings led to the revival of live concerts in the music industry, so has
the glut of freely available online porn pushed adult entertainment sector towards live interactive
erotic entertainment. It has also re-balanced power relations between service providers and
performers. “The technology allows a performer a lot of independence. All they need is a laptop,
a web camera, a platform and a bank account. This is why you have a lot of independents
working from home or anywhere in the world they happen to be”[4].

Today’s performers are increasingly confident and mobile. They can, for instance, take their web
camera into a public space like a park or the British library and connect with their customers who
will then ask – and pay for – services. Feeding on such visual stimuli from a “virtual girlfriend” the
client can act out the fantasy of having sex in the park without risk or contact.

The web camera produces a continuous stream of fresh imagery. Studies show that male
customers are always looking for fresh images, even while remaining “loyal” to particular
performers (Moxon, 2009). Many clients are in virtual relationships as is evident in the adulation
fans pay to their favourite “stars”.

But the medium also allows performers to “tailor” services to customers’ needs. The first is in the
attitude towards the clients. Success lies in treating clients for what they are: customers paying
good money to indulge their legitimate desire.

Part of the management’s job is to remind the staff that “this is a customer service business and
as such the quality of the service is what determines the businesses success. The callers are not
perverts, they are customers and are someone’s father, son or brother”. As in any other service
industry making the customer feel special is key. “It is just like going to a restaurant and being
given a great welcome by the Maitre D”.

Successful performers manage to project that positive customer care and give special attention
to their regular callers. She will, for instance, remember personal details like a nick name, the cars
he drives or his birthday. It makes him feel that she cares for him, and in a way she does. But it is
also a way of ensuring return calls, and the most skillful of the women are excellent in convincing
or deluding the client that he really is the object of her affection. A typical example would be a
daytime telephone one-on-one where as part of the “real girlfriend experience” the client asks her
how she is doing. “Terry! Thanks goodness you’ve called, its been so boring today, I’m so glad to
hear your voice”.

In their “special” relationships the men can also make requests, for special items of clothing –
a blue skirt, pink knickers, etc. – or for certain scenarios. Sometimes the performer is sent a
script, “what if your wife catches us” to go with a particular fantasy. At other times they want the
women to talk dirty or humiliate them.

The adaptation of technological advances where performers and clients can remain anonymous,
has opened up an entirely new arena of social intercourse, sexual gratification and economic
activity. It provides a spicy twist to virtual relationships.

While the set up has empowered performers, and especially female performers, there are
challenges for the corporate players. The model developed by Studio 66 is to combine
conventional linear TV broadcast accessible on Sky “adult” section of the Sky electronic
programme guide (“Sky EPG”), alongside bespoke webcam interactivity into a single bundle.
Performers can use the platform of Live TV, web cams and on demand video content from the
company website to create and build a brand. They can then jointly monetise that brand from
home or any site they wish, with the option of working from the studio always available.

Constantly harassed by moral crusaders and scrutinised by intrusive regulators, the adult
entertainment industry has always been an early adopter of technological innovation. Disruptive
technological changes, like videos in the 1970[5], internet in the 2000, the webcam today, have
helped the sector avoid undue of legislative interference, but it is a cat and mouse game.

Sitting in his control room by the battery of monitors, Brendan[6], the gallery operator and
compliance officer, keeps an eye on the studios and regularly checks on the phone conversations.
Occasionally he will alert a performer by intercom to pull down a wayward dress. Brendan explains

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 223

that if a girl inadvertently or not becomes too explicit, he has to switch the camera off and log the
incident to show that they immediately took action. An Ofcom report from 2013 notes a regulatory
breach when a daytime “female presenter” was seen exposing her nipples, gyrating her hips
suggestively and caressing her inner thigh, breasts and buttocks. They informed the licensee that
they were minded to consider imposing statutory sanctions in case of recurrence[7].

The business responded with alacrity, holding meetings with performers and issuing a code of
conduct. Paul, a producer and cameraman, explains the need for caution. “There are people
lining up to pounce on this business so we have to self-regulate”. This also means setting ceilings
of 20 minutes for callers after which they cannot renew. But the performers themselves also keep
an eye out, saying things like “you have called me four times now, you should really hang up now”.
These defensive measures are in place to pre-empt regulatory intervention. They also give them a
sense of being cared for, which further ensures his return.

Career choices

As with many TV studios, the action takes place behind windowless walls, the irony of a media
business built on the appeal of visual imagery. Apart from the technical requirement, this hermetic
isolation helps produce the privacy required. Privacy is a contested term here, because what the
studio sells is the inversion of social norms by allowing a paying stranger to enter the bedroom of
beautiful young women and vicariously engage in the most intimate acts.

For the crew however, privacy, team spirit and a pleasant environment are preconditions for
producing a quality product. “Many of the girls expect this to be a really sleazy place when they
first arrive. They are pleasantly surprised by what they find, the place is clean and light and
everybody is respectful”, explains Robert. He has been working with the founder since the
beginning, when they met at a different channel that was far less well organised. He has stuck
with the job for over six years now. A graduate in social anthropology who began work in the
publishing industry he never thought of becoming a “producer” in adult entertainment. But,
he explains, “my old position was morphing increasingly into a sales job. That was not for me,
so when this opportunity came up, I left”.

Precisely because of its ambivalent status the erotica industry is less structured than other
professions with opportunities for people short of vocational qualifications or technical expertise
that are expected elsewhere. Most of the staff came on board by accident, often joining initially
“while looking for something else” and find themselves in the same post years later. “I am not sure
what my job actually is” Robert explains. The manager left him to come up with his own title and
he is still looking. The tangible part of this job specification is organising the rota. It is not always
easy ensuring that all the shifts are covered in a 24/7 business. But the most demanding side of
the work is looking after the performers.

“Managing a lot of women is challenging at best of times, but looking after 50 glamour models
can just be impossible”, he sighs. The downside of the around the clock business is that
someone has to be on call. Robert receives texts at all hours of the day, which also puts a strain
on his own relationship. He relishes the fact that he has managed establishing a good rapport
with the performers. To some he is a confidante and he mentions examples where he was
informed of one young woman’s pregnancy before she had told her own mother.

It is by providing some form of pastoral care that Studio 66 (see footnote 6) is managing to hold
on to their performers when the competition is becoming intense. After all, anybody can set up a
technological platform, and there is a growing volume of free erotica on the internet.

This is one of the reasons why Mick, the director of studio 66, supports better regulation.
He believes that the government’s commitment to protecting children from pornography can work
in their favour. Age verification technology will ensure that the client is likely to stay after having gone
through the process and that he is able to pay. He things further that with the requirement in place
punters are more likely to entrust their details to a reputable private company.

But beyond questions of access the regulator is also interfering with content, which Mick Jordan
thinks lamentable. The vast majority of people, in his view, have no desire to watch a model

PAGE 224 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016

urinating into someone’s mouth, but for those who do, and provided the video was filmed
between consenting adults, let them watch it. If it is pushed underground then people will migrate
to the dark web, where the production methods may well be less civilised than at Studio 66.

The strive for respectability

The functionality of the night-time shows with striptease, “implicit nudity”, and simulated sex is
captured by the noms de guerre adopted by regulars like “Gonnacum”. Puzzling, however, is the
popularity of the daytime service when the girls keep their clothes on and do little other than
stretch and chat. Much of it is mundane, but some of it personal. One guy is telling Donna about
his mother who is not well and might have to go to hospital. Donna coos sympathetically and
wants to know more about the circumstances with the seconds ticking away.

To Robert this is a mystery, “what does he think is going on there, we are not the Samaritans”.
What the customers buy into is the fantasy of being in a relationship with a stunning partner. That
is why they send letters, sometimes with photographs of themselves, as if they were in a long
distance relationship. It follows that customers try to take it further, having revealed so much
themselves and after spending a fortune on phone charges, they want a date. When this does not
happen they take their desire elsewhere. Nothing is more revealing about the capture of some of
these men than the fact that they often return at a later point. The rupture can even reinforce the
compulsion by giving it the appearance of a tiff in a normal relationship.

To the crew in the studio the explanation is loneliness and social alienation. But some of the men
are in relationships and establish camaraderie on the chat lines where they discuss the
performers. Reassuring against the backdrop of social anxiety over the alleged misogyny inherent
to pornography is the quality of the exchanges on UK Babe Channels[8]. The prevailing attitudes
are classic fandom with pretensions of connoisseurship and genuine affection. A few lines
garnered from the first page of Lola Knight’s page provide an insight into the viewer’s mindset:

▪ “My personal opinion is that she is stunningly attractive, and deserved a regular place […] But all in all.
What a babe! And what a signing by studio 66 yet again! Looking forward to this beauty more often”.

▪ She would have fitted in at elite, can give no higher praise than that, she is so cute, hope she is on
her own next time.

▪ Finally S66 have signed a proper naturally assetted nightshow performer; I was mesmerised by her
beauty, only two questions spring to mind; when is she on again and more importantly can S66
hold on to her, whatever happens she wins BOTN[9] from me[10].

Arguably this is a consequence of the quest for respectability pursued by the operators and their
engagement with the regulator. It allows performers, support crew and clients to preserve their
dignity. Writing about the US porn industry in the late 1990, David Foster Wallace noted how the
psycho dynamics of shame and self-loathing coupled with the rising acceptability of porn (sex) in
mainstream culture were pushing the industry to extremes to retain its edgy sense of
unacceptability[11]. Studio 66 illustrates a very different trajectory for adult entertainment, with the
normalisation of commercial sexuality and a pride in setting standards.

In the gallery the operator keeps an eye on the competition. A series of monitors are tuned into
competing channels like Storm Babes. Gregory speaks dismissively of their poor lighting and
inept camera work. He also reports the failure of a contracted special interest channel “Deep filth”.
These outliers reinforce the sense of Studio 66 respectability, with in-house rules restricting nudity
(breasts) to the 11-5:30 night slot (different rules for webcam viewers).

Social attitudes still raise forbidding barriers to the carefree socialising of Studio 66 employees.
Most staff have cover stories, often pretending to be working in gambling or shopping channels,
but do run the risk of being caught out when stumbling into aficionados. For the cameramen,
producers and gallery operators social stigma and night work is the price for a rare luxury in the
media industry – stable full time employment. For the performer, of course, the challenge is all the
harder. Most of the women therefore work part time in mainstream occupations, often as
beauticians, which provides an alternate identity.

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 225

A save haven

The flexibility of the studio provides ready opportunities for women to assume a sexualised
fantasy persona without disrupting lifestyles. Bella starts her shift at 10 a.m. and works until 6 with
regular tea, toilet and lunch breaks. She is a beautiful, slim woman in her mid 20s, who works
lying on a bed in the studio. Occasionally she will throw a kiss at the camera, stretch and curl her
lovely legs asking all those “sexy boys out there” to give her a call. She has an easy smile, wide
open eyes and an expression of being truly interested in what he is telling her. The main skill,
however, is to keep talking about very little for minutes on end. Bella’s average caller time is
7.14 minutes. Much of it will be routine, “do you like what I am wearing?” or the customised chat
for regulars like Colin, who gets a special smile. The gift for easy patter, stunning looks and a great
deal of patience seem to be the key qualifications for Studio 66 models.

Some come from other sectors of the adult entertainment industry while others start out and stay in the
chat rooms. Most are part time like Lara who comes in from the West country to work 10-6,
overnighting in the bedroom, then working the 5:30-12:00 shift, and going home. Average earnings are
hard to calculate as each girl negotiates a different hourly rate and cuts the takings from each session
on a 40/60 basis with the studio. Some of the best performers make over 100k a year – part time.

It’s the money that make it so hard for the girls to leave. The insularity and stigma also work against exit
strategies, moreover, a career spent posing and chatting does not help diversify the performer’s
skill set. Leaving the industry therefore means crashing from a professional income to an unskilled
hourly rate. According to Samantha, who herself has just come out of retirement, most girls cannot
do it. They are so used to the spending power they do not save up. She and her boyfriend,
a film performer, now want to save up for a mortgage, and like many a woman in her late 20s,
finds she has to go back to work.

Another obstacle to re-integration is the complex identity that comes with being a glamour model.
The adulation of their clients, the regular customers, and for some, a fan base, feeds fragile egos.
As object of myriad fantasies the girls are simultaneously superbly confident in their powers to
manipulate and yet lacking in self-esteem. Some, especially as they get older, go back to school for
better qualifications while others prepare for business, usually in the personal beauty sector. But
changes in demographics, plus good body care, are extending the life span of erotic performers.
Studio 66 has a Golden Girl channel for the over 40s and only recently retired a working girl in her 60s.

Industry futures

The commercial director of Studio 66 has strong views on the regulatory framework. He believes
there are advantages in having age and credit card checks early on at the browsing stage, as
those who persist in filling in details are more likely to convert into customers. Eliminating some of
the profusion of free pornography available on the internet is also likely to benefit the remaining,
access controlled, commercial channels. He strongly objects to interference with content,
however. While “golden showers” may not have universal appeal, there are niche markets that
should be catered for. Overly zealous restrictions only run the risk of driving the providers
underground and the studios off shore with possibly very different working conditions and profit
sharing arrangements. Keeping the business in the UK has allowed them to create an
environment that meets high working standards without compromising the quality of the product.

The long-term future of the performers is less easy to ascertain. Spending a life time fearing
exposure, fabricating a web of pseudo identities to explain income and absences, must impose a
psychological burden. The social stigma attending to any involvement in the sector draws a veil over
successful passages out of erotica, leaving us to speculate about the successful slide into alternative
careers or the returns on invested earnings. There may well be other costs, such as arrested
personal development, or the prolonged strain of acting out a one-dimensional fantasy with little
room for self-expression. And yet, the telephone and on line relationships that the models do
establish with their clients have created a new communicative dimension that remains unexplored.

Male clients, in turn, may find that exposure to sexual titillation, feeding onanistic fantasies, may
get in the way of forming relationships. It may impede sexual development and certainly impose a
financial burden. In both cases, however, these are risks that adults need to assess for

PAGE 226 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016

themselves. Regulators can set standards and mitigate the risk of erotic content spilling over into
wider other channels where they are more accessible. The greater stringency of controls comes
at the invariable cost of pushing the industry underground, with a more sordid product and
greater risk for models, producers or clients.

For the moment “camming” has shifted the balance of power between performers and
“facilitators”, clients and workers, and reconfigured the relationships between punters and
performers. Eevie, a performer interviewed in Seattle last year, observed that camming has
changed sex work. “I think it’s really humanized us. We’re not just an idea of a person, we’re
actual people. Even if you come for the fantasy and just to see boobs and stuff, you’re gonna
have to work through me first” (McGehee, 2015). Most interesting perhaps is the combination of
web camera encounters, erotic pics and videos with performance, graphic art and short stories
pioneered by Aellea[12] who has her own website. Here erotica becomes a cultivated form of
self-expression using technology as a platform for purveying a product, promoting a body
centred aesthetics and promoting a philosophical ideal. In the opening credo the artist declares
herself “I am an INTP, a libertarian, a gun-owner and a loather of religion”. It’s a rare instance of
turning the tables on a constituency that has been persecuting the erotic art for millennia.

How the regulatory arrangements work out is quite unclear, as the arguments of reason are
conventionally drowned by apocalyptic warnings of moral decay. While this may succeed in closing
particular sites and business models the industry has always managed to adjust. For the moment,
however, camming seems to have achieved an equilibrium between performer safety, client
anonymity and a social relationship that makes good business sense with minimal external costs.

Notes

1. The performers are on their own, the erotic performances are simulated, there is no actual sex.

2. The holding company that owns the station.

3. Greek, from pornē prostitute+graphein to write.

4. Interview with managing director.

5. Staff recount the popular explanation for the demise of the Betamax video format as due to the adoption
of VHS as the standard video format by the porn industry.

6. All names have been changed.

7. Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin Issue 235, 5 August 2013.

8. UK Babe Channels www.babeshows.co.uk/index.php. Studio 66 had 140,959 posts on 27 May 2016.

9. Blog of the night.

10. www.babeshows.co.uk/showthread.php?tid ¼ 65795
11. David Foster Wallace, 1998, Big Red Son.

12. http://profiles.myfreecams.com/Aella

References

McGehee (2015), “Camming is not like any other kind of sex work”, The Stranger, available at: www.
thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/06/10/22360297/camming-is-not-like-any-other-kind-of-sex-work
(accessed 23 March 2016).

Moxon, S. (2009), The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play,
and in Society, Imprint Academic, Exeter.

Corresponding author

Axel Klein can be contacted at: axelcklein28@gmail.com

For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website:
www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm
Or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 227

www.babeshows.co.uk/index.php

www.babeshows.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=65795

http://profiles.myfreecams.com/Aella

www.thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/06/10/22360297/camming-is-not-like-any-other-kind-of-sex-work

Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.

Regulating online erotica – ethnographic
observations of a UK-based adult
entertainment provider

Axel Klein

Axel Klein is a Team Leader at
the Cocaine Route Monitoring
and Support Project,
CHSS, University of Kent,
Canterbury, UK.

Abstract

Keywords Regulation, Online, Sex work, Adult entertainment, Camming, Erotica

Paper type Viewpoint

Received 23 June 2016
Revised 6 July 2016
Accepted 7 July 2016

PAGE 222 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016, pp. 222-227, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1745-9265 DOI 10.1108/DAT-06-2016-0017

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 223

Career choices

But beyond questions of access the regulator is also interfering with content, which Mick Jordan
thinks lamentable. The vast majority of people, in his view, have no desire to watch a model

PAGE 224 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016

The strive for respectability

▪ She would have fitted in at elite, can give no higher praise than that, she is so cute, hope she is on
her own next time.

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 225

A save haven

Industry futures

PAGE 226 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016

Notes

1. The performers are on their own, the erotic performances are simulated, there is no actual sex.

2. The holding company that owns the station.

3. Greek, from pornē prostitute+graphein to write.

4. Interview with managing director.

5. Staff recount the popular explanation for the demise of the Betamax video format as due to the adoption
of VHS as the standard video format by the porn industry.

6. All names have been changed.

7. Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin Issue 235, 5 August 2013.

8. UK Babe Channels www.babeshows.co.uk/index.php. Studio 66 had 140,959 posts on 27 May 2016.

9. Blog of the night.

10. www.babeshows.co.uk/showthread.php?tid ¼ 65795
11. David Foster Wallace, 1998, Big Red Son.

12. http://profiles.myfreecams.com/Aella

References

Moxon, S. (2009), The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play,
and in Society, Imprint Academic, Exeter.

Corresponding author

Axel Klein can be contacted at: axelcklein28@gmail.com

VOL. 16 NO. 3 2016 j DRUGS AND ALCOHOL TODAY j PAGE 227

www.babeshows.co.uk/index.php

www.babeshows.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=65795

http://profiles.myfreecams.com/Aella

www.thestranger.com/features/feature/2015/06/10/22360297/camming-is-not-like-any-other-kind-of-sex-work

Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction
prohibited without permission.

Partin, William Clyde. 2019. Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance.
Surveillance & Society 17(1/2): 153-160.
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index | ISSN: 1477-7487
© The author(s), 2019 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license

William Clyde Partin

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
WCPartin@live.unc.edu

Abstract

This paper describes where and how research into the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform Twitch can profitably engage
surveillance studies. It argues that Twitch sits at the intersection of what David Lyon calls “surveillance culture,” a culture in which
watching and being watched is fundamental to individuals’ customs, habits, and ways of interpreting the world; and surveillance
capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s term for an emerging logic of accumulation built on data collection and hoarding. I draw attention
to three different actors in the Twitch ecosystem—the viewer, the streamer, and the platform owner—to articulate the different
modes of seeing and being seen each position affords. In all cases, I illustrate how visibility is bound up in a complex,
multidirectional web of political economic relations. In order to resist technological determinist narratives about platform effects, I
consider Twitch as a “boundary object” in order to identify how social, geographical, and cultural context influences actors in each
position. I conclude by offering some observations about what Twitch reveals about platform surveillance in general.

Introduction

In July 2018, the St. Louis Dispatch reported that Jason Gargac, a 32-year old Uber and Lyft driver working
in the St. Louis area, had been secretly broadcasting a live feed of his passengers to the Amazon-owned
livestreaming platform, Twitch (Heffernan 2018a). While this was not strictly illegal—Missouri is a one-
party recording consent state—passengers interveiwed by the Dispatch were understandably outraged when
they learned that their rides had been streamed to an audience of several hundred viewers, some of whom
made disparaging and sexually-charged comments about riders in real-time. Initially, Uber offered a five-
dollar credit to anyone who complained and a promise that they would not be paired with Gargac again.
Under increasing public pressure, however, Uber (and, later, Lyft) deactivated Gargac’s account and
instituted a policy banning drivers from broadcasting while on duty (Heffernan 2018b). Gargac, who
reported earning some additional $3,500 on Twitch over a period of several months, eventually deleted his
channel, which remains inactive as of December 2018.

This episode is unusual not simply because it poses questions about the legality and ethics of livestreaming,
nor even due to the novel collision of two forms of platform labor, but because Twitch is most associated
with digital games. While Twitch has relaxed its content guidelines to make space for “lifestreamers” like
Gargac, “social eating,” live gambling, and even on-duty sanitation workers, these channels are a small
fraction of the 4.6 million regular broadcasters on the platform, which delivered close to 10 billion hours of
live video in 2018. Twitch sits squarely within what David Nieborg and Thomas Poell (2018: 2) call the

Article Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance

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Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) 154

platformization of cultural production, “the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural
extensions of digital platforms into the web,” which has significant implications for the production,
monetization, and distribution of cultural content.

A growing body of literature is beginning to situate Twitch within broader political, cultural, and economic
currents. Even so, while scholars in “Twitch studies” (such as it is) rightly acknowledge the surveillant
dimensions of the platform, the specific infrastructures and imaginaries of surveillance on Twitch have not
been explored in depth, if only because the field is still establishing its empirical and theoretical terrain.
Rather than offering a single argument, then, my aim is to suggest what research into Twitch can learn from
surveillance studies, a field that offers a perspective that is especially useful for analyzing a platform built,
in essence, on seeing and being seen. For that reason, I position Twitch at the intersection of what David
Lyon (2018) calls surveillance culture, the sense that watching and being watched has become fundamental
to our customs, habits, and ways of interpreting the world, as well as surveillance capitalism, Soshana
Zuboff’s (2015) term for an emergent logic of accumulation in digital spaces built on widespread data
collection. In both cases, Twitch offers insight into how, and in what ways, surveillance increasingly
mediates contemporary cultural economies.

Twitch, Platforms, and Surveillance

Twitch was founded in 2008 as Justin.tv. Unlike YouTube, which was then coming to prominence, Justin.tv
afforded synchronous, asymmetric audio-visual communication between a broadcaster and their audience.1
Though Justin.tv was not the first livestreaming site, it succeeded in part because it reduced the cost of
delivering one hour of live video to less than a penny, making ad-supported livestreaming a viable business
model. Like many other sites built on user-generated content, Justin.tv grew rapidly throughout the late
2000s. In 2011, in part due to concerns over the volume of “pirated” streams hosted on the site (Bruns 2009),
and in part due to the popularity of video game content on the site, Justin.tv rebranded as Twitch. To orient
itself around gaming, the site adjusted its terms of service to ban any content that did not include live
gameplay, going so far as to dictate what percentage of the screen could be occupied by a video feed of the
streamer’s face. In 2014, amid an exponentially increasing number of viewers and streamers, Amazon
announced that it had purchased Twitch in an all-cash deal for $980 million dollars.

In describing its product, Twitch adopts many of the performative and egalitarian connotations of “platform”
that made the term appealing to tech companies in late 2000s (Gillespie, 2010). Scholarship on platforms
frequently echoes this definitional flexibility. Whereas software studies tends to ontologize platforms in
terms of programmability, scholars of political economy (Srnicek 2016) focus on how platforms facilitate
vast multi-sided markets (Rieder and Sire 2014). Researchers interested in labor, by contrast, theorize
platforms as “intermediaries” (van Doorn 2017). Twitch, which provides opportunities for self-expression,
has an application programming interface (API), enables exchanges between unlike parties, and organizes
labor at scale, is a platform according to each of these definitions. As a result, I adopt a knowingly open
sense of platform that acknowledges each of these valences without suggesting that any one is the “true”
definition. Platforms, like all things, are what they are only in context.

In response to this conceptual slippage, I also adopt John Gilliom and Torin Monahan’s (2013: 3) permissive
definition of surveillance as “monitoring people in order to regulate or govern their behavior,” while also
affirming that surveillance acquires different forms, purposes, and meanings across social contexts. The
need for radical contextuality takes on particular importance in social and participatory media, which
challenge top-down frameworks for surveillance and demonstrate the need to theorize alternate modes of
post-panoptic and social surveillance (Marwick 2012). As Monahan and Murakami Wood (2018: 307) ask,

1 In some ways, Mark Andrejevic (2008: 39) predicted the development and success of a service like Twitch in his
early work on interactive television. As he writes, “in the digital future, watching will really be a form of participation
precisely because we will be able to ‘talk back’ to the tube. The savvy subject will be realized in the form of the active
viewer.” As I will show, this description could have easily functioned as a pitch to Justin.tv’s early investors.

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Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) 155

“how should we modify our explanatory frameworks to include the nuanced complexity of micro-level
influence or the subtle production of social norms through social media interactions?” Twitch is a fruitful
site for wrestling with this question. Given the complex interplay of sociotechnical and political economic
relations on Twitch, and the variety of cultural production taking place, there is no one form of
“surveillance” on Twitch, but, rather, an irreducible array of surveillant relations. Untangling them—if only
to study their engagement—requires attending to the forms of seeing and being seen afforded to different
actors in the platform ecosystem. I now turn to them.

Streamers
In her monograph on Twitch, Watch Me Play, T.L. Taylor (2018) argues that Twitch broadcasters engage
in a kind of “transformative play,” a form of labor that turns private gameplay into public entertainment
through social practices and technical skills. While the ability to stream is not itself hardware intensive,
professional streaming demands a complex assemblage of microphones, video cameras, green screens,
second or even third monitors, fast, stable internet, and high-end computer hardware. A typical broadcast
includes a live feed of the streamer’s screen, as well as a webcam feed that displays streamers’ reactions to
in-game events and actions by the audience (see Figure 1). Twitch enthusiasts—viewers and streamers—
emphasize that “Twitch chat,” a box that allows viewers to send pseudonymous text-based messages, as
well as a growing number of extensions, is crucial to facilitating the interactive video experience that defines
the platform for many. Thus, both viewers and streamers are invested in the degree to which they can react
to and influence each other’s actions.

Figure 1: A screenshot of a typical livestream, displaying the live broadcast, chat box, and the rest of the user
interface.

Echoing Daniel Trottier’s (2012) work on how social media surveillance is simultaneous and
multidirectional, Austin Walker (2014) argues in an early article on livestreaming published by this journal
that streamers benefit from the new modes of “creative and collaborative” play Twitch affords. This is true:
most streamers, amateur or professional, view Twitch an empowering tool for self-expression. Yet, as
Walker notes, it is also true that streamers are subject to various “techniques and technologies of control

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Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) 156

and surveillance.” Taylor (2018) has elaborated on this point, describing how streamers are embedded in
the “regulatory assemblage” of networked broadcasting, the complex systems of governance and regulation
that shape streamers’ labor. As with other social media platforms, streamers must adhere to Twitch-imposed
content guidelines that govern everything from hate speech to copyrighted content, the latter of which is
monitored by algorithmic detection systems. At the same time, streamers are subjected to ongoing scrutiny
by each other and their viewers. The policing of women’s bodies by viewers, streamers, and Twitch itself
(in debates over what constitutes “appropriate” attire for streaming shows) that visibility and surveillance
on the platform is simultaneously bottom-up, lateral, and top-down (Alexandra 2018).

These relations are closely tied to the political economy of Twitch, which, as Hector Postigo (2016) notes
of YouTube, is inextricable from its sociotechnical architecture. Mark Johnson and Jamie Woodcock
(forthcoming) identify seven ways (as of 2018) in which streamers monetize their broadcasts: subscriptions,
donations, advertising, sponsorships, on-air competitions, unpredictable rewards for viewers, and channel
games. Though surveillance may be articulated to each of these, the role it plays is particularly apparent for
donations. As Taylor (2018) notes, drawing on recent work by Nancy Baym (2018: 21), streamers perform
constant relational labor, defined as “the ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of
communicating with people over time in order to create structures that can support continued work,” in
order to present themselves as “worthy” of donations from viewers. Likewise, upon receiving donations,
streamers are expected to perform gratitude appropriate to a given donation’s amount: while a five-dollar
donation may elicit a polite “thank you” from a streamer, $5,000 demands a spectacular celebration
(compilations of streamers receiving large donations has become its own subgenre on YouTube). Should
streamers fail to present themselves as deserving or celebrate a large donation adequately, they risk being
seen as ungrateful, imperiling their financial relationship with their audience. Thus, the sociotechnical
underpinnings of the political economy of Twitch interpellate streamers such that they must endlessly
monitor and modulate their behavior to appease a (potentially) paying audience.

Viewers
The productivity of audiences has long been a theme in the political economy of communication, going
back to Dallas Smythe’s (1973) formulation of the audience commodity, which described how audiences
are produced and sold to advertisers—the “work,” in a sense, of being watched. Smythe’s arguments have
received renewed interest in the age of social media, and scholars such as Christian Fuchs (2012) have
demonstrated how Marx’s concept of abstract labor is fully compatible with the various modalities of labor
that social media relies upon. While watching streams, Twitch viewers, like other social media platforms,
produce data that can be monetized via the development of data personas that can be sold to advertisers,
predict market trends, or influence user behavior.

Even so, viewers are not passive and enact their own forms of agency within Twitch, which speak to their
own self-presentation strategies and personal desires. As with any medium, viewer motivations for tuning
into Twitch vary significantly among individuals. Uses and gratifications research (Hilvert-Bruce et al.
2018) has shown that while many viewers are eager to evaluate new games for purchase or improve their
gaming skill by watching elite players, a plurality of viewers seeks sociality on Twitch. And because the
social necessarily relies on the presence of others—not just the streamer who “creates” the broadcast space,
but also those who answer the summons to tune in and interact—it is in part the audience that produces
Twitch’s appeal.

Viewers’ approaches to becoming social are often tied to strategies of becoming visible, both to each other
and to the streamers they follow. On this point, I have found Crystal Abidin’s (2016: 90) notion of visibility
labor, defined as “the work individuals do when they self-posture and curate their self-presentations so as
to be noticeable,” to be generative concept. Just as Abidin’s informants—followers of Singaporean
Instagram influencers—strategize about how and when to engage with certain posts, Twitch viewers
carefully negotiate the technical affordances and social norms of Twitch. Importantly, however, visibility
labor on Twitch is mediated by its political economy. While Twitch chat allows viewers to pseudonymously
ask questions of streamers and other viewers, individual messages are often drowned out in broadcasts with

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thousands of viewers. In such cases, becoming visible requires making a donation, which will cause a
viewer’s name to appear on the stream and (in theory) be recognized by the streamer. Such messages may
be supportive, taunting, or nakedly self-promotional. But regardless of intent, the work of “being seen”
performed by viewers is an integral part of how streamers monetize the labor of livestreaming.

Likewise, Johnson and Woodcock (forthcoming) describe “channel games” as one strategy streamers use to
monetize their audiences, affording such audiences an opportunity to become persistently visible. The most
famous among these is the “Bit Boss,” a

downloadable extension for one’s stream which establishes a certain donor as being the
“Boss” (Bits are Twitch’s internal currency) other viewers can “attack” by donating further
Bits. The individual who deals the final blow then becomes the Boss, and as a reward, their
username and donation remain on-screen until they are defeated by a later donor.

Beyond the hypervisibility it affords to a single “winner,” the Bit Boss channel game highlights the agency
of the audience and casts attention on it as a collective, one capable of working together to achieve a specific
goal. Importantly, however, this self-conscious call to action is circumscribed by Twitch’s political
economic terrain, benefiting both streamers and the platform owner.

Twitch as Platform Owner
Finally, Twitch—itself a part of Amazon’s empire—echoes the broader logics of surveillance capitalism,
defined by Zuboff (2015) as a model of institutionalized value accumulation in online spaces based on data
collection. Surveillance capitalism monetizes data it extracts from users by developing consumer profiles—
which, in this case, are linked to viewers’ Amazon accounts—in order to map and predict trends, manipulate
individual and group behavior, and sell collected data in markets that individual users are barred from
participating in.

As I argue elsewhere (Partin forthcoming), Twitch has consistently moved to “capture” third-party services
by creating first-party tools that replicate their functionality, which encloses the data these services produce
about streamers and viewers alike. Streamers, for example, have long relied on third-party donation
management services to process donations. In 2016, however, Twitch announced a similar service of its
own, Twitch Bits, that would compete with these third-party services. Because of Twitch’s ability design
its own interface, Twitch automatically enrolls every streamer in the Bits program and gives Bits prime
placement in its interface. These practices of “digital enclosure” (Andrejevic 2009) echo the broader logics
of platform capitalism, wherein data is imagined as a “raw” resource to be expropriated and capitalized
upon.

Twitch, like all platforms, also engages in various forms of algorithmic and manual content moderation and
behavioral monitoring that recall earlier panoptic theories of surveillance. As Tarleton Gillespie (2018: 5)
argues, “platforms must moderate: both to protect one user from another, or one group from its antagonists,
and to remove the offensive, vile, or illegal.” It is right, I believe, to expect Twitch to intervene when
streamers broadcast obviously hateful or illegal content, or when streamers engage in abusive behaviors on-
air.2

2 That said, streamers, who are incentivized to pursue novelty in a cutthroat attentional economy often engage in
practices designed to avoid scrutiny while broadcasting content that may violate Twitch’s terms of service. In one
well-known and humorous incident, streamer Lester_Gaming broadcast a copyrighted, pay-per-view Ultimate
Fighting Championship match, while pretending he was “playing” the licensed UFC video game (Good 2017).
Lester’s novel deception was discovered when it went viral and led to a 24-hour ban from Twitch, but it nevertheless
serves as a reminder that streamers actively attempt to circumvent or negotiate the regulatory assemblage into which
they are interpellated.

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Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) 158

What gets moderated is necessarily political, however, and Twitch has often found itself in the
uncomfortable position of adjudicating on content seen, fairly or not, as controversial. Disappointingly (if
unsurprisingly) the effects of these rulings have been disproportionately borne by marginalized populations.
Queer game designer Robert Yang, for example, has (in)famously had a number of his games about gay
male sexuality banned from Twitch. “What’s too gay for them? What’s too sexual for them?,” Yang (2016)
asked in a scathing op-ed for Polygon, noting too that Twitch has no provision against broadcasting a scene
in the popular game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in which the protagonist tours a house filled with mutilated
female corpses. Yang (2017) later responded to Twitch’s censorship by releasing The Tearoom (see Figure
2), “a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes’
guns.” In a wry move to avoid Twitch’s ire (or, better yet, to highlight its incoherence), Yang replaced on-
screen penises with a variety of firearms. “If they still ban my game,” he wrote, “then it will be the first time
in history that the game industry regulates and bans a game about guns.”

Figure 2: Screenshot from The Tearoom. Image courtesy of Robert Yang.

Twitch as Boundary Object

The case of Robert Yang and The Tearoom demonstrates that “streamers” and “viewers” are never
abstractions but classed, raced, and gendered bodies embedded in online and offline communities. Scholars
must attend to many contexts in which livestreaming occurs in order to disrupt technologically determinist
narratives about platforms and their effects. I follow Taylor (2018) in suggesting that Twitch should be
understood as what Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999: 297) call a boundary object, one that
“[inhabits] several communities of practice and [satisfies] the informational requirements of each of them …
plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of these several parties employing them, yet robust
enough to maintain a common identity across sites.” It is necessary for scholars to reconstruct the contexts
in which livestreaming is taken up in order to understand where, how, and why it has been accepted. Put
differently, platforms do not just mediate but are themselves mediated. Just as surveillance practices,

Partin: Watch Me Pay

Surveillance & Society 17(1/2) 159

infrastructures, and imaginaries co-produce their own situation, platforms’ effects are context-dependent.
Further research is necessary to fill out the empirical record and identify intervening variables.

As ever, the question that animates this research is “what differences make a difference?” I offer social
identity as one difference among many. As surveillance studies has developed over the last twenty years, it
has begun to account for how surveillance is experienced differently across populations and social identities,
and it is principally through these differential effects that surveillance reproduces and naturalizes social,
political, and economic inequalities. Not unlike how Simone Browne (2015) demonstrates how technologies
of racialized surveillance have targeted black Americans, Kishonna Gray (2016) has documented the
challenges black streamers face in a (white, cis-heteronormative, and patriarchal) hegemony that naturalizes
white streamers as “normal.” Black streamers, she argues, are often singled out as delegitimatized users—
“they’re just too urban,” as one commenter wrote—and are subject to increased scrutiny. Likewise, I have
elsewhere (Partin 2018) explored how masculinized discourses of entrepreneurship construct male
streamers as more “authentic” recipients of corporate sponsorships, whereas many women who pursue such
deals are beleaguered by accusations of selling out or being “fake.” In such cases, social surveillance plays
an important role in dictating who can stream on Twitch, in what ways, and for what reasons. Explaining
these phenomena requires engaging broader social ills that a technocentric approach may miss.

Conclusion: Towards a Cultural Economy of Surveillance

I end with the vignette with which I began. The case of Jason Gargac, the Uber driver-cum-Twitch streamer,
is another reminder that Twitch is a flexible set of technologies that will be employed in ways beyond what
its owners intended. So too will the contexts in which platform surveillance occurs shift. For this reason, we
do well not to speak of platform surveillance, but of multiple and intersecting platform surveillances, the
various and multiform practices of platform-based surveillance that rely on technical systems but are enacted
by users afforded distinctive ways of performing. There is no platform surveillance, only platform
surveillances.

In this note, I have attempted to speak about the heterogeneous forms of surveillance—some lateral, some
panoptic; some (arguably) justifiable, and others troubling—that Twitch affords and how these forms of
surveillance are often inextricable from the political economy of Twitch. Indeed, in many ways, they are
the political economy of Twitch. In an age of mutually reinforcing surveillance culture and surveillance
capitalism—of which Twitch is a prime example—it is no longer enough to speak of surveillance and
political economy. Surveillance is a cultural economy all its own.

Acknowledgments
This paper emerged out of conversations in an independent study with Dr. Torin Monahan and Amrut Mishra. I am
grateful to them, as well as my anonymous reviewer and Dr. Melissa Gregg, for their comments.

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Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content
in accordance with the terms of the License.

Middllesex – J
Pulitzer
Jeffery

r Prize Wi
Eugeni
inner
ides

Ajaytao

JEFFREYEUGENIDES
Middlesex
FARRAR,STRAUSANDGIROUX
NEWYORK

Farrar, Straus andGiroux
19UnionSquareWest,NewYork10003

Copyright©2002by JeffreyEugenides
All rights reserved
Published simultaneously inCanada byAlfredA.KnopfCanada,
a division ofRandomHouse ofCanadaLimited, Toronto
Printed in theUnited States ofAmerica
First edition, 2002

Portions of this novel appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker and Granta.
       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eugenides, Jeffrey.
Middlesex / JeffreyEugenides.—1st ed.
       p.  cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-19969-2 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-19969-8 (alk. paper)
1. Greek Americans—Fiction.  2. Gender identity—Fiction. 3. Hermaphroditism—Fiction.  4.
Teenagers—Fiction.  5.Grosse Pointe (Mich.)—Fiction.  6.Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3555.U4M532002
813′.54—dc21
2002019921
Designed by JonathanD.Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

4   6   8   10   12   13   11   9   7   5

The author would like to thank the Whiting Younger Writers’ Awards, the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Deutscher Akademischer
Austauschdienst, the American Academy in Berlin, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Helen
Papanikolas, and Milton Karafilis, for their help and support. In addition, the author would like
to cite the following works from which he drew information crucial in the writing of Middlesex:
The Smyrna Affair by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin; “Wrestling with Death: Greek Immigrant
Funeral Customs inUtah” byHelenZ. Papanikolas; An Original Man byClaudeAndrewClegg
III; The Black Muslims in America byC. Eric Lincoln; VenusesPenuses: Sexology, Sexosophy,
and Exigency Theory by Dr. John Money; Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt; Hermaphrodites and the Medical
Invention of Sex by Alice Domurat Dreger; “Androgens and the Evolution of Male Gender
Identity Among Male Pseudo-hermaphrodites with 5-alpha-reductase Deficiency” by Julianne
Imperato-McGinley, M.D., Ralph E. Peterson, M.D., Teofilo Gautier, M.D., and Erasmo Sturla,
M.D.; and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, the newspaper published by the Intersex Society of
NorthAmerica.

http://www.fsgbooks.com

FORYAMA,WHOCOMESFROMA
DIFFERENTGENEPOOLENTIRELY

CONTENTS

BOOKONE
TheSilver Spoon
Matchmaking
An Immodest Proposal
TheSilkRoad

BOOKTWO
HenryFord’sEnglish-LanguageMelting Pot
Minotaurs
Marriage on Ice
Tricknology
Clarinet Serenade
News of theWorld
ExOvoOmnia

BOOKTHREE
HomeMovies
Opa!
Middlesex
TheMediterraneanDiet
TheWolverette
WaxingLyrical
TheObscureObject
Tiresias inLove
Flesh andBlood
TheGunon theWall

BOOKFOUR
TheOracularVulva
LookingMyselfUp inWebster’s
GoWest,YoungMan
GenderDysphoria in SanFrancisco

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Hermaphroditus
Air-Ride
TheLast Stop

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BOOKONE

THESILVERSPOON

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smoglessDetroit day in January of 1960;
and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of
1974. Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity
in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric
Endocrinology in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now
sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity. That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height
chartwith a black box coveringmy eyes.
My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s
license (from the Federal Republic of Germany) records my first name simply as Cal. I’m a
former field hockey goalie, long-standing member of the Save-the-Manatee Foundation, rare
attendant at the Greek Orthodox liturgy, and, for most of my adult life, an employee of the U.S.
State Department. Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I’ve been ridiculed by
classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of
Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not knowing what I was. (Her
brother liked me, too.) An army tank led me into urban battle once; a swimming pool turned me
into myth; I’ve left my body in order to occupy others—and all this happened before I turned
sixteen.
But now, at the age of forty-one, I feel another birth coming on.
After decades of neglect, I find myself thinking about departed great-aunts and -uncles, long-
lost grandfathers, unknown fifth cousins, or, in the case of an inbred family like mine, all those
things in one.And so before it’s too late Iwant to get it down for good: this roller-coaster ride of
a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth
chromosome! Sing how it bloomed two and a half centuries ago on the slopes of Mount
Olympus, while the goats bleated and the olives dropped. Sing how it passed down through nine
generations, gathering invisibly within the polluted pool of the Stephanides family. And sing
how Providence, in the guise of a massacre, sent the gene flying again; how it blew like a seed
across the sea to America, where it drifted through our industrial rains until it fell to earth in the
fertile soil ofmymother’s ownmidwesternwomb.
Sorry if I get a littleHomeric at times. That’s genetic, too.

Three months before I was born, in the aftermath of one of our elaborate Sunday dinners, my
grandmother Desdemona Stephanides ordered my brother to get her silkworm box. Chapter
Eleven had been heading toward the kitchen for a second helping of rice pudding when she
blocked his way. At fifty-seven, with her short, squat figure and intimidating hairnet, my
grandmother was perfectly designed for blocking people’s paths. Behind her in the kitchen, the
day’s large female contingent had congregated, laughing and whispering. Intrigued, Chapter
Eleven leaned sideways to see what was going on, but Desdemona reached out and firmly
pinched his cheek. Having regained his attention, she sketched a rectangle in the air and pointed

at the ceiling. Then, through her ill-fitting dentures, she said, “Go for yia yia, dolly mou.”
Chapter Eleven knew what to do. He ran across the hall into the living room. On all fours he
scrambled up the formal staircase to the second floor. He raced past the bedrooms along the
upstairs corridor.At the far endwas a nearly invisible door,wallpapered over like the entrance to
a secret passageway. Chapter Eleven located the tiny doorknob level with his head and, using all
his strength, pulled it open. Another set of stairs lay behind it. For a long moment my brother
stared hesitantly into the darkness above, before climbing, very slowly now, up to the atticwhere
mygrandparents lived.
In sneakers he passed beneath the twelve damply newspapered birdcages suspended from the
rafters. With a brave face he immersed himself in the sour odor of the parakeets, and in my
grandparents’ own particular aroma, a mixture of mothballs and hashish. He negotiated his way
past my grandfather’s book-piled desk and his collection of rebetika records. Finally, bumping
into the leather ottoman and the circular coffee table made of brass, he found my grandparents’
bed and, under it, the silkwormbox.
Carved from olivewood, a little bigger than a shoe box, it had a tin lid perforated by tiny
airholes and inset with the icon of an unrecognizable saint. The saint’s face had been rubbed off,
but the fingers of his right hand were raised to bless a short, purple, terrifically self-confident-
looking mulberry tree. After gazing awhile at this vivid botanical presence, Chapter Eleven
pulled the box from under the bed and opened it. Inside were the two wedding crowns made
from rope and, coiled like snakes, the two long braids of hair, each tied with a crumbling black
ribbon. He poked one of the braids with his index finger. Just then a parakeet squawked, making
my brother jump, and he closed the box, tucked it under his arm, and carried it downstairs to
Desdemona.
She was still waiting in the doorway. Taking the silkworm box out of his hands, she turned
back into the kitchen.At this point Chapter Elevenwas granted a viewof the room,where all the
women now fell silent. They moved aside to let Desdemona pass and there, in the middle of the
linoleum, was my mother. Tessie Stephanides was leaning back in a kitchen chair, pinned
beneath the immense, drum-tight globe of her pregnant belly. She had a happy, helpless
expression on her face, which was flushed and hot. Desdemona set the silkworm box on the
kitchen table and opened the lid. She reached under the wedding crowns and the hair braids to
come up with something Chapter Eleven hadn’t seen: a silver spoon. She tied a piece of string to
the spoon’s handle. Then, stooping forward, she dangled the spoon over my mother’s swollen
belly.And, by extension, overme.
Up until nowDesdemona had had a perfect record: twenty-three correct guesses. She’d known
that Tessie was going to be Tessie. She’d predicted the sex of my brother and of all the babies of
her friends at church. The only children whose genders she hadn’t divined were her own,
because itwas bad luck for amother to plumb
the mysteries of her own womb. Fearlessly, however, she plumbed my mother’s. After some
initial hesitation, the spoon swungnorth to south,whichmeant that Iwas going to be a boy.
Splay-legged in the chair, my mother tried to smile. She didn’t want a boy. She had one
already. In fact, she was so certain I was going to be a girl that she’d picked out only one name
forme: Calliope. Butwhenmygrandmother shouted inGreek, “Aboy!” the crywent around the
room, and out into the hall, and across the hall into the living room where the men were arguing
politics.Andmymother, hearing it repeated somany times, began to believe itmight be true.
As soon as the cry reached my father, however, he marched into the kitchen to tell his mother
that, this time at least, her spoon was wrong. “And how you know so much?” Desdemona asked
him.Towhich he repliedwhatmanyAmericans of his generationwould have:
“It’s science,Ma.”

Ever since they had decided to have another child—the dinerwas doingwell andChapter Eleven
was long out of diapers—Milton and Tessie had been in agreement that they wanted a daughter.
Chapter Eleven had just turned five years old. He’d recently found a dead bird in the yard,

bringing it into the house to show his mother. He liked shooting things, hammering things,
smashing things, and wrestling with his father. In such a masculine household, Tessie had begun
to feel like the odd woman out and saw herself in ten years’ time imprisoned in a world of
hubcaps and hernias. My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of
lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In the spring of 1959, when
discussions of my fertilization got under way, my mother couldn’t foresee that women would
soon be burning their brassieres by the thousand. Hers were padded, stiff, fire-retardant. As
much as Tessie loved her son, she knew there were certain things she’d be able to share only
with a daughter.
On hismorning drive towork,my father had been seeing visions of an irresistibly sweet, dark-
eyed little girl. She sat on the seat beside him—mostly during stoplights—directing questions at
his patient, all-knowing ear. “What do you call that thing, Daddy?” “That? That’s the Cadillac
seal.” “What’s theCadillac seal?” “Well, a long time ago,
there was a French explorer named Cadillac, and he was the one who discovered Detroit. And
that seal was his family seal, from France.” “What’s France?” “France is a country in Europe.”
“What’s Europe?” “It’s a continent, which is like a great big piece of land, way, way bigger than
a country. But Cadillacs don’t come fromEurope anymore, kukla. They come from right here in
the good old U.S.A.” The light turned green and he drove on. But my prototype lingered. She
was there at the next light and the next. So pleasant was her company that my father, a man
loadedwith initiative, decided to seewhat he could do to turn his vision into reality.
Thus: for some time now, in the living room where the men discussed politics, they had also
been discussing the velocity of sperm. Peter Tatakis, “Uncle Pete,” as we called him, was a
leading member of the debating society that formed every week on our black love seats. A
lifelong bachelor, he had no family in America and so had become attached to ours. Every
Sunday he arrived in his wine-dark Buick, a tall, prune-faced, sad-seeming man with an
incongruously vital head of wavy hair. He was not interested in children. A proponent of the
Great Books series—which he had read twice—Uncle Pete was engaged with serious thought
and Italian opera. He had a passion, in history, for Edward Gibbon, and, in literature, for the
journals of Madame de Staël. He liked to quote that witty lady’s opinion on the German
language, which held that German wasn’t good for conversation because you had to wait to the
end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. Uncle Pete had wanted to become a
doctor, but the “catastrophe” had ended that dream. In the United States, he’d put himself
through two years of chiropractic school, and now ran a small office in Birmingham with a
human skeleton he was still paying for in installments. In those days, chiropractors had a
somewhat dubious reputation. People didn’t come to Uncle Pete to free up their kundalini. He
cracked necks, straightened spines, and made custom arch supports out of foam rubber. Still, he
was the closest thing to a doctor we had in the house on those Sunday afternoons. As a young
man he’d had half his stomach surgically removed, and now after dinner always drank a Pepsi-
Cola to help digest his meal. The soft drink had been named for the digestive enzyme pepsin, he
sagely told us, and sowas suited to the task.
Itwas this kind of knowledge that ledmy father to trustwhatUncle
Pete said when it came to the reproductive timetable. His head on a throw pillow, his shoes
off, Madama Butterfly softly playing on my parents’ stereo, Uncle Pete explained that, under
the microscope, sperm carrying male chromosomes had been observed to swim faster than those
carrying female chromosomes. This assertion generated immediate merriment among the
restaurant owners and fur finishers assembled in our living room. My father, however, adopted
the pose of his favorite piece of sculpture, The Thinker, aminiature ofwhich sat across the room
on the telephone table. Though the topic had been brought up in the open-forum atmosphere of
those postprandial Sundays, it was clear that, notwithstanding the impersonal tone of the
discussion, the sperm they were talking about was my father’s. Uncle Pete made it clear: to have
a girl baby, a couple should “have sexual congress twenty-four hours prior to ovulation.” That
way, the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more

reliable,would arrive just as the egg dropped.

My father had trouble persuading my mother to go along with the scheme. Tessie Zizmo had
been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of twenty-two. Their engagement,
which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of
the way she’d managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father’s flame, keeping him at a
low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm. This hadn’t been all that difficult, however,
since shewas inDetroit andMiltonwas inAnnapolis at theU.S.NavalAcademy. Formore than
a year Tessie lit candles at the Greek church for her fiancé, while Milton gazed at her
photographs pinned over his bunk. He liked to pose Tessie in the manner of the movie
magazines, standing sideways, one high heel raised on a step, an expanse of black stocking
visible. My mother looks surprisingly pliable in those old snapshots, as though she liked nothing
better than to have her man in uniform arrange her against the porches and lampposts of their
humble neighborhood.
She didn’t surrender until after Japan had. Then, from their wedding night onward (according
to what my brother told my covered ears), my parents made love regularly and enjoyably. When
it came to having children, however, my mother had her own ideas. It was her belief that an
embryo could sense the amount of lovewithwhich it
had been created. For this reason,my father’s suggestion didn’t sitwellwith her.
“What do you think this is,Milt, theOlympics?”
“Wewere just speaking theoretically,” saidmy father.
“What doesUncle Pete knowabout having babies?”
“He read this particular article in Scientific American,” Milton said. And to bolster his case:
“He’s a subscriber.”
“Listen, if my back went out, I’d go to Uncle Pete. If I had flat feet like you do, I’d go. But
that’s it.”
“This has all been verified.Under themicroscope. Themale sperms are faster.”
“I bet they’re stupider, too.”
“Go on. Malign the male sperms all you want. Feel free. We don’t want a male sperm. What
wewant is a good old, slow, reliable female sperm.”
“Even if it’s true, it’s still ridiculous. I can’t just do it like clockwork,Milt.”
“It’ll be harder onme than you.”
“I don’twant to hear it.”
“I thought youwanted a daughter.”
“I do.”
“Well,” saidmy father, “this is howwe can get one.”
Tessie laughed the suggestion off. But behind her sarcasm was a serious moral reservation. To
tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.
In the first place, Tessie didn’t believe you could do it. Even if you could, she didn’t believe you
should try.

Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can’t be entirely sure about any of this.
I can only explain the scientific mania that overtook my father during that spring of ’59 as a
symptom of the belief in progress that was infecting everyone back then. Remember, Sputnik
had been launched only two years earlier. Polio, which had kept my parents quarantined indoors
during the summers of their childhood, had been conquered by the Salk vaccine. People had no
idea that viruses were cleverer than human beings, and thought they’d soon be a thing of the
past. In that optimistic, postwar America, which I caught the tail end of, everybody was the
master of his
owndestiny, so it only followed thatmy fatherwould try to be themaster of his.
A few days after he had broached his plan to Tessie, Milton came home one evening with a
present. Itwas a jewelry box tiedwith a ribbon.

“What’s this for?”Tessie asked suspiciously.
“What do youmean,what is it for?”
“It’s notmybirthday. It’s not our anniversary. Sowhy are you givingme a present?”
“Do I have to have a reason to give you a present?Goon.Open it.”
Tessie crumpled up one corner of her mouth, unconvinced. But it was difficult to hold a
jewelry box in your hand without opening it. So finally she slipped off the ribbon and snapped
the box open.
Inside, on black velvet,was a thermometer.
“A thermometer,” saidmymother.
“That’s not just any thermometer,” said Milton. “I had to go to three different pharmacies to
find one of these.”
“A luxurymodel, huh?”
“That’s right,” said Milton. “That’s what you call a basal thermometer. It reads the
temperature down to a tenth of a degree.” He raised his eyebrows. “Normal thermometers only
read every two tenths. This one does it every tenth. Try it out. Put it in yourmouth.”
“I don’t have a fever,” saidTessie.
“This isn’t about a fever. You use it to find out what your base temperature is. It’s more
accurate and precise than a regular fever-type thermometer.”
“Next time bringme a necklace.”
But Milton persisted: “Your body temperature’s changing all the time, Tess. You may not
notice, but it is. You’re in constant flux, temperature-wise. Say, for instance”—a little
cough—“you happen to be ovulating. Then your temperature goes up. Six tenths of a degree, in
most case scenarios. Now,” my father went on, gaining steam, not noticing that his wife was
frowning, “if we were to implement the system we talked about the other day—just for instance,
say—what you’d do is, first, establish your base temperature. It might not be ninety-eight point
six. Everybody’s a little different. That’s another thing I learned from Uncle Pete. Anyway, once
you established your base temperature, then you’d look for that six-tenths-degree rise.And
that’s when, if we were to go through with this, that’s when we’d know to, you know, mix the
cocktail.”
My mother said nothing. She only put the thermometer into the box, closed it, and handed it
back to her husband.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Suit yourself. We may get another boy. Number two. If that’s the way
youwant it, that’s theway it’ll be.”
“I’mnot so surewe’re going to have anything at themoment,” repliedmymother.

Meanwhile, in the greenroom to the world, I waited. Not even a gleam in my father’s eye yet (he
was staring gloomily at the thermometer case in his lap). Now my mother gets up from the so-
called love seat. She heads for the stairway, holding a hand to her forehead, and the likelihood of
my ever coming to be seems more and more remote. Now my father gets up to make his rounds,
turning out lights, locking doors. As he climbs the stairway, there’s hope for me again. The
timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by
an hour and you change the gene selection. My conception was still weeks away, but already my
parents had begun their slow collision into each other. In our upstairs hallway, the Acropolis
night-light is burning, a gift from Jackie Halas, who owns a souvenir shop. My mother is at her
vanity when my father enters the bedroom. With two fingers she rubs Noxzema into her face,
wiping it off with a tissue. My father had only to say an affectionate word and she would have
forgiven him. Not me but somebody like me might have been made that night. An infinite
number of possible selves crowded the threshold, me among them but with no guaranteed ticket,
the hours moving slowly, the planets in the heavens circling at their usual pace, weather coming
into it, too, because my mother was afraid of thunderstorms and would have cuddled against my
father had it rained that night. But, no, clear skies held out, as did my parents’ stubbornness. The
bedroom light went out. They stayed on their own sides of the bed. At last, from my mother,

“Night.” And frommy father, “See you in themorning.” Themoments that led up tome fell into
place as though decreed.Which, I guess, iswhy I think about them somuch.

The following Sunday, my mother took Desdemona and my brother to church. My father never
went along, having become an apostate at
the age of eight over the exorbitant price of votive candles. Likewise, my grandfather preferred
to spend his mornings working on a modern Greek translation of the “restored” poems of
Sappho. For the next seven years, despite repeated strokes, my grandfather worked at a small
desk, piecing together the legendary fragments into a larger mosaic, adding a stanza here, a coda
there, soldering an anapest or an iamb. In the evenings he played his bordello music and smoked
a hookah pipe.
In 1959, Assumption Greek Orthodox Church was located on Charlevoix. It was there that I
would be baptized less than a year later and would be brought up in the Orthodox faith.
Assumption, with its revolving chief priests, each sent to us via the Patriarchate in
Constantinople, each arriving in the full beard of his authority, the embroidered vestments of his
sanctity, but each wearying after a time—six months was the rule—because of the squabbling of
the congregation, the personal attacks on the way he sang, the constant need to shush the
parishionerswho treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium, and, finally, the effort of
delivering a sermon each week twice, first in Greek and then again in English. Assumption, with
its spirited coffee hours, its bad foundation and roof leaks, its strenuous ethnic festivals, its
catechism classes where our heritage was briefly kept alive in us before being allowed to die in
the great diaspora. Tessie and company advanced down the central aisle, past the sand-filled
trays of votive candles. Above, as big as a float in theMacy’s ThanksgivingDayParade,was the
Christ Pantocrator. He curved across the dome like space itself. Unlike the suffering, earthbound
Christs depicted at eye level on the church walls, our Christ Pantocrator was clearly
transcendent, all-powerful, heaven-bestriding. He was reaching down to the apostles above the
altar to present the four rolled-up sheepskins of the Gospels. And my mother, who tried all her
life to believe inGodwithout ever quite succeeding, looked up at him for guidance.
The Christ Pantocrator’s eyes flickered in the dim light. They seemed to suck Tessie upward.
Through the swirling incense, the Savior’s eyes glowed like televisions flashing scenes of recent
events . . .
First there was Desdemona the week before, giving advice to her daughter-in-law. “Why you
want more children, Tessie?” she had asked with studied nonchalance. Bending to look in the
oven, hiding the alarmonher face (an alarm thatwould go unexplained for
another sixteen years),Desdemonawaved the idea away. “More children,more trouble . . .”
Next there was Dr. Philobosian, our elderly family physician. With ancient diplomas behind
him, the old doctor gave his verdict. “Nonsense. Male sperm swim faster? Listen. The first
person who saw sperm under a microscope was Leeuwenhoek. Do you know what they looked
like to him?Likeworms . . .”
And then Desdemona was back, taking a different angle: “God decides what baby is. Not you
. . .”
These scenes ran through my mother’s mind during the interminable Sunday service. The
congregation stood and sat. In the front pew, my cousins, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and
Cleopatra, fidgeted. FatherMike emerged frombehind the icon screen and swung his censer.My
mother tried to pray, but itwas no use. She barely survived until coffee hour.
From the tender age of twelve, my mother had been unable to start her day without the aid of
at least two cups of immoderately strong, tar-black, unsweetened coffee, a taste for which she
had picked up from the tugboat captains and zooty bachelorswho filled the boardinghousewhere
she had grown up. As a high school girl, standing five foot one inch tall, she had sat next to auto
workers at the corner diner, having coffee before her first class. While they scanned the racing
forms, Tessie finished her civics homework. Now, in the church basement, she told Chapter
Eleven to run off and playwith the other childrenwhile she got a cup of coffee to restore herself.

She was on her second cup when a soft, womanly voice sighed in her ear. “Good morning,
Tessie.” Itwas her brother-in-law, FatherMichaelAntoniou.
“Hi, Father Mike. Beautiful service today,” Tessie said, and immediately regretted it. Father
Mike was the assistant priest at Assumption. When the last priest had left, harangued back to
Athens after a mere three months, the family had hoped that Father Mike might be promoted.
But in the end another new, foreign-born priest, Father Gregorios, had been given the post. Aunt
Zo, who never missed a chance to lament her marriage, had said at dinner in her comedienne’s
voice, “Myhusband.Always the bridesmaid and never the bride.”
By complimenting the service, Tessie hadn’t intended to compliment
Father Greg. The situation was made still more delicate by the fact that, years ago, Tessie and
Michael Antoniou had been engaged to be married. Now she was married to Milton and Father
Mike was married to Milton’s sister. Tessie had come down to clear her head and have her
coffee and already the daywas getting out of hand.
Father Mike didn’t appear to notice the slight, however. He stood smiling, his eyes gentle
above the roaring waterfall of his beard. A sweet-natured man, Father Mike was popular with
churchwidows. They liked to crowd around him, offering himcookies and bathing in his beatific
essence. Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being only five
foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height. He
seemed to have forgiven Tessie for breaking off their engagement years ago, but it was always
there in the air between them, like the talcum powder that sometimes puffed out of his clerical
collar.
Smiling, carefully holding his coffee cup and saucer, Father Mike asked, “So, Tessie, how are
things at home?”
My mother knew, of course, that as a weekly Sunday guest at our house, Father Mike was
fully informed about the thermometer scheme. Looking in his eyes, she thought she detected a
glint of amusement.
“You’recoming over to the house today,” she said carelessly. “Youcan see for yourself.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” said FatherMike. “We always have such interesting discussions at
your house.”
Tessie examined Father Mike’s eyes again but now they seemed full of genuine warmth. And
then something happened to take her attention away fromFatherMike completely.
Across the room, Chapter Eleven had stood on a chair to reach the tap of the coffee urn. He
was trying to fill a coffee cup, but once he got the tap open he couldn’t get it closed. Scalding
coffee poured out across the table. The hot liquid splattered a girl who was standing nearby. The
girl jumped back. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. With great speed my mother ran
across the roomandwhisked the girl into the ladies’ room.
No one remembers the girl’s name. She didn’t belong to any of the regular parishioners. She
wasn’t evenGreek. She appeared at
church that one day and never again, and seems to have existed for the sole purpose of
changing my mother’s mind. In the bathroom the girl held her steaming shirt away from her
bodywhile Tessie brought damp towels. “Are you okay, honey?Did you get burned?”
“He’s very clumsy, that boy,” the girl said.
“He can be.He gets into everything.”
“Boys can be very obstreperous.”
Tessie smiled. “Youhave quite a vocabulary.”
At this compliment the girl broke into a big smile. “ ‘Obstreperous’ is my favorite word. My
brother is very obstreperous. Last month my favorite word was ‘turgid.’ But you can’t use
‘turgid’ thatmuch.Not thatmany things are turgid,when you think about it.”
“You’reright about that,” saidTessie, laughing. “But obstreperous is all over the place.”
“I couldn’t agreewith youmore,” said the girl.

Two weeks later. Easter Sunday, 1959. Our religion’s adherence to the Julian calendar has once

again left us out of sync with the neighborhood. Two Sundays ago, my brother watched as the
other kids on the block hunted multicolored eggs in nearby bushes. He saw his friends eating the
heads off chocolate bunnies and tossing handfuls of jelly beans into cavity-rich mouths.
(Standing at the window, my brother wanted more than anything to believe in an American God
who got resurrected on the right day.) Only yesterday was Chapter Eleven finally allowed to dye
his own eggs, and then only in one color: red. All over the house red eggs gleam in lengthening,
solstice rays. Red eggs fill bowls on the dining room table. They hang from string pouches over
doorways. They crowd themantel and are baked into loaves of cruciform tsoureki.
But now it is late afternoon; dinner is over. And my brother is smiling. Because now comes
the one part of Greek Easter he prefers to egg hunts and jelly beans: the egg-cracking game.
Everyone gathers around the dining table. Biting his lip, Chapter Eleven selects an egg from the
bowl, studies it, returns it. He selects another. “This looks like a good one,” Milton says,
choosing his own egg. “Built like a Brinks truck.” Milton holds his egg up. Chapter Eleven
prepares to attack.When suddenlymymother tapsmy father on the back.
“Just aminute, Tessie.We’re cracking eggs here.”
She taps himharder.
“What?”
“My temperature.” She pauses. “It’s up six tenths.”
She has been using the thermometer. This is the firstmy father has heard of it.
“Now?”my fatherwhispers. “Jesus, Tessie, are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. You told me to watch for any rise in my temperature and I’m telling you
I’m up six tenths of a degree.” And, lowering her voice, “Plus it’s been thirteen days since my
last you knowwhat.”
“Comeon,Dad,”Chapter Eleven pleads.
“Time out,”Milton says.He puts his egg in the ashtray. “That’smy egg.Nobody touch it until
I comeback.”
Upstairs, in the master bedroom, my parents accomplish the act. A child’s natural decorum
makes me refrain from imagining the scene in much detail. Only this: when they’re done, as if
topping off the tank, my father says, “That should do it.” It turns out he’s right. In May, Tessie
learns she’s pregnant, and thewaiting begins.

By six weeks, I have eyes and ears. By seven, nostrils, even lips. My genitals begin to form.
Fetal hormones, taking chromosomal cues, inhibit Müllerian structures, promote Wolffian ducts.
My twenty-three paired chromosomes have linked up and crossed over, spinning their roulette
wheel, as my papou puts his hand on my mother’s belly and says, “Lucky two!” Arrayed in
their regiments, my genes carry out their orders. All except two, a pair of miscreants—or
revolutionaries, depending on your view—hiding out on chromosome number 5. Together, they
siphon off an enzyme, which stops the production of a certain hormone, which complicates my
life.
In the living room, themen have stopped talking about politics and instead lay bets onwhether
Milt’s new kid will be a boy or a girl. My father is confident. Twenty-four hours after the deed,
my mother’s body temperature rose another two tenths, confirming ovulation. By then the male
sperm had given up, exhausted. The female sperm, like tortoises, won the race. (At which point
Tessie handedMilton the thermometer and told him she neverwanted to see it again.)
All this led up to the dayDesdemona dangled a utensil overmy
mother’s belly. The sonogram didn’t exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.
Desdemona crouched. The kitchen grew silent. The other women bit their lower lips, watching,
waiting. For the first minute, the spoon didn’t move at all. Desdemona’s hand shook and, after
long seconds had passed, Aunt Lina steadied it. The spoon twirled; I kicked; my mother cried
out. And then, slowly,moved by awind no one felt, in that unearthlyOuija-boardway, the silver
spoon began to move, to swing, at first in a small circle but each orbit growing gradually more
elliptical until the path flattened into a straight line pointing from oven to banquette. North to

south, in other words. Desdemona cried, “Koros!” And the room erupted with shouts of
“Koros, koros.”
That night, my father said, “Twenty-three in a row means she’s bound for a fall. This time,
she’swrong. Trustme.”
“I don’t mind if it’s a boy,” my mother said. “I really don’t. As long as it’s healthy, ten
fingers, ten toes.”
“What’s this ‘it.’ That’smydaughter you’re talking about.”

Iwas born aweek afterNewYear’s,on January 8, 1960. In thewaiting room, supplied onlywith
pink-ribboned cigars, my father cried out, “Bingo!” I was a girl. Nineteen inches long. Seven
pounds four ounces.
That same January 8, my grandfather suffered the first of his thirteen strokes. Awakened by
my parents rushing off to the hospital, he’d gotten out of bed and gone downstairs to make
himself a cup of coffee. An hour later, Desdemona found him lying on the kitchen floor. Though
his mental faculties remained intact, that morning, as I let out my first cry at Women’s Hospital,
my papou lost the ability to speak. According to Desdemona, my grandfather collapsed right
after overturning his coffee cup to read his fortune in the grounds.

When he heard the news of my sex, Uncle Pete refused to accept any congratulations. There was
no magic involved. “Besides,” he joked, “Milt did all the work.” Desdemona became grim. Her
American-born son had been proven right and, with this fresh defeat, the old country, in which
she still tried to live despite its being four thousand miles and thirty-eight years away, receded
onemore notch.Myarrivalmarked the end of her baby-guessing and the start of her husband’s
long decline. Though the silkworm box reappeared now and then, the spoon was no longer
among its treasures.
I was extracted, spanked, and hosed off, in that order. They wrapped me in a blanket and put
me on display among six other infants, four boys, two girls, all of them, unlike me, correctly
tagged. This can’t be true but I remember it: sparks slowly filling a dark screen.
Someone had switched onmyeyes.

MATCHMAKING

When this story goes out into the world, I may become the most famous hermaphrodite in
history. There have been others before me. Alexina Barbin attended a girls’ boarding school in
France before becoming Abel. She left behind an autobiography, which Michel Foucault
discovered in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene. (Her memoirs, which
end shortly before her suicide, make unsatisfactory reading, and it was after finishing them years
ago that I first got the idea to write my own.) Gottlieb Göttlich, born in 1798, lived as Marie
Rosine until the age of thirty-three. One day abdominal pains sent Marie to the doctor. The
physician checked for a hernia and found undescended testicles instead. From then on, Marie
donned men’s clothes, took the name of Gottlieb, and made a fortune traveling around Europe,
exhibiting himself tomedicalmen.
As far as the doctors are concerned, I’m even better than Gottlieb. To the extent that fetal
hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I’ve got a male brain. But I was raised as a girl.
If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus
nurture, you couldn’t come up with anything better than my life. During my time at the Clinic
nearly three decades ago, Dr. Luce ran me through a barrage of tests. I was given the Benton
Visual Retention Test and the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test. My verbal IQ was measured,
and lots of other things, too. Luce even analyzed
myprose style to see if Iwrote in a linear,masculineway, or in a circular, feminine one.
All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there’s an innate feminine circularity in the
story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I’m the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that
sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning
to get to the end,which ismy arrival.
And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off,
my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I’m sucked back
between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops
swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back
to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-
year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age
eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first
U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the
middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on
deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, andwe’re up on dry land
again,where the filmunspools, back at the beginning . . .

In the late summer of 1922, my grandmother Desdemona Stephanides wasn’t predicting births

but deaths, specifically, her own. She was in her silkworm cocoonery, high on the slope of
Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, when her heart, without warning, missed a beat. It was a distinct
sensation: she felt her heart stop and squeeze into a ball. Then, as she stiffened, it began to race,
thumping against her ribs. She let out a small, astonished cry. Her twenty thousand silkworms,
sensitive to human emotion, stopped spinning cocoons. Squinting in the dim light, my
grandmother looked down to see the front of her tunic visibly fluttering; and in that instant, as
she recognized the insurrection inside her, Desdemona became what she’d remain for the rest of
her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body. Nevertheless, unable to believe in her own
endurance, despite
her already quieting heart, she stepped out of the cocoonery to take a last look at the world she
wouldn’t be leaving for another fifty-eight years.
The view was impressive. A thousand feet below lay the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, like a
backgammon board spread out across the valley’s green felt. Red diamonds of roof tile fit into
diamonds of whitewash. Here and there, the sultans’ tombs were stacked up like bright chips.
Back in 1922, automobile traffic didn’t clog the streets. Ski lifts didn’t cut swaths into the
mountain’s pine forests. Metallurgic and textile plants didn’t ring the city, filling the air with
smog. Bursa looked—at least from a thousand feet up—pretty much as it had for the past six
centuries, a holy city, necropolis of the Ottomans and center of the silk trade, its quiet, declining
streets abloom with minarets and cypress trees. The tiles of the Green Mosque had turned blue
with age, but that was about it. Desdemona Stephanides, however, kibitzing from afar, gazed
downon the board and sawwhat the players hadmissed.
To psychoanalyze my grandmother’s heart palpitations: they were the manifestations of grief.
Her parentswere dead—killed in the recentwarwith theTurks. TheGreekArmy, encouraged by
the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the ancient Greek territory
in Asia Minor. After years of living apart up on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my
grandmother’s village, had emerged into the safety of the Megale Idea—theBig Idea, the dream
of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the
former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Angora in
the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under Turkish
rule. No longer were the giaours (“infidel dogs”) forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses
or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village
every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men
took silk tomarket inBursa, theywere freeGreeks, in a freeGreek city.
Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she
stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to
feel happy like everybody else.Years later, in herwidowhood,when she’d spend a
decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years
between wars a half century earlier had been the only decent time in her life; but by then
everyone she’d knownwould be dead and she could only tell it to the television.
For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ignore her foreboding by
working in the cocoonery. She’d come out the back door of the house, through the sweet-
smelling grape arbor, and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid,
larval smell inside didn’t bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother’s own
personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled
mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to
music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its
terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead she heard her mother,
Euphrosyne Stephanides, speaking in this very cocoonery years ago, elucidating the mysteries of
silkworms—“To have good silk, you have to be pure,” she used to tell her daughter. “The
silkworms know everything. You can always tell what somebody is up to by the way their silk
looks”—and so on, Euphrosyne giving examples—“Maria Poulos, who’s always lifting her skirt
for everyone? Have you seen her cocoons? A stain for every man. You should look next

time”—Desdemona only eleven or twelve and believing every word, so that now, as a young
woman of twenty-one, she still couldn’t entirely disbelieve her mother’s morality tales, and
examined the cocoon constellations for a sign of her own impurity (the dreams she’d been
having!). She looked for other things, too, because her mother also maintained that silkworms
reacted to historical atrocities. After every massacre, even in a village fifty miles away, the
silkworms’ filaments turned the color of blood—“I’ve seen them bleed like the feet of Christos
Himself,” Euphrosyne again, and her daughter, years later, remembering, squinting in the weak
light to see if any cocoons had turned red. She pulled out a tray and shook it; she pulled out
another; and it was right then that she felt her heart stop, squeeze into a ball, and begin punching
her from inside. She dropped the tray, saw her tunic flutter from interior force, and understood
that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, over
anything else.
So my yia yia, suffering the first of her imaginary diseases, stood looking down at Bursa, as
though shemight spot a visible confirmation of her invisible dread.And then it came from inside
the house, by means of sound: her brother, Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides, had begun to sing.
In badly pronounced,meaningless English:
“Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun,” Lefty sang, standing before their bedroom
mirror as he did every afternoon about this time, fastening the new celluloid collar to the new
white shirt, squeezing a dollop of hair pomade (smelling of limes) into his palm and rubbing it
into his new Valentinohaircut. And continuing: “In the meantime, in-between time, ain’t we got
fun.” The lyrics meant nothing to him, either, but the melody was enough. It spoke to Lefty of
jazz-age frivolity, gin cocktails, cigarette girls; it made him slick his hair back with panache . . .
while, out in the yard, Desdemona heard the singing and reacted differently. For her, the song
conjured only the disreputable bars her brother went to down in the city, those hash dens where
they played rebetika and American music and where there were loose women who sang . . . as
Lefty put on his new striped suit and folded the red pocket handkerchief that matched his red
necktie . . . and she felt funny inside, especially her stomach, which was roiled by complicated
emotions, sadness, anger, and something else she couldn’t name that hurtmost of all. “The rent’s
unpaid, dear, we haven’t a car,” Lefty crooned in the sweet tenor I would later inherit; and
beneath the music Desdemona now heard her mother’s voice again, Euphrosyne Stephanides’
last words spoken just before she died from a bullet wound, “Take care of Lefty. Promise me.
Find him a wife!” . . . and Desdemona, through her tears, replying, “I promise. I promise!” . . .
these voices all speaking at once in Desdemona’s head as she crossed the yard to go into the
house. She came through the small kitchen where she had dinner cooking (for one) and marched
straight into the bedroom she shared with her brother. He was still singing—“Not much money,
Oh! but honey”—fixing his cuff links, parting his hair; but then he looked up and saw his
sister—“Ain’twe got”—andpianissimonow—“fun”—fell silent.
For a moment, the mirror held their two faces. At twenty-one, long before ill-fitting dentures
and self-imposed invalidism, my grandmother was something of a beauty. She wore her black
hair in
long braids pinned up under her kerchief. These braids were not delicate like a little girl’s but
heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver’s tail. Years, seasons, and various
weather had gone into the braids; and when she undid them at night they fell to her waist. At
present, black silk ribbons were tied around the braids, too, making them even more imposing, if
you got to see them, which few people did. What was on view for general consumption was
Desdemona’s face: her large, sorrowful eyes, her pale, candlelit complexion. I should also
mention, with the vestigial pang of a once flat-chested girl, Desdemona’s voluptuous figure. Her
body was a constant embarrassment to her. It was always announcing itself in ways she didn’t
sanction. In church when she knelt, in the yard when she beat rugs, beneath the peach tree when
she picked fruit, Desdemona’s feminine elaborations escaped the constraints of her drab,
confining clothes. Above the jiggling of her body, her kerchief-framed face remained apart,
looking slightly scandalized atwhat her breasts and hipswere up to.

Eleutherios was taller and skinnier. In photographs from the time he looks like the underworld
figures he idolized, the thin mustachioed thieves and gamblers who filled the seaside bars of
Athens and Constantinople. His nose was aquiline, his eyes sharp, the overall impression of his
face hawk-like. When he smiled, however, you saw the softness in his eyes, which made it clear
that Leftywas in fact no gangster but the pampered, bookish son of comfortablywell-off parents.
That summer afternoon in 1922, Desdemona wasn’t looking at her brother’s face. Instead her
eyesmoved to the suit coat, to the gleaming hair, to the striped trousers, as she tried to figure out
what had happened to him these past fewmonths.
Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she’d survived
those first twelve months without him. For as long as she could remember he’d always been on
the other side of the goat’s-hair blanket that separated their beds. Behind the kelimi he
performed puppet shows, turning his hands into the clever, hunchbacked Karaghiozis who
always outwitted the Turks. In the dark he made up rhymes and sang songs, and one of the
reasons she hated his new American music was that he sang it exclusively to himself.
Desdemona had always loved her brother as only a sister growing up on
a mountain could love a brother: he was the whole entertainment, her best friend and
confidant, her co-discoverer of short cuts and monks’ cells. Early on, the emotional sympathy
she’d felt with Lefty had been so absolute that she’d sometimes forgotten they were separate
people. As kids they’d scrabbled down the terraced mountainside like a four-legged, two-headed
creature. She was accustomed to their Siamese shadow springing up against the whitewashed
house at evening, andwhenever she encountered her solitary outline, it seemed cut in half.
Peacetime seemed to be changing everything. Lefty had taken advantage of the new freedoms.
In the last month he’d gone down to Bursa a total of seventeen times. On three occasions he’d
stayed overnight in the Cocoon Inn across from the Mosque of Sultan Ouhan. He’d left one
morning dressed in boots, knee socks, breeches, doulamas, and vest and come back the
following evening in a striped suit, with a silk scarf tucked into his collar like an opera singer
and a black derby on his head. There were other changes. He’d begun to teach himself French
from a small, plum-colored phrase book. He’d picked up affected gestures, putting his hands in
his pockets and rattling change, for instance, or doffing his cap. When Desdemona did the
laundry, she found scraps of paper in Lefty’s pockets, covered with mathematical figures. His
clothes smelledmusky, smoky, and sometimes sweet.
Now, in the mirror, their joined faces couldn’t hide the fact of their growing separation. And
my grandmother, whose constitutional gloom had broken out into full cardiac thunder, looked at
her brother, as she once had her own shadow, and felt that somethingwasmissing.
“Sowhere are you going all dressed up?”
“Where do you think I’mgoing?To theKozaHan. To sell cocoons.”
“Youwent yesterday.”
“It’s the season.”
With a tortoiseshell comb Lefty parted his hair on the right, adding pomade to an unruly curl
that refused to stay flat.
Desdemona came closer. She picked up the pomade and sniffed it. It wasn’t the smell on his
clothes. “What else do you do down there?”
“Nothing.”
“Youstay all night sometimes.”
“It’s a long trip. By the time Iwalk there, it’s late.”
“What are you smoking in those bars?”
“Whatever’s in the hookah. It’s not polite to ask.”
“IfMother andFather knewyouwere smoking and drinking like this . . .” She trailed off.
“They don’t know, do they?” said Lefty. “So I’m safe.” His light tone was unconvincing.
Lefty acted as though he had recovered from their parents’ deaths, but Desdemona saw through
this. She smiled grimly at her brother and, without comment, held out her fist. Automatically,
while still admiring himself in the mirror, Lefty made a fist, too. They counted, “One, two, three

. . . shoot!”
“Rock crushes snake. Iwin,” saidDesdemona. “So tellme.”
“Tell youwhat?”
“Tellmewhat’s so interesting inBursa.”
Lefty combed his hair forward again and parted it on the left. He swiveled his head back and
forth in themirror. “Which looks better? Left or right?”
“Letme see.”Desdemona raised her hand delicately toLefty’s hair—andmussed it.
“Hey!”
“What do youwant inBursa?”
“Leaveme alone.”
“Tellme!”
“Youwant to know?”Lefty said, exasperatedwith his sister now. “What do you think Iwant?”
He spokewith pent-up force. “Iwant awoman.”
Desdemona gripped her belly, patted her heart. She took two steps backward and from this
vantage point examined her brother anew. The idea that Lefty, who shared her eyes and
eyebrows, who slept in the bed beside hers, could be possessed by such a desire had never
occurred to Desdemona before. Though physically mature, Desdemona’s body was still a
stranger to its owner.At night, in their bedroom, she’d seen her sleeping brother press against his
rope mattress as though angry with it. As a child she’d come upon him in the cocoonery,
innocently rubbing against a wooden post. But none of this had made an impression. “What are
you doing?” she’d askedLefty, eight or nine at the time, and gripping the post,moving his
knees up and down. With a steady, determined voice, he’d answered, “I’m trying to get that
feeling.”
“What feeling?”
“Youknow”—grunting, puffing, pumping knees—“that feeling.”
But she didn’t know. It was still years before Desdemona, cutting cucumbers, would lean
against the corner of the kitchen table and, without realizing it, would lean in a little harder, and
after that would find herself taking up that position every day, the table corner snug between her
legs. Now, preparing her brother’s meals, she sometimes struck up her old acquaintance with the
dining table, but she wasn’t conscious of it. It was her body that did it, with the cunning and
silence of bodies everywhere.
Her brother’s trips to the city were different. He knew what he was looking for, apparently; he
was in full communication with his body. His mind and body had become one entity, thinking
one thought, bent on one obsession, and for the first time ever Desdemona couldn’t read that
thought.All she knewwas that it had nothing to dowith her.
It made her mad. Also, I suspect, a little jealous. Wasn’t she his best friend? Hadn’t they
always told each other everything? Didn’t she do everything for him, cook, sew, and keep house
as their mother used to? Wasn’t she the one who had been taking care of the silkworms single-
handedly so that he, her smart little brother, could take lessons from the priest, learning ancient
Greek? Hadn’t she been the one to say, “You take care of the books, I’ll take care of the
cocoonery. All you have to do is sell the cocoons at the market.” And when he had started
lingering down in the city, had she complained? Had she mentioned the scraps of paper, or his
red eyes, or the musky-sweet smell on his clothes? Desdemona had a suspicion that her dreamy
brother had become a hashish smoker. Where there was rebetika music there was always
hashish. Lefty was dealing with the loss of their parents in the only way he could, by
disappearing in a cloud of hash smoke while listening to the absolutely saddest music in the
world. Desdemona understood all this and so had said nothing. But now she saw that her brother
was trying to escape his grief in a way she hadn’t expected; and she was no longer content to be
quiet.
“Youwant a woman?” Desdemona asked in an incredulous voice. “What kind of woman? A
Turkishwoman?”
Lefty said nothing.After his outburst he had resumed combing his hair.

“Maybe you want a harem girl. Is that right? You think I don’t know about those types of
loose girls, those poutanes? Yes, I do. I’m not so stupid. You like a fat girl shaking her belly in
your face? With a jewel in her fat belly? Youwant one of those? Let me tell you something. Do
you know why those Turkish girls cover their faces? You think it’s because of religion? No. It’s
because otherwise no one can stand to look at them!”
And now she shouted, “Shame on you, Eleutherios! What’s the matter with you? Why don’t
you get a girl from the village?”
Itwas at this point that Lefty,whowas nowbrushing off his jacket, called his sister’s attention
to something she was overlooking. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” he said, “but there aren’t any
girls in this village.”
Which, in fact,was prettymuch the case. Bithynios had never been a big village, but in 1922 it
was smaller than ever. People had begun leaving in 1913, when the phylloxera blight ruined the
currants. They had continued to leave during the Balkan Wars. Lefty and Desdemona’s cousin,
Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built along a
gentle slope of the mountain, Bithynios wasn’t a precarious, cliffside sort of place. It was an
elegant, or at least harmonious, cluster of yellow stucco houses with red roofs. The grandest
houses, of which there were two, had çikma, enclosed bay windows that hung out over the
street. The poorest houses, of which there were many, were essentially one-room kitchens. And
then there were houses like Desdemona and Lefty’s, with an overstuffed parlor, two bedrooms, a
kitchen, and a backyard privy with a European toilet. There were no shops in Bithynios, no post
office or bank, only a church and one taverna. For shopping you had to go into Bursa, walking
first and then taking the horse-drawn streetcar.
In 1922 therewere barely a hundred people living in the village. Fewer than half of thosewere
women. Of forty-seven women, twenty-one were old ladies. Another twenty were middle-aged
wives. Three were young mothers, each with a daughter in diapers. One was his sister. That left
twomarriageable girls.WhomDesdemona now rushed to nominate.
“What do you mean there aren’t any girls? What about Lucille Kafkalis? She’s a nice girl. Or
Victoria Pappas?”
“Lucille smells,” Lefty answered reasonably. “She bathes maybe once a year. On her name
day. And Victoria?” He ran a finger over his upper lip. “Victoria has a mustache bigger than
mine. I don’t want to share a razor with my wife.” With that, he put down his clothing brush and
put on his jacket. “Don’twait up,” he said, and left the bedroom.
“Go!” Desdemona called after him. “See what I care. Just remember. When your Turkish wife
takes off hermask, don’t come running back to the village!”
But Lefty was gone.His footsteps faded away. Desdemona felt the mysterious poison rising in
her blood again. She paid no attention. “I don’t like eating alone!” she shouted, to no one.
The wind from the valley had picked up, as it did every afternoon. It blew through the open
windows of the house. It rattled the latch on her hope chest and her father’s old worry beads
lying on top. Desdemona picked the beads up. She began to slip them one by one through her
fingers, exactly as her father had done, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather,
performing a family legacy of precise, codified, thorough worrying. As the beads clicked
together, Desdemona gave herself up to them. What was the matter with God? Why had He
taken her parents and left her to worry about her brother? What was she supposed to do with
him? “Smoking, drinking, and now worse! And where does he get the money for all his
foolishness? From my cocoons, that’s how!” Each bead slipping through her fingers was another
resentment recorded and released. Desdemona, with her sad eyes, her face of a girl forced to
grow up too fast, worried with her beads like all the Stephanides men before and after her (right
down tome, if I count).
She went to the window and put her head out, heard the wind rustling in the pine trees and the
white birch. She kept counting her worry beads and, little by little, they did their job. She felt
better. She decided to go on with her life. Lefty wouldn’t come back tonight. Who cared? Who
needed him anyway? It would be easier for her if he never came back. But she owed it to her

mother to see that he didn’t catch some shameful disease or, worse, run off with a Turkish girl.
The beads continued to drop, one by one, throughDesdemona’s
hands. But she was no longer counting her pains. Instead, the beads now summoned to her
mind images in a magazine hidden in their father’s old desk. One bead was a hairstyle. The next
beadwas a silk slip. The nextwas a black brassiere.Mygrandmother had begun tomatchmake.

Lefty, meanwhile, carrying a sack of cocoons, was on his way down the mountain. When he
reached the city, he came down Kapali Carsi Caddesi, turned at Borsa Sokak, and soon was
passing through the arch into the courtyard of the Koza Han. Inside, around the aquamarine
fountain, hundreds of stiff, waist-high sacks foamed over with silkworm cocoons. Men crowded
everywhere, either selling or buying. They had been shouting since the opening bell at ten that
morning and their voices were hoarse. “Good price! Good quality!” Lefty squeezed through the
narrow paths between the cocoons, holding his own sack. He had never had any interest in the
family livelihood. He couldn’t judge silkworm cocoons by feeling or sniffing them as his sister
could. The only reason he brought the cocoons to market was that women were not allowed. The
jostling, the bumping of porters and sidestepping of sacks made him tense. He thought how nice
it would be if everyone would just stop moving a moment, if they would stand still to admire the
luminosity of the cocoons in the evening light; but of course no one ever did. They went on
yelling and thrusting cocoons in one another’s faces and lying and haggling. Lefty’s father had
lovedmarket season at theKozaHan, but themercantile impulse hadn’t been passed down to his
son.
Near the covered portico Lefty saw a merchant he knew. He presented his sack. The merchant
reached deep into it and brought out a cocoon. He dipped it into a bowl of water and then
examined it. Then he dipped it into a cup ofwine.
“I need tomake organzine from these. They’re not strong enough.”
Lefty didn’t believe this. Desdemona’s silk was always the best. He knew that he was
supposed to shout, to act offended, to pretend to take his business elsewhere. But he had gotten
such a late start; the closing bell was about to sound. His father had always told him not to bring
cocoons late in the day because then you had to sell them at a discount. Lefty’s skin prickled
under his new suit.Hewanted the
transaction to be over. He was filled with embarrassment: embarrassment for the human race,
its preoccupation with money, its love of swindle. Without protest he accepted the man’s price.
As soon as the deal was completed he hurried out of the Koza Han to attend to his real business
in town.
It wasn’t what Desdemona thought. Watch closely: Lefty, setting his derby at a rakish angle,
walks down the sloping streets of Bursa. When he passes a coffee kiosk, however, he doesn’t go
in. The proprietor hails him, but Lefty only waves. In the next street he passes a window behind
whose shutters female voices call out, but he pays no attention, following the meandering streets
past fruit sellers and restaurants until he reaches another street where he enters a church. More
precisely: a former mosque, with minaret torn down and Koranic inscriptions plastered over to
provide a fresh canvas for the Christian saints that are, even now, being painted on the interior.
Lefty hands a coin to the old lady selling candles, lights one, stands it upright in sand.He takes a
seat in a back pew. And in the same way my mother will later pray for guidance over my
conception, Lefty Stephanides, my great-uncle (among other things) gazes up at the unfinished
Christ Pantocrator on the ceiling. His prayer begins with words he learned as a child, Kyrie
eleison, Kyrie eleison, I am not worthy to come before Thy throne, but soon it veers off,
becoming personal with I don’tknow why I feel this way, it’snot natural . . . and then turning a
little accusatory, praying Youmade me this way, I didn’task to think things like . . . but getting
abject finally with Give me strength, Christos, don’t let me be this way, if she even knew . . .
eyes squeezed shut, hands bending the derby’s brim, the words drifting up with the incense
toward aChrist-in-progress.
He prayed for five minutes. Then came out, replaced his hat on his head, and rattled the

change in his pockets. He climbed back up the sloping streets and, this time (his heart
unburdened), stopped at all the places he’d resisted on hisway down.He stepped into a kiosk for
coffee and a smoke. He went to a café for a glass of ouzo. The backgammon players shouted,
“Hey, Valentino, how about a game?” He let himself get cajoled into playing, just one, then lost
and had to go double or nothing. (The calculations Desdemona found in Lefty’s pants pockets
were gambling debts.) The night wore on. The ouzo kept flowing. The musicians arrived and the
rebetika began. They
played songs about lust, death, prison, and life on the street. “At the hash den on the seashore,
where I’d go every day,” Lefty sang along, “Every morning, bright and early, to chase the blues
away; I ran into two harem girls sitting on the sand; Quite stoned the poor things were, and they
were really looking grand.” Meanwhile, the hookah was being filled. By midnight, Lefty came
floating back onto the streets.
An alley descends, turns, dead-ends. A door opens. A face smiles, beckoning. The next thing
Lefty knows, he’s sharing a sofa with three Greek soldiers, looking across at seven plump,
perfumed women sharing two sofas opposite. (A phonograph plays the hit song that’s playing
everywhere: “Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening . . .”) And now his recent prayer is forgotten
completely because as the madam says, “Anyone you like, sweetheart,” Lefty’s eyes pass over
the blond, blue-eyed Circassian, and the Armenian girl suggestively eating a peach, and the
Mongolian with the bangs; his eyes keep scanning to fix on a quiet girl at the end of the far
couch, a sad-eyed girl with perfect skin and black hair in braids. (“There’s a scabbard for every
dagger,” the madam says in Turkish as the whores laugh.) Unconscious of the workings of his
attraction, Lefty stands up, smooths his jacket, holds out his hand toward his choice . . . and only
as she leads himup the stairs does a voice in his head point out how this girl comes up to exactly
where . . . and isn’t her profile just like . . . but now they’ve reached the room with its unclean
sheets, its blood-colored oil lamp, its smell of rose water and dirty feet. In the intoxication of his
young senses Lefty doesn’t pay attention to the growing similarities the girl’s disrobing reveals.
His eyes take in the large breasts, the slim waist, the hair cascading down to the defenseless
coccyx; but Lefty doesn’t make connections. The girl fills a hookah for him. Soon he drifts off,
no longer hearing the voice in his head. In the soft hashish dream of the ensuing hours, he loses
sense of who he is and who he’s with. The limbs of the prostitute become those of another
woman. A few times he calls out a name, but by then he is too stoned to notice. Only later,
showing himout, does the girl bring himback to reality. “By theway, I’m Irini.We don’t have a
Desdemona here.”
The next morning he awoke at the Cocoon Inn, awash in recriminations. He left the city and
climbed back up themountain toBithynios.His pockets (empty)made no sound.Hungover and
feverish, Lefty told himself that his sister was right: it was time for him to get married. He
would marry Lucille, or Victoria. He would have children and stop going down to Bursa and
little by little he’d change; he’d get older; everything he felt now would fade into memory and
then into nothing.He nodded his head; he fixed his hat.

Back in Bithynios, Desdemona was giving those two beginners finishing lessons. While Lefty
was still sleeping it off at the Cocoon Inn, she invited Lucille Kafkalis and Victoria Pappas over
to the house. The girls were even younger than Desdemona, still living at home with their
parents. They looked up to Desdemona as the mistress of her own home. Envious of her beauty,
they gazed admiringly at her; flattered by her attentions, they confided in her; and when she
began to give them advice on their looks, they listened. She told Lucille to wash more regularly
and suggested she use vinegar under her arms as an antiperspirant. She sentVictoria to a Turkish
woman who specialized in removing unwanted hair. Over the next week, Desdemona taught the
girls everything she’d learned from the only beauty magazine she’d ever seen, a tattered
catalogue called Lingerie Parisienne. The catalogue had belonged to her father. It contained
thirty-two pages of photographs showing models wearing brassieres, corsets, garter belts, and
stockings. At night, when everyone was sleeping, her father used to take it out of the bottom

drawer of his desk. Now Desdemona studied the catalogue in secret, memorizing the pictures so
that she could re-create them later.
She told Lucille and Victoria to stop by every afternoon. They walked into the house, swaying
their hips as instructed, and passed through the grape arbor where Lefty liked to read. They wore
a different dress each time. They also changed their hairstyles, walks, jewelry, and mannerisms.
Under Desdemona’s direction, the two drab girls multiplied themselves into a small city of
women, each with a signature laugh, a personal gemstone, a favorite song she hummed. After
two weeks, Desdemona went out to the grape arbor one afternoon and asked her brother, “What
are you doing here? Why aren’t you down in Bursa? I thought you’d have found a nice Turkish
girl tomarry by now.Or do they all havemustaches likeVictoria’s?”
“Funny you should mention that,” Lefty said. “Have you noticed? Vicky doesn’t have a
mustache anymore.Anddoyouknowwhat
else?”—getting up now, smiling—“even Lucille’s starting to smell okay. Every time she
comes over, I smell flowers.” (He was lying, of course. Neither girl looked or smelled more
appealing to him than before. His enthusiasm was only his way of giving in to the inevitable: an
arranged marriage, domesticity, children—the complete disaster.) He came up close to
Desdemona. “Youwere right,” he said. “The most beautiful girls in the world are right here in
this village.”
She looked shyly back up into his eyes. “Youthink so?”
“Sometimes you don’t even noticewhat’s right under your nose.”
They stood gazing at each other, as Desdemona’s stomach began to feel funny again. And to
explain the sensation I have to tell you another story. In his presidential address at the annual
convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in 1968 (held that year in
Mazatlán among lots of suggestive piñatas), Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence.”
The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The
state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding.
It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope
of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the initial drugged and happy bedtime where you
sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two
years—tops.) The ancients would have explained what Desdemona was feeling as the workings
of Eros. Now expert opinion would put it down to brain chemistry and evolution. Still, I have to
insist: toDesdemona periphescence felt like a lake ofwarmth flooding up fromher abdomen and
across her chest. It spread like the 180-proof, fiery flood of a mint-green Finnish liqueur. With
the pumping of two efficient glands in her neck, it heated her face. And then the warmth got
other ideas and started spreading into places a girl like Desdemona didn’t allow it to go, and she
broke off the stare and turned away. She walked to the window, leaving the periphescence
behind, and the breeze from the valley cooled her down. “I will speak to the girls’ parents,” she
said, trying to sound like hermother. “Then youmust go pay court.”

The next night, the moon, like Turkey’s future flag, was a crescent. Down in Bursa the Greek
troops scrounged for food, caroused, and shot up another mosque. In Angora, Mustafa Kemal let
it be printed
in the newspaper that he would be holding a tea at Chankaya while in actuality he’d left for his
headquarters in the field. With his men, he drank the last raki he’d take until the battle was over.
Under cover of night, Turkish troops moved not north toward Eski ehir, as everyone expected,
but to the heavily fortified city of Afyon in the south. At Eski ehir, Turkish troops lit campfires
to exaggerate their strength. A small diversionary force feinted northward toward Bursa. And,
amid these deployments, Lefty Stephanides, carrying two corsages, stepped out the front door of
his house and beganwalking to the housewhereVictoria Pappas lived.
It was an event on the level of a birth or a death. Each of the nearly hundred citizens of
Bithynios had heard about Lefty’s upcoming visits, and the oldwidows, themarriedwomen, and
the young mothers, as well as the old men, were waiting to see which girl he would choose.

Because of the small population, the old courting rituals had nearly ceased. This lack of romantic
possibility had created a vicious cycle. No one to love: no love. No love: no babies. No babies:
no one to love.
Victoria Pappas stood half in and half out of the light, the shading across her body exactly that
of the photograph on page 8 of Lingerie Parisienne. Desdemona (costume lady, stage manager,
and director all in one) had pinned up Victoria’s hair, letting ringlets fall over her forehead and
warning her to keep her biggish nose in shadow. Perfumed, depilated, moist with emollients,
wearing kohl around her eyes, Victoria let Lefty look upon her. She felt the heat of his gaze,
heard his heavy breathing, heard him try to speak twice—small squeaks from a dry throat—and
then she heard his feet coming toward her, and she turned, making the face Desdemona had
taught her; but she was so distracted by the effort to pout her lips like the French lingerie model
that she didn’t realize the footsteps weren’t approaching but retreating; and she turned to see that
Lefty Stephanides, the only eligible bachelor in town, had taken off . . .
. . . Meanwhile, back at home, Desdemona opened her hope chest. She reached in and pulled
out her own corset. Hermother had given it to her years ago in expectation of herwedding night,
saying, “I hope you fill this out someday.”Now, before the bedroommirror,Desdemona held the
strange, complicated garment against herself. Down went her knee socks, her gray underwear.
Off cameher high-waisted
skirt, her high-collared tunic. She shook off her kerchief and unbraided her hair so that it fell
over her bare shoulders. The corset was made of white silk. As she put it on, Desdemona felt as
though shewere spinning her own cocoon, awaitingmetamorphosis.
But when she looked in the mirror again, she caught herself. It was no use. She would never
get married. Lefty would come back tonight having chosen a bride, and then he would bring her
home to live with them. Desdemona would stay where she was, clicking her beads and growing
even older than she already felt. A dog howled. Someone in the village kicked over a bundle of
sticks and cursed. And my grandmother wept silently because she was going to spend the rest of
her days countingworries that neverwent away . . .
. . . While in the meantime Lucille Kafkalis was standing exactly as she’d been told, half in
and half out of the light, wearing a white hat sashed with glass cherries, a mantilla over bare
shoulders, a bright green, décolleté dress, and high heels, in which she didn’t move for fear of
falling. Her fat mother waddled in, grinning and shouting, “Here he comes! Even one minute he
couldn’t staywithVictoria!” . . .
. . . Already he could smell the vinegar. Lefty had just entered the lowdoorway of theKafkalis
house. Lucille’s father welcomed him, then said, “We’ll leave you two alone. To get
acquainted.” The parents left. It was dim in the room. Lefty turned . . . and dropped another
corsage.
What Desdemona hadn’t anticipated: her brother, too, had pored over the pages of Lingerie
Parisienne. In fact, he’d done it from the time he turned twelve to the time he turned fourteen,
when he discovered the real loot: ten postcard-sized photographs, hidden in an old suitcase,
showing “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” in which a bored, pear-shaped twenty-five-year-
old assumed a variety of positions on the tasseled pillows of a staged seraglio. Finding her in the
toiletries pocket was like rubbing a genie’s lamp. Up she swirled in a plume of shining dust:
wearing nothing but a pair of Arabian Nights slippers and a sash around her waist (flash); lying
languidly on a tiger skin, fondling a scimitar (flash); and bathing, lattice-lit, at a marble
hammam. Those ten sepia-toned photographs were what had started Lefty’s fascination with the
city. But he had never entirely forgotten his first loves in Lingerie Parisienne. He could
summon them in his
imagination at will. When he had seen Victoria Pappas looking like page 8, what had struck
Lefty most acutely was the distance between her and his boyhood ideal. He tried to imagine
himself married to Victoria, living with her, but every image that came to mind had a gaping
emptiness at the center, the lack of the person he loved more and knew better than any other.
And so he had fled from Victoria Pappas to come down the street and find Lucille Kafkalis, just

as disappointingly, failing to live up to page 22 . . .
. . . And now it happens. Desdemona, weeping, takes off the corset, folds it back up, and
returns it to the hope chest. She throws herself on the bed, Lefty’s bed, to continue crying. The
pillow smells of his lime pomade and she breathes it in, sobbing . . .
. . . until, drugged by weeping’s opiates, she falls asleep. She dreams the dream she’s been
having lately. In the dream everything’s the way it used to be. She and Lefty are children again
(except they have adult bodies). They’re lying in the same bed (except now it’s their parents’
bed). They shift their limbs in sleep (and it feels extremely nice, how they shift, and the bed is
wet) . . . at which pointDesdemonawakes up, as usual. Her face is hot. Her stomach feels funny,
way deep down, and she can almost name the feeling now . . .
. . . As I sit here in my Aeron chair, thinking E. O. Wilson thoughts. Was it love or
reproduction? Chance or destiny? Crime or nature at work? Maybe the gene contained an
override, ensuring its expression, which would explain Desdemona’s tears and Lefty’s taste in
prostitutes; not fondness, not emotional sympathy; only the need for this new thing to enter the
world and hence the heart’s rigged game. But I can’t explain it, any more than Desdemona or
Lefty could have, any more than each one of us, falling in love, can separate the hormonal from
what feels divine, and maybe I cling to the God business out of some altruism hard-wired to
preserve the species; I can’t say. I try to go back in my mind to a time before genetics, before
everyone was in the habit of saying about everything, “It’s in the genes.” A time before our
present freedom, and so much freer! Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn’t
envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of
which might contain a bug. Now we know we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we
stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the samewrinkles and
age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes
embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have that same way of
blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing
with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and voice boxes, formed
from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be
extrapolated backward in time, so thatwhen I speak,Desdemona speaks, too. She’swriting these
words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders,
or of the one soldierwhodisobeyed, goingAWOL . . .
. . . Running like Lefty away from Lucille Kafkalis and back to his sister. She heard his feet
hurrying as she was refastening her skirt. She wiped her eyes with her kerchief and put a smile
on as he came through the door.
“So,which one did you choose?”
Lefty said nothing, inspecting his sister. He hadn’t shared a bedroomwith her all his life not to
be able to tell when she’d been crying. Her hair was loose, covering most of her face, but the
eyes that looked up at himwere brimmingwith feeling. “Neither one,” he said.
At thatDesdemona felt tremendous happiness. But she said, “What’s thematterwith you?You
have to choose.”
“Those girls look like a couple ofwhores.”
“Lefty!”
“It’s true.”
“Youdon’twant tomarry them?”
“No.”
“Youhave to.” She held out her fist. “If Iwin, youmarryLucille.”
Lefty,who could never resist a bet,made a fist himself. “One, two, three . . . shoot!
“Axbreaks rock,”Lefty said. “Iwin.”
“Again,” saidDesdemona. “This time, if Iwin, youmarryVicky.One, two, three . . .”
“Snake swallows ax. Iwin again! So long toVicky.”
“Thenwhowill youmarry?”
“I don’t know”—taking her hands and looking down at her. “Howabout you?”

“Too bad I’myour sister.”
“You’renot onlymy sister.You’remy third cousin, too. Third cousins canmarry.”
“You’recrazy, Lefty.”
“Thiswaywill be easier.Wewon’t have to rearrange the house.”
Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the
standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and
strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things
constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty
beganwaltzingDesdemona around, European-style; hewaltzed her outside, across the yard, over
to the cocoonery, and back under the grape arbor, and she laughed and covered her mouth with
her hand. “You’re a good dancer, cousin,” she said, and her heart jumped again, making her
think shemight die right then and there inLefty’s arms, but of course she didn’t; they danced on.
And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins
sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related; so that as they danced,
they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a
man and awoman, in lonely and pressing circumstances,might sometimes do.
And in the middle of this, before anything had been said outright or any decisions made
(before fire would make those decisions for them), right then, mid-waltz, they heard explosions
in the distance, and looked down to see, in firelight, theGreekArmy in full retreat.

ANIMMODESTPROPOSAL

Descended from Asia Minor Greeks, born in America, I live in Europe now. Specifically, in
the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The Foreign Service is split into two parts, the diplomatic
corps and the cultural staff. The ambassador and his aides conduct foreign policy from the newly
opened, extensively barricaded embassy on Neustädtische Kirchstrasse. Our department (in
charge of readings, lectures, and concerts) operates out of the colorful concrete box of Amerika
Haus.
This morning I took the train to work as usual. The U-Bahn carried me gently west from
Kleistpark to Berliner Strasse and then, after a switch, northward toward Zoologischer Garten.
Stations of the former West Berlin passed one after another. Most were last remodeled in the
seventies and have the colors of suburban kitchens from my childhood: avocado, cinnamon,
sunflower yellow. At Spichernstrasse the train halted to conduct an exchange of bodies. Out on
the platform a street musician played a teary Slavic melody on an accordion. Wing tips
gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she
rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.
Youused to be able to tell a person’s nationality by the face. Immigration ended that.Next you
discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that. Those Finnish seal puppies,
those German flounders—you don’t see them much anymore. Only Nikes, on Basque, on Dutch,
onSiberian feet.
The bicyclist was Asian, at least genetically. Her black hair was cut in a shag. She was
wearing a short olive green windbreaker, flared black ski pants, and a pair of maroon Campers
resembling bowling shoes. The basket of her bike contained a camera bag.
I had a hunch shewasAmerican. It was the retro bike. Chrome and turquoise, it had fenders as
wide as aChevrolet’s, tires as thick as awheelbarrow’s, and appeared toweigh at least a hundred
pounds. An expatriate’s whim, that bike. I was about to use it as a pretext for starting a
conversation when the train stopped again. The bicyclist looked up. Her hair fell away from her
beautiful, hooded face and, for a moment, our eyes met. The placidity of her countenance along
with the smoothness of her skin made her face appear like a mask, with living, human eyes
behind it. These eyes now darted away from mine as she grasped the handlebars of her bike and
pushed her great two-wheeler off the train and toward the elevators. The U-Bahn resumed, but I
was no longer reading. I sat in my seat, in a state of voluptuous agitation, of agitated
voluptuousness, untilmy stop. Then I staggered out.
Unbuttoning my suit jacket, I took a cigar from the inner pocket of my coat. From a still
smaller pocket I took out my cigar cutter and matches. Though it wasn’t after dinner, I lit the
cigar—a Davidoff Grand Cru No. 3—and stood smoking, trying to calm myself. The cigars, the
double-breasted suits—they’re a little too much. I’m well aware of that. But I need them. They
make me feel better. After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected. In
my bespoke suit, my checked shirt, I smoked my medium-fat cigar until the fire in my blood
subsided.

Something you should understand: I’m not androgynous in the least. 5-alpha-reductase
deficiency syndrome allows for normal biosynthesis and peripheral action of testosterone, in
utero, neonatally, and at puberty. In other words, I operate in society as a man. I use the men’s
room. Never the urinals, always the stalls. In the men’s locker room at my gym I even shower,
albeit discreetly. I possess all the secondary sex characteristics of a normal man except one: my
inability to synthesize dihydrotestosterone has made me immune to baldness. I’ve lived more
than halfmy life as amale, and by noweverything comes naturally.WhenCalliope surfaces, she
does so like a childhood speech impediment. Suddenly there she is again, doing a hair flip, or
checking her nails. It’s a little like being possessed.Callie
rises up insideme,wearingmy skin like a loose robe. She sticks her little hands into the baggy
sleeves of my arms. She inserts her chimp’s feet through the trousers of my legs. On the
sidewalk I’ll feel her girlish walk take over, and the movement brings back a kind of emotion, a
desolate and gossipy sympathy for the girls I see coming home from school. This continues for a
few more steps. Calliope’s hair tickles the back of my throat. I feel her press tentatively on my
chest—that old nervous habit of hers—to see if anything is happening there. The sick fluid of
adolescent despair that runs through her veins overflows again into mine. But then, just as
suddenly, she is leaving, shrinking and melting away inside me, and when I turn to see my
reflection in a window there’s this: a forty-one-year-old man with longish, wavy hair, a thin
mustache, and a goatee.Akind ofmodernMusketeer.
But that’s enough about me for now. I have to pick up where explosions interrupted me
yesterday. After all, neither Cal nor Calliope could have come into existence without what
happened next.

“I told you!” Desdemona cried at the top of her lungs. “I told you all this good luck would be
bad!This is how they liberate us?Only theGreeks could be so stupid!”
By the morning after the waltz, you see, Desdemona’s forebodings had been borne out. The
Megale Idea had come to an end. The Turks had captured Afyon. The Greek Army, beaten, was
fleeing toward the sea. In retreat, it was setting fire to everything in its path. Desdemona and
Lefty, in dawn’s light, stood on the mountainside and surveyed the devastation. Black smoke
rose formiles across the valley. Every village, every field, every treewas aflame.
“We can’t stay here,” Lefty said. “TheTurkswillwant revenge.”
“Sincewhen did they need a reason?”
“We’ll go toAmerica.We can livewith Sourmelina.”
“It won’t be nice in America,” Desdemona insisted, shaking her head. “Youshouldn’t believe
Lina’s letters. She exaggerates.”
“As long aswe’re togetherwe’ll be okay.”
He looked at her, in the way of the night before, and Desdemona blushed. He tried to put his
armaround her, but she stopped him. “Look.”
Down below, the smoke had thinned momentarily. They could see the roads now, clogged
with refugees: a river of carts,wagons,water buffalo,mules, and people hurrying out of the city.
“Where canweget a boat? InConstantinople?”
“We’ll go to Smyrna,” said Lefty. “Everyone says Smyrna’s the safest way.” Desdemona was
quiet for a moment, trying to fathom this new reality. Voices rumbled in the other houses as
people cursed the Greeks, the Turks, and started packing. Suddenly, with resolve: “I’ll bring my
silkwormbox.And some eggs. Sowe canmakemoney.”
Lefty took hold of her elbowand shook her armplayfully. “They don’t farm silk inAmerica.”
“They wear clothes, don’t they? Or do they go around naked? If they wear clothes, they need
silk.And they can buy it fromme.”
“Okay,whatever youwant. Just hurry.”

Eleutherios and Desdemona Stephanides left Bithynios on August 31, 1922. They left on foot,
carrying two suitcases packed with clothes, toiletries, Desdemona’s dream book and worry
beads, and two of Lefty’s texts of Ancient Greek. Under her arm Desdemona also carried her
silkworm box containing a few hundred silkworm eggs wrapped in a white cloth. The scraps of
paper in Lefty’s pockets now recorded not gambling debts but forwarding addresses inAthens or
Astoria. Over a single week, the hundred or so remaining citizens of Bithynios packed their
belongings and set out formainlandGreece,most en route toAmerica. (Adiasporawhich should
have preventedmy existence, but didn’t.)
Before leaving, Desdemona walked out into the yard and crossed herself in the Orthodox
fashion, leading with the thumb. She said her goodbyes: to the powdery, rotting smell of the
cocoonery and to the mulberry trees lined along the wall, to the steps she’d never have to climb
again and to this feeling of living above the world, too. She went inside the cocoonery to look at
her silkworms for the last time. They had all stopped spinning. She reached up, plucked a cocoon
fromamulberry twig, and put it in her tunic pocket.

On September 6, 1922, General Hajienestis, Commander in Chief of the Greek forces in Asia
Minor, awoke with the impression that his legs were made of glass. Afraid to get out of bed, he
sent the barber away, forgoing hismorning shave. In the afternoon he declined to go
ashore to enjoy his usual lemon ice on the Smyrna waterfront. Instead he lay on his back, still
and alert, ordering his aides—who came and went with dispatches from the front—not to slam
the door or stomp their feet. This was one of the commander’s more lucid, productive days.
When the Turkish Army had attacked Afyon two weeks earlier, Hajienestis had believed that he
was dead and that the ripples of light reflecting on his cabin walls were the pyrotechnics of
heaven.
At two o’clock, his second-in-command tiptoed into the general’s cabin to speak in a whisper:
“Sir, I amawaiting your orders for a counterattack, sir.”
“Doyouhear how they squeak?”
“Sir?”
“My legs.My thin, vitreous legs.”
“Sir, I am aware the general is having trouble with his legs, but I submit, with all due respect,
sir”—a little louder than awhisper now—“this is not a time to concentrate on suchmatters.”
“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you, lieutenant? But if your legs were made of
glass, you’d understand. I can’t go into shore. That’s exactlywhatKemal is banking on! To have
me stand up and shattermy legs to pieces.”
“These are the latest reports, General.” His second-in-command held a sheet of paper over
Hajienestis’ face. “ ‘The Turkish cavalry has been sighted one hundred miles east of Smyrna,’ ”
he read. “ ‘The refugee population is now 180,000.’ That’s an increase of 30,000 people since
yesterday.”
“I didn’t know death would be like this, lieutenant. I feel close to you. I’m gone. I’ve taken
that trip to Hades, yet I can still see you. Listen to me. Death is not the end. This is what I’ve
discovered. We remain, we persist. The dead see that I’m one of them. They’re all around me.
Youcan’t see them, but they’re here. Mothers with children, old women—everyone’s here. Tell
the cook to bringmemy lunch.”
Outside, the famous harbor was full of ships. Merchant vessels were tied up to a long quay
alongside barges and wooden caiques. Farther out, the Allied warships lay at anchor. The sight
of them, for the Greek and Armenian citizens of Smyrna (and the thousands and thousands of
Greek refugees), was reassuring, and whenever a rumor circulated—yesterday an Armenian
newspaper had claimed that the
Allies, eager to make amends for their support of the Greek invasion, were planning to hand
the city over to the victorious Turks—the citizens looked out at the French destroyers andBritish
battleships, still on hand to protect European commercial interests in Smyrna, and their fears
were calmed.

Dr. Nishan Philobosian had set off for the harbor that afternoon seeking just such reassurance.
He kissed his wife, Toukhie, and his daughters, Rose and Anita, goodbye; he slapped his sons,
Karekin and Stepan, on the back, pointing at the chessboard and saying with mock gravity,
“Don’tmove those pieces.”He locked the front door behind him, testing itwith his shoulder, and
started down Suyane Street, past the closed shops and shuttered windows of the Armenian
Quarter.He stopped outsideBerberian’s bakery,wonderingwhetherCharlesBerberian had taken
his family out of the city or whether they were hiding upstairs like the Philobosians. For five
days now they’d been under self-imprisonment, Dr. Philobosian and his sons playing endless
games of chess, Rose and Anita looking at a copy of Photoplay he’d picked up for them on a
recent visit to the American suburb of Paradise, Toukhie cooking day and night because eating
was the only thing that relieved the anxiety. The bakery door showed only a sign that said OPEN
SOON and a portrait—which made Philobosian wince—of Kemal, the Turkish leader resolute in
astrakhan cap and fur collar, his blue eyes piercing beneath the crossed sabers of his eyebrows.
Dr. Philobosian turned away from the face and moved on, rehearsing all the arguments against
putting up Kemal’s portrait like that. For one thing—as he’d been telling his wife all week—the
European powers would never let the Turks enter the city. Second, if they did, the presence of
the warships in the harbor would restrain the Turks from looting. Even during the massacres of
1915 the Armenians of Smyrna had been safe. And finally—for his own family, at least—there
was the letter hewas on hisway to retrieve fromhis office. So reasoning, he continued down the
hill, reaching theEuropeanQuarter. Here the houses grewmore prosperous.On either side of the
street rose two-story villas with flowering balconies and high, armored walls. Dr. Philobosian
had never been invited into these villas socially, but he often made house calls to attend the
Levantine girls living inside; girls of eighteen or nineteen who awaited him in the “water
palaces” of the courtyards, lying languidly on daybeds
amid a profusion of fruit trees; girls whose desperate need to find European husbands gave
them a scandalous amount of freedom, cause itself for Smyrna’s reputation as being
exceptionally kind tomilitary officers, and responsible for the fever blushes the girls betrayed on
the mornings of Dr. Philobosian’s visits, as well as for the nature of their complaints, which ran
from the ankle twisted on the dance floor to more intimate scrapes higher up. All of which the
girls showed no modesty about, throwing open silk peignoirs to say, “It’s all red, Doctor. Do
something. I have to be at the Casin by eleven.” These girls all gone now, taken out of the city
by their parents after the first fighting weeks ago, off in Paris and London—where the Season
was beginning—the houses quiet as Dr. Philobosian passed by, the crisis receding from his mind
at the thought of all those loosened robes. But then he turned the corner, reaching the quay, and
the emergency cameback to him.
From one end of the harbor to the other, Greek soldiers, exhausted, cadaverous, unclean,
limped toward the embarkation point at Chesme, southwest of the city, awaiting evacuation.
Their tattered uniforms were black with soot from the villages they’d burned in retreat. Only a
week before, the waterfront’s elegant open-air cafés had been filled with naval officers and
diplomats; now the quay was a holding pen. The first refugees had come with carpets and
armchairs, radios, Victrolas, lampstands, dressers, spreading them out before the harbor, under
the open sky. The more recent arrivals turned up with only a sack or a suitcase. Amid this
confusion, porters darted everywhere, loading boats with tobacco, figs, frankincense, silk, and
mohair. Thewarehouseswere being emptied before theTurks arrived.
Dr. Philobosian spotted a refugee picking through chicken bones and potato peels in a heap of
garbage. It was a young man in a well-tailored but dirty suit. Even from a distance, Dr.
Philobosian’s medical eye noticed the cut on the young man’s hand and the pallor of
malnutrition. But when the refugee looked up, the doctor saw only a blank for a face; he was
indistinguishable from any of the refugees swarming the quay. Nevertheless, staring into this
blankness, the doctor called, “Are you sick?”
“I haven’t eaten for three days,” said the youngman.
The doctor sighed. “Comewithme.”

He led the refugee downback streets to his office.He ushered
him inside and brought gauze, antiseptic, and tape from a medical cabinet, and examined the
hand.
Thewoundwas on theman’s thumb,where the nailwasmissing.
“Howdid this happen?”
“First the Greeks invaded,” the refugee said. “Then the Turks invaded back. My hand got in
theway.”
Dr. Philobosian said nothing as he cleaned the wound. “I’ll have to pay you with a check,
Doctor,” the refugee said. “I hope you don’t mind. I don’t have a lot of money on me at the
moment.”
Dr. Philobosian reached into his pocket. “I have a little.Goon. Take it.”
The refugee hesitated only a moment. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll repay you as soon as I get to
theUnited States. Please givemeyour address.”
“Be carefulwhat you drink,”Dr. Philobosian ignored the request. “Boil water, if you can.God
willing, some shipsmay come soon.”
The refugee nodded. “You’reArmenian,Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Andyou’re not leaving?”
“Smyrna ismyhome.”
“Good luck, then.AndGodbless you.”
“You too.” And with that Dr. Philobosian led him out. He watched the refugee walk off. It’s
hopeless, he thought. He’ll be dead in a week. If not typhus, something else. But it wasn’t his
concern. Reaching inside a typewriter, he extracted a thick wad of money from beneath the
ribbon. He rummaged through drawers until he found, inside his medical diploma, a faded
typewritten letter: “This letter is to certify that Nishan Philobosian, M.D., did, on April 3, 1919,
treat Mustafa Kemal Pasha for diverticulitis. Dr. Philobosian is respectfully recommended by
Kemal Pasha to the esteem, confidence, and protection of all persons to whom he may present
this letter.” The bearer of this letter now folded it and tucked it into his pocket.
By then the refugee was buying bread at a bakery on the quay. Where now, as he turns away,
hiding the warm loaf under his grimy suit, the sunlight off the water brightens his face and his
identity fills itself in: the aquiline nose, the hawk-like expression, the softness appearing in the
brown eyes.
For the first time since reachingSmyrna, Lefty Stephanideswas
smiling. On his previous forays he’d brought back only a single rotten peach and six olives,
which he’d encouraged Desdemona to swallow, pits and all, to fill herself up. Now, carrying the
sesame-seeded chureki, he squeezed back into the crowd.He skirted the edges of open-air living
rooms (where families sat listening to silent radios) and stepped over bodies he hoped were
sleeping. He was feeling encouraged by another development, too. Just that morning word had
spread that Greece was sending a fleet of ships to evacuate refugees. Lefty looked out at the
Aegean. Having lived on a mountain for twenty years, he’d never seen the sea before.
Somewhere over the water was America and their cousin Sourmelina. He smelled the sea air, the
warm bread, the antiseptic from his bandaged thumb, and then he saw her—Desdemona, sitting
on the suitcasewhere he’d left her—and felt even happier.
Lefty couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d begun to have thoughts about his sister. At first he’d
just been curious to see what a real woman’s breasts looked like. It didn’t matter that they were
his sister’s. He tried to forget that they were his sister’s. Behind the hanging kelimi that
separated their beds, he saw Desdemona’s silhouette as she undressed. It was just a body; it
could have been anyone’s, or Lefty liked to pretend so. “What are you doing over there?”
Desdemona asked, undressing. “Why are you so quiet?”
“I’m reading.”
“What are you reading?”
“TheBible.”

“Oh, sure.Younever read theBible.”
Soon he’d found himself picturing his sister after the lights went out. She’d invaded his
fantasies, but Lefty resisted. He went down to the city instead, in search of naked women he
wasn’t related to.
But since the night of their waltz, he’d stopped resisting. Because of the messages of
Desdemona’s fingers, because their parents were dead and their village destroyed, because no
one in Smyrna knew who they were, and because of the way Desdemona looked right now,
sitting on a suitcase.
And Desdemona? What did she feel? Fear foremost, and worry, punctuated by unprecedented
explosions of joy. She had never rested her head in a man’s lap before while riding in an oxcart.
She’d never slept like spoons, encircled by a man’s arms; she’d never experienced a man getting
hard against her spinewhile trying to talk as though
nothing were happening. “Only fifty more miles,” Lefty had said one night on the arduous
journey to Smyrna. “Maybe we’ll be lucky tomorrow and get a ride. And when we get to
Smyrna, we’ll get a boat to Athens”—his voice tight, funny-sounding, a few tones higher than
normal—“and fromAthenswe’ll get a boat toAmerica. Sound good?Okay. I think that’s good.”

What am I doing? Desdemona thought. He’s my brother! She looked at the other refugees on the
quay, expecting to see them shaking their fingers, saying, “Shame on you!” But they only
showed her lifeless faces, empty eyes. Nobody knew. Nobody cared. Then she heard her
brother’s excited voice, as he lowered the bread before her face. “Behold.Manna fromheaven.”
Desdemona glanced up at him. Her mouth filled with saliva as Lefty broke the chureki in
two.But her face remained sad. “I don’t see any boats coming,” she said.
“They’re coming. Don’t worry. Eat.” Lefty sat down on the suitcase beside her. Their
shoulders touched.Desdemonamoved away.
“What’s thematter?”
“Nothing.”
“Every time I sit down you move away.” He looked at Desdemona, puzzled, but then his
expression softened and he put his armaround her. She stiffened.
“Okay, have it yourway.”He stood up again.
“Where are you going?”
“To findmore food.”
“Don’t go,”Desdemona pleaded. “I’m sorry. I don’t like sitting here all alone.”
But Lefty had stormed off. He left the quay and wandered the city streets, muttering to
himself. He was angry with Desdemona for rebuffing him and he was angry at himself for being
angry at her, because he knew she was right. But he didn’t stay angry long. It wasn’t in his
nature. He was tired, half-starved, he had a sore throat, a wounded hand, but for all that Lefty
was still twenty years old, on his first real trip away from home, and alert to the newness of
things. When you got away from the quay you could almost forget that there was a crisis on.
Back here there were fancy shops and high-toned bars, still operating. He came down the Rue de
France and found himself at the SportingClub.Despite the emergency, two foreign consulswere
playing
tennis on the grass courts out back. In fading light they moved back and forth, swatting the
ball while a dark-skinned boy in a white jacket held a tray of gin and tonics courtside. Lefty kept
walking. He came to a square with a fountain and washed his face. A breeze came up, bringing
the smell of jasmine all the way in from Bournabat. And while Lefty stops to breathe it in, I’d
like to take this opportunity to resuscitate—for purely elegiac reasons and only for a
paragraph—that citywhich disappeared, once and for all, in 1922.
Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The WasteLand:
                Mr.Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
                Unshaven, with a pocketful of currants
                C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

                Asked me in demotic French
                Toluncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
                Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
Everything you need to know about Smyrna is contained in that. The merchant is rich, and so
was Smyrna. His proposal was seductive, and so was Smyrna, the most cosmopolitan city in the
Near East. Among its reputed founders were, first, the Amazons (which goes nicely with my
theme), and second, Tantalus himself. Homer was born there, and Aristotle Onassis. In Smyrna,
East and West, opera and politakia, violin and zourna, piano and daouli blended as tastefully
as did the rose petals and honey in the local pastries.
Lefty startedwalking again and soon came to the Smyrna Casin. Potted palms flanked a grand
entrance, but the doors stood wide open. He stepped inside. No one stopped him. There was no
one around. He followed a red carpet to the second floor and into the gaming room. The craps
table was unoccupied. Nobody was at the roulette wheel. In the far corner, however, a group of
men were playing cards. They glanced up at Lefty but then returned to their game, ignoring his
dirty clothes. That was when he realized that the gamblers weren’t regular club members; they
were refugees like him. Each hadwandered through the open door in hopes ofwinningmoney to
buy passage out of Smyrna. Lefty approached the table.A card player asked, “Youin?”
“I’m in.”
He didn’t understand the rules. He’d never played poker before, only backgammon, and for
the first half hour he lost again and again. Eventually, though, Lefty began to understand the
difference between five-card draw and seven-card stud, and gradually the balance of payments
around the table began to shift. “Three of these,” Lefty said, showing three aces, and the men
started to grumble. They watched his dealing more closely, mistaking his clumsiness for a
cardsharp’s sleight of hand. Lefty began to enjoy himself, and after winning a big pot cried,
“Ouzo all around!” But when nothing happened, he looked up and saw again how truly deserted
the Casin was, and the sight brought home to him the high stakes they were playing for. Life.
They were playing for their lives, and now, as he examined his fellow gamblers, and saw
perspiration beading their brows and smelled their sour breath, Lefty Stephanides, showing far
more restraint than he would four decades later when he played the Detroit numbers, stood up
and said, “I’m folding.”
They nearly killed him. Lefty’s pockets bulged with winnings, and the men insisted he
couldn’t leave without giving them a chance to win some of it back. He bent over to scratch his
leg, insisting, “I can go out any time I want.” One of the men grabbed him by his soiled lapels,
and Lefty added, “And I don’t want to yet.” He sat down, scratching his other leg, and thereafter
started losing again and again. When all his money was gone, Lefty got up and said with
disgusted anger, “Can I leave now?” The men said sure, leave, laughing as they dealt the next
hand. Lefty walked stiffly, dejectedly, out of the Casin. In the entrance, between the potted
palms, he bent down to collect themoney he’d stashed in his ripe-smelling socks.
Back at the quay, he sought out Desdemona. “Look what I found,” he said, flashing his
money. “Somebodymust have dropped it.Nowwe can get a ship.”
Desdemona screamed and hugged him. She kissed him right on the lips. Then she pulled back,
blushing, and turned to thewater. “Listen,” she said, “thoseBritish are playingmusic again.”

She was referring to the service band on the Iron Duke. Every night, as officers dined, the band
began playing on the ship’s deck. Strains ofVivaldi andBrahms floated out over thewater. Over
brandy,Major
Arthur Maxwell of His Majesty’s Marines and his subordinates passed around binoculars to
observe the situation ashore.
“Jolly crowded,what?”
“Looks likeVictoria Station onChristmasEve, sir.”
“Look at those poor wretches. Left to fend for themselves. When word gets out about the
Greek commissioner’s leaving, it’s going to be pandemonium.”

“Willwe be evacuating refugees, sir?”
“Our orders are to protectBritish property and citizens.”
“But, surely, sir, if theTurks arrive and there’s amassacre . . .”
“There’s nothingwe can do about it, Phillips. I’ve spent years in theNear East. The one lesson
I’ve learned is that there is nothing you can do with these people. Nothing at all! The Turks are
the best of the lot. The Armenian I liken to the Jew. Deficient moral and intellectual character.
As for the Greeks, well, look at them. They’ve burned down the whole country and now they
swarm in here crying for help.Nice cigar,what?”
“Awfullygood, sir.”
“Smyrna tobacco. Finest in theworld. Brings a tear tomy eyes, Phillips, the thought of all that
tobacco lying in thosewarehouses out there.”
“Perhapswe could send a detail to save the tobacco, sir.”
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Phillips?”
“Faintly, sir, faintly.”
“Good Lord, Phillips, I’m not heartless. I wish we could help these people. But we can’t. It’s
not ourwar.”
“Are you certain of that, sir?”
“What do youmean?”
“Wemight have supported theGreek forces. Seeing aswe sent them in.”
“They were dying to be sent in! Venizelos and his bunch. I don’t think you fathom the
complexity of the situation. We have interests here in Turkey. We must proceed with the utmost
care.We cannot let ourselves get caught up in theseByzantine struggles.”
“I see, sir.More cognac, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“It’s a beautiful city, though, isn’t it?”
“Quite.Youare aware ofwhat Strabo said of Smyrna, are you
not? He called Smyrna the finest city in Asia. That was back in the time of Augustus. It’s
lasted that long. Take a good look, Phillips. Take a good long look.”

By September 7, 1922, every Greek in Smyrna, including Lefty Stephanides, is wearing a fez in
order to pass as a Turk. The last Greek soldiers are being evacuated at Chesme. The Turkish
Army is only thirtymiles away—andno ships arrive fromAthens to evacuate the refugees.
Lefty, newly moneyed and befezzed, makes his way through the maroon-capped crowd at the
quay. He crosses tram tracks and heads uphill. He finds a steamship office. Inside, a clerk is
bending over passenger lists. Lefty takes out hiswinnings and says, “Two seats toAthens!”
The head remains down. “Deck or cabin?”
“Deck.”
“Fifteen hundred drachmas.”
“No, not cabin,” Lefty says, “deckwill be fine.”
“That is deck.”
“Fifteen hundred? I don’t have fifteen hundred. Itwas five hundred yesterday.”
“Thatwas yesterday.”

On September 8, 1922, General Hajienestis, in his cabin, sits up in bed, rubs first his right leg
and then his left, raps his knuckles against them, and stands up. He goes above deck, walking
with great dignity, much as he will later proceed to his death in Athens when he is executed for
losing thewar.
On the quay, the Greek civil governor, Aristedes Sterghiades, boards a launch to take him out
of the city. The crowd hoots and jeers, shaking fists. General Hajienestis takes the scene in
calmly. The crowdobscures thewaterfront, his favorite café.All he can see is themarquee of the
movie theater at which, ten days earlier, he’d been to see Le Tango de la Mort. Briefly—and
possibly this is another hallucination—he smells the fresh jasmine ofBournabat.He breathes this

in. The launch reaches the ship andSterghiades, ashen-faced, climbs aboard.
And thenGeneralHajienestis gives his onlymilitary order of
the past fewweeks: “Up anchors. Reverse engines. Full steamahead.”
On shore, Lefty and Desdemona watched the Greek fleet leaving. The crowd surged toward
the water, raised its four hundred thousand hands, and shouted. And then it fell silent. Not one
mouth uttered a sound as the realization came home that their own country had deserted them,
that Smyrna now had no government, that there was nothing between them and the advancing
Turks.
(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose
petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and
Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto
the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt
water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the
fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how
everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want
to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was
part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you’ll see
modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATOheadquarters, and a sign
that says Izmir . . .)

Five cars, bedecked with olive branches, burst the city gates. Cavalry gallop fender to fender.
The cars roar past the covered bazaar, through cheering throngs in the Turkish Quarter where
every streetlamp, door, and window streams red cloth. By Ottoman law, Turks must occupy a
city’s highest ground, so the convoy is high above the city now, heading down. Soon the five
cars pass through the deserted sections where houses have been abandoned or where families
hide. Anita Philobosian peeks out to see the beautiful, leaf-covered vehicles approaching, the
sight so arresting she starts to unfasten the shutters before her mother pulls her away . . . and
there are other faces pressed to slats, Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek eyes peeking out of
hideaways and attics to get a look at the conqueror and divine his intentions; but the cars move
too fast, and the sun on the cavalry’s raised sabers blinds the eyes, and then the cars are gone,
reaching the
quay,where horses charge into the crowd and refugees screamand scatter.
In the backseat of the last car sits Mustafa Kemal. He is lean from battle. His blue eyes flash.
He hasn’t had a drink in over two weeks. (The “diverticulitis” Dr. Philobosian had treated the
pasha for was just a cover-up. Kemal, champion of Westernization and the secular Turkish state,
would remain true to those principles to the end, dying at fifty-seven of cirrhosis of the liver.)
And as he passes he turns and looks into the crowd, as a young woman stands up from a
suitcase. Blue eyes pierce brown. Two seconds. Not even two. Then Kemal looks away; the
convoy is gone.

And now it is all a matter of wind. 1 a.m., Wednesday, September 13, 1922. Lefty and
Desdemona have been in the city seven nights now. The smell of jasmine has turned to kerosene.
Around the Armenian Quarter barricades have been erected. Turkish troops block the exits from
the quay. But the wind remains blowing in the wrong direction. Around midnight, however, it
shifts. It begins blowing southwesterly, that is, away from the Turkish heights and toward the
harbor.
In the blackness, torches gather. Three Turkish soldiers stand in a tailor shop. Their torches
illuminate bolts of cloth and suits on hangers. Then, as the light grows, the tailor himself
becomes visible. He is sitting at his sewingmachine, right shoe still on the foot treadle. The light
grows brighter still to reveal his face, the gaping eye sockets, the beard torn out in bloody
patches.
All over the Armenian Quarter fires bloom. Like a million fireflies, sparks fly across the dark

city, inseminating every place they land with a germ of fire. At his house on Suyane Street, Dr.
Philobosian hangs a wet carpet over the balcony, then hurries back inside the dark house and
closes the shutters. But the blaze penetrates the room, lighting it up in stripes: Toukhie’s
panicked eyes; Anita’s forehead, wrapped with a silver ribbon like Clara Bow’s in Photoplay;
Rose’s bare neck; Stepan’s andKarekin’s dark, downcast heads.
By firelight Dr. Philobosian reads for the fifth time that night “ ‘. . . is respectfully
recommended . . . to the esteem, confidence, and protection . . .’ Youhear that? ‘Protection . . .’
”
Across the streetMrs.Bidzikian sings the climactic three notes of
the “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. The music sounds so strange amid the
other noises—of doors crashing in, people screaming, girls crying out—that they all look up.
Mrs. Bidzikian repeats the B flat, D, and F two more times, as though practicing the aria, and
then her voice hits a note none of them has ever heard before, and they realize that Mrs.
Bidzikian hasn’t been singing an aria at all.
“Rose, getmybag.”
“Nishan, no,” hiswife objects. “If they see you comeout, they’ll knowwe’re hiding.”
“Noonewill see.”

The flames first registered to Desdemona as lights on the ships’ hulls. Orange brushstrokes
flickered above the waterline of the U.S.S. Litchfield and the French steamer Pierre Loti. Then
thewater brightened, as though a school of phosphorescent fish had entered the harbor.
Lefty’s head rested on her shoulder. She checked to see if he was asleep. “Lefty. Lefty?”
Whenhe didn’t respond, she kissed the top of his head. Then the sirenswent off.
She sees not one fire but many. There are twenty orange dots on the hill above. And they have
an unnatural persistence, these fires. As soon as the fire department puts out one blaze, another
erupts somewhere else. They start in hay carts and trash bins; they follow kerosene trails down
the center of streets; they turn corners; they enter bashed-in doorways. One fire penetrates
Berberian’s bakery, making quick work of the bread racks and pastry carts. It burns through to
the living quarters and climbs the front staircase where, halfway up, it meets Charles Berberian
himself, who tries to smother it with a blanket. But the fire dodges him and races up into the
house. From there it sweeps across an Oriental rug, marches out to the back porch, leaps nimbly
up onto a laundry line, and tightrope-walks across to the house behind. It climbs in the window
and pauses, as if shocked by its good fortune: because everything in this house is just made to
burn, too—the damask sofawith its long fringe, themahogany end tables and chintz lampshades.
The heat pulls down wallpaper in sheets; and this is happening not only in this apartment but in
ten or fifteen others, then twenty or twenty-five, each house setting fire to
its neighbor until entire blocks are burning. The smell of things burning that aren’t meant to
burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby
cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin. On the quay, Lefty and
Desdemona stand up along with everyone else, with people too stunned to react, or still half-
asleep, or sick with typhus and cholera, or exhausted beyond caring. And then, suddenly, all the
fires on the hillside form one great wall of fire stretching across the city and—it’s inevitable
now—startmoving down toward them.
(And now I remember something else: my father, Milton Stephanides, in robe and slippers,
bending over to light a fire on Christmas morning. Only once a year did the need to dispose of a
mountain of wrapping paper and cardboard packaging overrule Desdemona’s objections to using
our fireplace. “Ma,” Milton would warn her, “I’m going to burn up some of this garbage now.”
To which Desdemona would cry, “Mana!” and grab her cane. At the hearth, my father would
pull a long match from the hexagonal box. But Desdemona would already be moving away,
heading for the safety of the kitchen, where the oven was electric. “Your yia yia doesn’t like
fires,” my father would tell us. And, lighting the match, he would hold it to paper covered with
elves and Santas as flames leapt up, and we ignorant, American children went crazy throwing

paper, boxes, and ribbons into the blaze.)

Dr. Philobosian stepped out into the street, looked both ways, and ran straight across through the
door opposite. He climbed to the landing, where he could see the top of Mrs. Bidzikian’s head
from behind as she sat in the living room. He ran to her, telling her not to worry, it was Dr.
Philobosian from across the street. Mrs. Bidzikian seemed to nod, but her head didn’t come back
up. Dr. Philobosian knelt beside her. Touching her neck, he felt a weak pulse. Gently he pulled
her out of the chair and laid her on the floor.As he did so, he heard footsteps on the stairway.He
hurried across the roomandhid behind the drapes just as the soldiers stormed in.
For fifteen minutes, they ransacked the apartment, taking whatever the first band had left.
They dumped out drawers and slit open sofas and clothing, looking for jewelry or money hidden
inside.After theywere gone,Dr. Philobosianwaited a full fiveminutes before
stepping out from behind the drapes. Mrs. Bidzikian’s pulse had stopped. He spread his
handkerchief over her face and made the sign of the cross over her body. Then he picked up his
doctor’s bag and hurried down the stairs again.

The heat precedes the fire. Figs heaped along the quay, not loaded in time, begin to bake,
bubbling and oozing juice. The sweetness mixes with the smell of smoke. Desdemona and Lefty
stand as close to the water as possible, along with everyone else. There is no escape. Turkish
soldiers remain at the barricades. People pray, raise their arms, pleading to ships in the harbor.
Searchlights sweep across thewater, lighting up people swimming, drowning.
“We’re going to die, Lefty.”
“No we’re not. We’re going to get out of here.” But Lefty doesn’t believe this. As he looks up
at the flames, he is certain, too, that they are going to die. And this certainty inspires him to say
something he would never have said otherwise, something he would never even have thought.
“We’re going to get out of here.And then you’re going tomarryme.”
“We should never have left.We should have stayed inBithynios.”
As the fire approaches, the doors of the French consulate open. A marine garrison forms two
lines stretching across the quay to the harbor. The Tricolor descends. From the consulate’s doors
people emerge, men in cream-colored suits and women in straw hats, walking arm in arm to a
waiting launch. Over the Marines’ crossed rifles, Lefty sees fresh powder on the women’s faces,
lit cigars in the men’s mouths. One woman holds a small poodle under her arm. Another woman
trips, breaking her heel, and is consoled by her husband. After the launch has motored away, an
official turns to the crowd.
“French citizens onlywill be evacuated.Wewill begin processing visas immediately.”

When they hear knocking, they jump. Stepan goes to the window and looks down. “It must be
Father.”
“Go. Let him in!Quick!”Toukhie says.
Karekin vaults down the stairs two at a time.At the door he stops, collects himself, and quietly
unbolts the door. At first, when he pulls it open, he sees nothing. Then there’s a soft hiss,
followed by a ripping
noise. The noise sounds as though it has nothing to do with him until suddenly a shirt button
pops off and clatters against the door. Karekin looks down as all at once his mouth fills with a
warm fluid. He feels himself being lifted off his feet, the sensation bringing back to him
childhood memories of being whisked into the air by his father, and he says, “Dad, my button,”
before he is lifted high enough to make out the steel bayonet puncturing his sternum. The fire’s
reflection leads along the gun barrel, over the sight and hammer, to the soldier’s ecstatic face.

The fire bore downon the crowd at the quay. The roof of theAmerican consulate caught. Flames
climbed the movie theater, scorching the marquee. The crowd inched back from the heat. But
Lefty, sensing his opportunity,was undeterred.

“Nobodywill know,” he said. “Who’s to know?There’s nobody left but us.”
“It’s not right.”
Roofs crashed, people screamed, as Lefty put his lips to his sister’s ear. “Youpromised you’d
findme a niceGreek girl.Well.You’reit.”
On one side a man jumped into the water, trying to drown himself; on the other, a woman was
giving birth, as her husband shielded her with his coat. “Kaymaste! Kaymaste!” people
shouted. “We’re burning! We’re burning!” Desdemona pointed, at the fire, at everything. “It’s
too late, Lefty. It doesn’tmatter now.”
“But ifwe lived?You’dmarryme then?”
Anod. Thatwas all. AndLeftywas gone, running toward the flames.

On a black screen, a binocular-shaped template of vision sweeps back and forth, taking in the
distant refugees. They screamwithout sound. They hold out their arms, beseeching.
“They’re going to cook the poorwretches alive.”
“Permission to retrieve a swimmer, sir.”
“Negative, Phillips.Oncewe take one aboardwe’ll have to take themall.”
“It’s a girl, sir.”
“Howold?”
“Looks to be about ten or eleven.”
MajorArthurMaxwell lowers his binoculars.A triangular knot ofmuscle tenses in his jaw and
disappears.
“Have a look at her, sir.”
“Wemustn’t be swayed by emotions here, Phillips. There are greater things at stake.”
“Have a look at her, sir.”
The wings of Major Maxwell’s nose flare as he looks at Captain Phillips. Then, slapping one
hand against his thigh, hemoves to the side of the ship.
The searchlight sweeps across the water, lighting up its own circle of vision. The water looks
odd under the beam, a colorless broth littered with a variety of objects: a bright orange; a man’s
fedora with a brim of excrement; bits of paper like torn letters. And then, amid this inert matter,
she appears, holding on to the ship’s line, a girl in a pink dress the water darkens to red, hair
plastered to her small skull. Her eyes make no appeal, staring up. Her sharp feet kick every so
often, like fins.
Rifle fire from shore hits thewater around her. She pays no attention.
“Turn off the searchlight.”
The light goes off and the firing stops. Major Maxwell looks at his watch. “It is now 2115
hours. I am going to my cabin, Phillips. I will stay there until 0700 hours. Should a refugee be
taken aboard during that period, itwould not come tomy attention. Is that understood?”
“Understood, sir.”

It didn’t occur to Dr. Philobosian that the twisted body he stepped over in the street belonged to
his younger son. He noticed only that his front door was open. In the foyer, he stopped to listen.
There was only silence. Slowly, still holding his doctor’s bag, he climbed the stairs. All the
lamps were on now. The living room was bright. Toukhie was sitting on the sofa, waiting for
him. Her head had fallen backward as though in hilarity, the angle opening the wound so that a
section of windpipe gleamed. Stepan sat slumped at the dining table, his right hand, which held
the letter of protection, nailed down with a steak knife. Dr. Philobosian took a step and slipped,
then noticed a trail of blood leading down the hallway. He followed the trail into the master
bedroom,where he found his twodaughters. They
were both naked, lying on their backs. Three of their four breasts had been cut off. Rose’s hand
reached out toward her sister as though to adjust the silver ribbon across her forehead.

The line was long and moved slowly. Lefty had time to go over his vocabulary. He reviewed his

grammar, taking quick peeks at the phrase book. He studied “Lesson 1: Greetings,” and by the
time he reached the official at the table, hewas ready.
“Name?”
“Eleutherios Stephanides.”
“Place of birth?”
“Paris.”
The official looked up. “Passport.”
“Everything was destroyed in the fire! I lost all my papers!” Lefty puckered his lips and
expelled air, as he’d seenFrenchmendo. “Look atwhat I’mwearing. I lost allmygood suits.”
The official smiledwryly and stamped the papers. “Pass.”
“I havemywifewithme.”
“I suppose shewas born in Paris, too.”
“Of course.”
“Her name?”
“Desdemona.”
“DesdemonaStephanides?”
“That’s right. Same asmine.”
When he returned with the visas, Desdemona wasn’t alone. A man sat beside her on the
suitcase. “He tried to throw himself in the water. I caught him just in time.” Dazed, bloody, a
shining bandage wrapping one hand, the man kept repeating, “They couldn’t read. They were
illiterate!” Lefty checked to see where the man was bleeding but couldn’t find a wound. He
unwrapped the man’s bandage, a silver ribbon, and tossed it away. “They couldn’t read my
letter,” theman said, looking at Lefty,who recognized his face.

“Youagain?” the French official said.
“Mycousin,” saidLefty, in execrable French. Theman stamped a visa and handed it to him.
A motor launch took them out to the ship. Lefty kept hold of Dr. Philobosian, who was still
threatening to drownhimself.Desdemona
opened her silkworm box and unwrapped the white cloth to check on her eggs. In the hideous
water, bodies floated past. Somewere alive, calling out. A searchlight revealed a boy halfway up
the anchor chain of a battleship. Sailors dumped oil on himand he slipped back into thewater.
On the deck of the Jean Bart, the three new French citizens looked back at the burning city,
ablaze from end to end. The fire would continue for the next three days, the flames visible for
fifty miles. At sea, sailors would mistake the rising smoke for a gigantic mountain range. In the
country they were heading for, America, the burning of Smyrna made the front pages for a day
or two, before being bumped off by the Hall-Mills murder case (the body of Hall, a Protestant
minister, had been found with that of Miss Mills, an attractive choir member) and the opening of
theWorld Series.AdmiralMarkBristol of theU.S.Navy, concerned about damage toAmerican-
Turkish relations, cabled a press release in which he stated that “it is impossible to estimate the
number of deaths due to killings, fire, and execution, but the total probably does not exceed
2,000.” The American consul, George Horton, had a larger estimate. Of the 400,000 Ottoman
Christians in Smyrna before the fire, 190,000 were unaccounted for by October 1. Horton halved
that number and estimated the dead at 100,000.
The anchors surged up out of the water. The deck rumbled underfoot as the destroyer’s
engineswere thrown into reverse.Desdemona andLeftywatchedAsiaMinor recede.
As they passed the Iron Duke, theBritishmilitary service band started into awaltz.

THESILKROAD

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 2640 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi
was sitting under amulberry treewhen a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup.When she tried to
remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the
loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess’s
chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the Forbidden
City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this
legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an
apple. Eitherway, themeanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are
alwayswindfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)
I feel a little like that Chinese princess, whose discovery gave Desdemona her livelihood. Like
her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament
and you go back to the cocoon’s beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop. And following
my story’s thread back to where I left off, I see the Jean Bart dock in Athens. I see my
grandparents on land again, making preparations for another voyage. Passports are placed into
hands, vaccinations administered to upper arms. Another ship materializes at the dock, the
Giulia. A foghorn sounds.
And look: from the deck of the Giulia something else unwinds
now. Somethingmulticolored, spinning itself out over thewaters of Piraeus.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on
deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away
from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted
farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn’t remember. Propellers
churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red, yellow,
blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every ten seconds,
then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible,
maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls
ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze.
From two separate locations on the Giulia’s deck, Lefty and Desdemona—and I can say it
now, finally, my grandparents—watched the airy blanket float away. Desdemona was standing
between two air manifolds shaped like giant tubas. At midships Lefty slouched in a brace of
bachelors. In the last three hours they hadn’t seen each other. That morning, they’d had coffee
together in a café near the harbor after which, like professional spies, they’d picked up their
separate suitcases—Desdemona keeping her silkworm box—and had departed in different
directions. My grandmother was carrying falsified documents. Her passport, which the Greek
government had granted under the condition that she leave the country immediately, bore her
mother’s maiden name, Aristos, instead of Stephanides. She’d presented this passport along with
her boarding card at the top of the Giulia’s gangway. Then she’d gone aft, as planned, for the
send-off.

At the shipping channel, the foghorn sounded again, as the boat came around to the west and
picked up more speed. Dirndls, kerchiefs, and suit coats flapped in the breeze. A few hats flew
off heads, to shouts and laughter. Yarn drift-netted the sky, barely visible now. People watched
as long as they could. Desdemona was one of the first to go below. Lefty lingered on deck for
another half hour. This, too,was part of the plan.
For the first day at sea, they didn’t speak to each other. They came up on deck at the appointed
mealtimes and stood in separate lines. After eating, Lefty joined the men smoking at the rail
whileDesdemona
hunched on deck with the women and children, staying out of the wind. “Youhave someone
meeting you?” thewomen asked. “A fiancé?”
“No. Justmy cousin inDetroit.”
“Traveling all by yourself?” themen askedLefty.
“That’s right. Free and easy.”
At night, they descended to their respective compartments. In separate bunks of seaweed
wrapped in burlap, with life vests doubling as pillows, they tried to sleep, to get used to the
motion of the ship, and to tolerate the smells. Passengers had brought on board all manner of
spices and sweetmeats, tinned sardines, octopus inwine sauce, legs of lambpreservedwith garlic
cloves. In those days you could identify a person’s nationality by smell. Lying on her back with
eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her
right, and the raw-meat smell of an Armenian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg
Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.) Lefty’s annoyances were auditory
as well as olfactory. To one side was a man named Callas with a snore like a miniature foghorn
itself; on the other was Dr. Philobosian, who wept in his sleep. Ever since leaving Smyrna the
doctor had been beside himself with grief. Racked, gut-socked, he lay curled up in his coat, blue
around the eye sockets. He ate almost nothing. He refused to go up on deck to get fresh air. On
the fewoccasions he did go, he threatened to throwhimself overboard.
InAthens,Dr. Philobosian had told them to leave him alone.He refused to discuss plans about
the future and said that he had no family anywhere. “My family’s gone. Theymurdered them.”
“Poorman,”Desdemona said. “He doesn’twant to live.”
“We have to help him,” Lefty insisted. “He gave me money. He bandaged my hand. Nobody
else cared about us. We’ll take him with us.” While they waited for their cousin to wire money,
Lefty tried to console the doctor and finally convinced him to come with them to Detroit.
“Wherever’s far away,” saidDr. Philobosian.But nowon the boat he talked only of death.
The voyage was supposed to take from twelve to fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the
schedule all worked out. On the second day at sea, directly after dinner, Lefty made a tour of the
ship.He picked hisway among the bodies sprawled across the steerage deck.
He passed the stairway to the pilothouse and squeezed past the extra cargo, crates of Kalamata
olives and olive oil, sea sponges from Kos. He proceeded forward, running his hand along the
green tarps of the lifeboats, until he met the chain separating steerage from third class. In its
heyday, the Giulia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Line. Boasting modern conveniences
(“lumina electrica, ventilatie et comfortu cel mai mare”), it had traveled once a month between
Trieste and New York. Now the electric lights worked only in first class, and even then
sporadically. The iron rails were rusted. Smoke from the stack had soiled the Greek flag. The
boat smelled of old mop buckets and a history of nausea. Lefty didn’t have his sea legs yet. He
kept falling against the railing. He stood at the chain for an appropriate amount of time, then
crossed to port and returned aft. Desdemona, as arranged,was standing alone at the rail. AsLefty
passed, he smiled and nodded. She nodded coldly and looked back out to sea.
On the third day, Lefty took another after-dinner stroll. He walked forward, crossed to port,
and headed aft. He smiled at Desdemona and nodded again. This time, Desdemona smiled back.
Rejoining his fellow smokers, Lefty inquired if any of them might happen to know the name of
that youngwoman traveling alone.
On the fourth day out, Lefty stopped and introduced himself.

“So far theweather’s been good.”
“I hope it stays thatway.”
“You’retraveling alone?”
“Yes.”
“I am, too.Where are you going to inAmerica?”
“Detroit.”
“What a coincidence! I’mgoing toDetroit, too.”
They stood chatting for another few minutes. Then Desdemona excused herself and went
downbelow.
Rumors of the budding romance spread quickly through the ship. To pass the time, everybody
was soon discussing how the tall youngGreek with the elegant bearing had become enamored of
the dark beauty who was never seen anywhere without her carved olivewood box. “They’re both
traveling alone,” people said. “And they both have relatives inDetroit.”
“I don’t think they’re right for each other.”
“Whynot?”
“He’s a higher class than she is. It’ll neverwork.”
“He seems to like her, though.”
“He’s on a boat in themiddle of the ocean!What else does he have to do?”
On the fifth day, Lefty and Desdemona took a stroll on deck together. On the sixth day, he
presented his armand she took it.
“I introduced them!” one man boasted. City girls sniffed. “She wears her hair in braids. She
looks like a peasant.”
My grandfather, on the whole, came in for better treatment. He was said to have been a silk
merchant from Smyrna who’d lost his fortune in the fire; a son of King Constantine I by a
French mistress; a spy for the Kaiser during the Great War. Lefty never discouraged any
speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself. He wrapped a
ratty blanket over his shoulders like an opera cape. Aware that whatever happened now would
become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was—already an
American, in other words—he waited for Desdemona to come up on deck. When she did, he
adjusted hiswrap, nodded to his shipmates, and sauntered across the deck to pay his respects.
“He’s smitten!”
“I don’t think so. Type like that, he’s just out for a little fun. That girl better watch it or she’ll
havemore than that box to carry around.”
My grandparents enjoyed their simulated courtship. When people were within earshot, they
engaged in first- or second-date conversations, making up past histories for themselves. “So,”
Leftywould ask, “do you have any siblings?”
“I had a brother,” Desdemona replied wistfully. “He ran off with a Turkish girl. My father
disowned him.”
“That’s very strict. I think love breaks all taboos.Don’t you?”
Alone, they told each other, “I think it’sworking.Noone suspects.”
Each timeLefty encounteredDesdemona on deck, he pretended he’d only recentlymet her.He
walked up, made small talk, commented on the beauty of the sunset, and then, gallantly, segued
into the beauty of her face. Desdemona played her part, too. She was standoffish at first. She
withdrew her arm whenever he made an off-color joke. She told him that her mother had warned
her aboutmen
like him. They passed the voyage playing out this imaginary flirtation and, little by little, they
began to believe it. They fabricated memories, improvised fate. (Why did they do it? Why did
they go to all that trouble? Couldn’t they have said they were already engaged? Or that their
marriage had been arranged years earlier? Yes,of course they could have. But it wasn’t the other
travelers theywere trying to fool; itwas themselves.)
Traveling made it easier. Sailing across the ocean among half a thousand perfect strangers
conveyed an anonymity in which my grandparents could re-create themselves. The driving spirit

on the Giulia was self-transformation. Staring out to sea, tobacco farmers imagined themselves
as race car drivers, silk dyers as Wall Street tycoons, millinery girls as fan dancers in the
Ziegfeld Follies. Gray ocean stretched in all directions. Europe andAsiaMinorwere dead behind
them.Ahead layAmerica and newhorizons.
On the eighth day at sea, Lefty Stephanides, grandly, on one knee, in full view of six hundred
and sixty-three steerage passengers, proposed to Desdemona Aristos while she sat on a docking
cleat. Youngwomen held their breath. Married men nudged bachelors: “Pay attention and you’ll
learn something.” My grandmother, displaying a theatrical flair akin to her hypochondria,
registered complex emotions: surprise; initial delight; second thoughts; prudent near refusal; and
then, to the applause already starting up, dizzy acceptance.

The ceremony took place on deck. In lieu of a wedding dress, Desdemona wore a borrowed silk
shawl over her head. Captain Kontoulis loaned Lefty a necktie spotted with gravy stains. “Keep
your coat buttoned and nobody will notice,” he said. For stephana, my grandparents had
wedding crownswovenwith rope. Flowersweren’t available at sea and so the koumbaros, a guy
named Pelos serving as best man, switched the king’s hempen crown to the queen’s head, the
queen’s to the king’s, and back again.
Bride and bridegroom performed the Dance of Isaiah. Hip to hip, arms interwoven to hold
hands,Desdemona andLefty circumambulated the captain, once, twice, and then again, spinning
the cocoon of their life together. No patriarchal linearity here. We Greeks get married in circles,
to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find
variety in repetition; that to
go forward you have to comebackwhere you began.
Or, in my grandparents’ case, the circling worked like this: as they paced around the deck the
first time, Lefty and Desdemona were still brother and sister. The second time, they were bride
and bridegroom.And the third, theywere husband andwife.

The night of my grandparents’ wedding, the sun set directly before the ship’s bow, pointing the
way to New York.The moon rose, casting a silver stripe over the ocean. On his nightly tour of
the deck, Captain Kontoulis descended from the pilothouse and marched forward. The wind had
picked up. The Giulia pitched in high seas.As the deck tilted back and forth, CaptainKontoulis
didn’t stumble once, and was even able to light one of the Indonesian cigarettes he favored,
dipping his cap’s braided brim to cut the wind. In his not terribly clean uniform, wearing knee-
high Cretan boots, Captain Kontoulis scrutinized running lights, stacked deck chairs, lifeboats.
The Giulia was alone on the vast Atlantic, hatches battened down against swells crashing over
the side. The decks were empty except for two first-class passengers, American businessmen
sharing a nightcap under lap blankets. “Fromwhat I hear, Tilden doesn’t just play tenniswith his
protégés, if you get my drift.” “You’rekidding.” “Lets them drink from the loving cup.” Captain
Kontoulis, understanding none of this, nodded as he passed . . .
Inside one of the lifeboats, Desdemona was saying, “Don’t look.” She was lying on her back.
There was no goat’s-hair blanket between them, so Lefty covered his eyes with his hands,
peeking through his fingers. A single pinhole in the tarp leaked moonlight, which slowly filled
the lifeboat. Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a
shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to
take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck
by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white
light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his
eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she’d
brought along: thewhite cloth enfolding her silkworm eggswas nothing other thanDesdemona’s
wedding corset. She thought she’d neverwear it, but here itwas.Brassiere cups
pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset’s skirt dropped
garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the

corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona’s face, head, and
arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a
conqueror’smuseum.All thatwasmissingwas thewings.
Lefty took off his shoes and socks, as grit rained down. When he removed his underwear, the
lifeboat filled with a mushroomy smell. He was ashamed momentarily, but Desdemona didn’t
seem tomind.
She was distracted by her own mixed feelings. The corset, of course, reminded Desdemona of
hermother, and suddenly thewrongness ofwhat theywere doing assailed her.Until now she had
been keeping it at bay. She had had no time to dwell on it in the chaos of the last days.
Lefty, too, was conflicted. Though he had been tortured by thoughts of Desdemona, he was
glad for the darkness of the lifeboat, glad, in particular, that he couldn’t see her face. For months
Lefty had slept with whores who resembled Desdemona, but now he found it easier to pretend
that shewas a stranger.
The corset seemed to possess its own sets of hands. One was softly rubbing her between the
legs. Two more cupped her breasts, one, two, three hands pressing and caressing her; and in the
lingerie Desdemona saw herself through new eyes, her thin waist, her plump thighs; she felt
beautiful, desirable, most of all: not herself. She lifted her feet, rested her calves on the oarlocks.
She spread her legs. She opened her arms for Lefty, who twisted around, chafing his knees and
elbows, dislodging oars, nearly setting off a flare, until finally he fell into her softness,
swooning. For the first time Desdemona tasted the flavor of his mouth, and the only sisterly
thing she did during their lovemaking was to come up for air, once, to say, “Bad boy. You’ve
done this before.”But Lefty only kept repeating, “Not like this, not like this . . .”
And I was wrong before, I take it back. Underneath Desdemona, beating time against the
boards and lifting her up: a pair ofwings.
“Lefty!”Desdemona now, breathlessly. “I think I felt it.”
“Feltwhat?”
“Youknow.That feeling.”
“Newlyweds,”CaptainKontoulis said,watching the lifeboat rock.
“Oh, to be young again.”

After Princess Si Ling-chi—whom I findmyself picturing as the imperial version of the bicyclist
I saw on the U-Bahn the other day; I can’t stop thinking about her for some reason, I keep
looking for her every morning—after Princess Si Ling-chi discovered silk, her nation kept it a
secret for three thousand one hundred and ninety years. Anyone who attempted to smuggle
silkwormeggs out ofChina faced punishment of death.My familymight never have become silk
farmers if it hadn’t been for the Emperor Justinian, who, according to Procopius, persuaded two
missionaries to risk it. In A.D. 550, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China in the
swallowed condom of the time: a hollow staff. They also brought the seeds of the mulberry tree.
As a result, Byzantium became a center for sericulture. Mulberry trees flourished on Turkish
hillsides. Silkworms ate the leaves. Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those first
stolen eggs filledmygrandmother’s silkwormboxon the Giulia.
I’m the descendant of a smuggling operation, too.Without their knowing,mygrandparents, on
their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. It
wasn’t a recent mutation. According to Dr. Luce, the gene first appeared in my bloodline
sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evangelatos, my great-grandmother to the
ninth power. She passed it on to her son Petras, who passed it on to his two daughters, who
passed it on to three of their five children, and so on and so on. Being recessive, its expression
would have been fitful. Sporadic heredity is what the geneticists call it. A trait that goes
underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. That was how it
went in Bithynios. Every so often a hermaphrodite was born, a seeming girl who, in growing up,
proved otherwise.

For the next six nights, under various meteorological conditions, my grandparents trysted in the
lifeboat. Desdemona’s guilt flared up during the day, when she sat on deck wondering if she and
Lefty were to blame for everything, but by nighttime she felt lonely and wanted to escape the
cabin and so stole back to the lifeboat and her newhusband.
Their honeymoon proceeded in reverse. Instead of getting to know each other, becoming
familiarwith likes and dislikes, ticklish
spots, pet peeves, Desdemona and Lefty tried to defamiliarize themselves with each other. In
the spirit of their shipboard con game, they continued to spin out false histories for themselves,
inventing brothers and sisters with plausible names, cousins with moral shortcomings, in-laws
with facial tics. They took turns reciting Homeric genealogies, full of falsifications and
borrowings from real life, and sometimes they fought over this or that favorite real uncle or aunt,
and had to bargain like casting directors. Gradually, as the nights passed, these fictional relatives
began to crystallize in their minds. They’d quiz each other on obscure connections, Lefty asking,
“Who’s your second cousin Yiannis married to?” And Desdemona replying, “That’s easy.
Athena. With the limp.” (And am I wrong to think that my obsession with family relations
started right there in the lifeboat? Didn’t my mother quiz me on uncles and aunts and cousins,
too? She never quizzed my brother, because he was in charge of snow shovels and tractors,
whereas I was supposed to provide the feminine glue that keeps families together, writing thank-
you notes and remembering everybody’s birthdays and name days. Listen, I’ve heard the
following genealogy come out of my mother’s mouth: “That’s your cousin Melia. She’s Uncle
Mike’s sister Lucille’s brother-in-law Stathis’s daughter. Youknow Stathis the mailman, who’s
not too swift? Melia’s his third child, after his boys Mike and Johnny. You should know her.
Melia! She’s your cousin-in-lawbymarriage!”)
And here I amnow, sketching it all out for you, dutifully oozing feminine glue, but alsowith a
dull pain in my chest, because I realize that genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was
related towhombut she had no ideawho her ownhusbandwas, orwhat her in-lawswere to each
other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their
lives.
Sexually, things were simple for them. Dr. Peter Luce, the great sexologist, can cite
astonishing statistics asserting that oral sex didn’t exist between married couples prior to 1950.
My grandparents’ lovemaking was pleasurable but unvarying. Every night Desdemona would
disrobe down to her corset and Lefty would press its clasps and hooks, searching for the secret
combination that sprung the locked garment open. The corset was all they needed in terms of an
aphrodisiac, and it remained formygrandfather the singular erotic emblemof his life. The corset
madeDesdemona newagain.As I said,
Lefty had glimpsed his sister naked before, but the corset had the odd power of making her
seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidding, armored creature with a soft inside
he had to hunt for. When the tumblers clicked, it popped open; Lefty crawled on top of
Desdemona and the twoof themhardly evenmoved; the ocean swells did thework for them.
Their periphescence existed simultaneously with a less passionate stage of pair bonding. Sex
could give way, at any moment, to coziness. So, after making love, they lay staring up through
the pulled-back tarp at the night sky passing overhead and got down to the business of life.
“MaybeLina’s husband can giveme a job,”Lefty said. “He’s got his ownbusiness, right?”
“I don’t knowwhat he does. Lina never givesme a straight answer.”
“After we save some money, I can open a casino. Some gambling, a bar, maybe a floor show.
Andpotted palms everywhere.”
“Youshould go to college. Become a professor like Mother and Father wanted. And we have
to build a cocoonery, remember.”
“Forget the silkworms. I’m talking roulette, rebetika, drinking, dancing. Maybe I’ll sell some
hash on the side.”
“Theywon’t let you smoke hashish inAmerica.”
“Who says?”

AndDesdemona announcedwith certitude:
“It’s not that kind of country.”

They spent what remained of their honeymoon on deck, learning how to finagle their way
through Ellis Island. It wasn’t so easy anymore. The Immigration Restriction League had been
formed in 1894. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge thumped a copy of On the
Origin of Species, warning that the influx of inferior peoples from southern and eastern Europe
threatened “the very fabric of our race.” The Immigration Act of 1917 barred thirty-three kinds
of undesirables from entering the United States, and so, in 1922, on the deck of the Giulia,
passengers discussed how to escape the categories. In nervous cram sessions, illiterates learned
to pretend to read; bigamists to admit to only onewife; anarchists to deny having read Proudhon;
heart patients to simulate vigor; epileptics to deny their fits; and carriers of hereditary diseases to
neglectmentioning
them. My grandparents, unaware of their genetic mutation, concentrated on the more blatant
disqualifications. Another category of restriction: “persons convicted of a crime or misdemeanor
involvingmoral turpitude.”And a subset of this group: “Incestuous relations.”
They avoided passengers who seemed to be suffering from trachoma or favus. They fled
anyone with a hacking cough. Occasionally, for reassurance, Lefty took out the certificate that
declared:

ELEUTHERIOSSTEPHANIDES
HASBEENVACCINATEDAND
UNLOUSED
ANDISPASSEDASVERMIN -FREETHISDATE
SEPT. 23, 1922
DISINFECTIONMARITIMEPIRAEUS

Literate, married to only one person (albeit a sibling), democratically inclined, mentally stable,
and authoritatively deloused, my grandparents saw no reason why they would have trouble
getting through. They each had the requisite twenty-five dollars apiece. They also had a sponsor:
their cousin Sourmelina. Just the year before, the Quota Act had reduced the annual numbers of
southern and eastern European immigrants from 783,000 to 155,000. It was nearly impossible to
get into the country without either a sponsor or stunning professional recommendations. To help
their own chances, Lefty put away his French phrase book and began memorizing four lines of
the King James New Testament. The Giulia was full of inside sources familiar with the English
literacy test. Different nationalitieswere asked to translate different bits of Scripture. ForGreeks,
it was Matthew 19:12: “For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s
womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs,
which havemade themselves eunuchs for the kingdomof heaven’s sake.”
“Eunuchs?”Desdemona quailed. “Who told you this?”
“This is a passage from theBible.”
“WhatBible?Not theGreekBible.Go ask somebody elsewhat’s on that test.”
But Lefty showed her the Greek at the top of the card and the English below. He repeated the
passageword byword,making her
memorize it, whether or not she understood it.
“Wedidn’t have enough eunuchs inTurkey?Nowwehave to talk about thematEllis Island?”
“TheAmericans let in everyone,” Lefty joked. “Eunuchs included.”
“They should let us speakGreek if they’re so accepting,”Desdemona grumbled.
Summer was abandoning the ocean. One night it grew too cold in the lifeboat to crack the
corset’s combination. Instead they huddled under blankets, talking.
“Is Sourmelinameeting us inNewYork?”Desdemona asked.
“No.Wehave to take a train toDetroit.”

“Why can’t shemeet us?”
“It’s too far.”
“Just aswell. Shewouldn’t be on time anyway.”
The ceaseless sea wind made the tarp’s edges flap. Frost formed on the lifeboat’s gunwales.
They could see the top of the Giulia’s smokestack, the smoke itself discernible only as a starless
patch of night sky. (Though they didn’t know it, that striped, canted smokestack was already
informing them about their new home; it was whispering about River Rouge and the Uniroyal
plant, and the Seven Sisters and Two Brothers, but they didn’t listen; they wrinkled up their
noses and ducked down in the lifeboat away from the smoke.)
And if the smell of industry didn’t insist on entering my story already, if Desdemona and
Lefty, who grew up on a pine-scented mountain and who could never get used to the polluted air
of Detroit, hadn’t ducked down in the lifeboat, then they might have detected a new aroma
wafting in on the brisk sea air: a humid odor ofmud andwet bark. Land.NewYork.America.
“What arewegoing to tell Sourmelina about us?”
“She’ll understand.”
“Will she keep quiet?”
“There are a few things she’d rather her husband didn’t knowabout her.”
“YoumeanHelen?”
“I didn’t say a thing,” saidLefty.
They fell asleep after that,waking to sunlight, and a face staring down at them.
“Did you have a good sleep?”CaptainKontoulis said. “Maybe I
could get you a blanket?”
“I’m sorry,” Lefty said. “Wewon’t do it again.”
“Youwon’t get the chance,” said the captain and, to prove his point, pulled the lifeboat’s tarp
completely away. Desdemona and Lefty sat up. In the distance, lit by the rising sun, was the
skyline of New York. It wasn’t the right shape for a city—no domes, no minarets—and it took
them a minute to process the tall geometric forms. Mist curled off the bay. A million pink
windowpanes glittered. Closer, crownedwith her own sunrays and dressed like a classicalGreek,
the Statue ofLibertywelcomed them.
“Howdoyou like that?”CaptainKontoulis asked.
“I’ve seen enough torches to last the rest ofmy life,” saidLefty.
But Desdemona, for once, was more optimistic. “At least it’s a woman,” she said. “Maybe
here peoplewon’t be killing each other every single day.”

BOOKTWO

HENRYFORD’SENGLISH -LANGUAGE
MELTINGPOT

Everyonewhobuilds a factory builds a temple.
—CalvinCoolidge

Detroit was always made of wheels. Long before the Big Three and the nickname “Motor
City”; before the auto factories and the freighters and the pink, chemical nights; before anyone
had necked in a Thunderbird or spooned in a Model T; previous to the day a young Henry Ford
knocked down his workshop wall because, in devising his “quadricycle,” he’d thought of
everything but how to get the damn thing out; and nearly a century prior to the coldMarch night,
in 1896, when Charles King tiller-steered his horseless carriage down St. Antoine, along
Jefferson, and up Woodward Avenue (where the two-stroke engine promptly quit); way, way
back, when the city was just a piece of stolen Indian land located on the strait from which it got
its name, a fort fought over by the British and French until, wearing them out, it fell into the
hands of the Americans; way back then, before cars and cloverleaves, Detroit was made of
wheels.
I amnine years old and holdingmy father’s meaty, sweaty hand.We are standing at awindow
on the top floor of the Pontchartrain Hotel. I have come downtown for our annual lunch date. I
am wearing a miniskirt and fuchsia tights. A white patent leather purse hangs on a long strap
frommy shoulder.
The fogged window has spots on it. We are way up high. I’m going to order shrimp scampi in
aminute.
The reason for my father’s hand perspiration: he’s afraid of heights. Two days ago, when he
offered to takemewherever Iwanted, I called out inmypiping voice, “Top of the Pontch!”High
above the city, amid the business lunchers and power brokers, was where I wanted to be. And
Milton has been true to his promise. Despite racing pulse he has allowed the maître d’ to give us
a table next to the window; so that now here we are—as a tuxedoed waiter pulls out my
chair—andmy father, too frightened to sit, begins a history lesson instead.
What’s the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it? Milton, olive
complexion turning a shade pale, only says, “Look. See thewheel?”
And now I squint. Oblivious, at nine, to the prospect of crow’s-feet, I gaze out over
downtown, down to the streets where my father is indicating (though not looking). And there it
is: half a hubcap of city plaza, with the spokes of Bagley, Washington, Woodward, Broadway,
andMadison radiating from it.
That’s all that remains of the famousWoodward Plan.Drawn up in 1807 by the hard-drinking,
eponymous judge. (Two years earlier, in 1805, the city had burned to the ground, the timber
houses and ribbon farms of the settlement founded by Cadillac in 1701 going up in the span of
three hours. And, in 1969, with my sharp vision, I can read the traces of that fire on the city’s
flag a half mile away in Grand Circus Park: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope
for better things; itwill rise from the ashes.”)

Judge Woodward envisioned the new Detroit as an urban Arcadia of interlocking hexagons.
Each wheel was to be separate yet united, in accordance with the young nation’s federalism, as
well as classically symmetrical, in accordance with Jeffersonian aesthetics. This dream never
quite came to be. Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities
dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and
therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. Since 1818, the city
had spread out along the river, warehouse by warehouse, factory by factory. Judge Woodward’s
wheels had been squashed, bisected, pressed into the usual rectangles.
Or seen anotherway (from a rooftop restaurant): thewheels hadn’t vanished at all, they’d only
changed form. By 1900 Detroit was the leading manufacturer of carriages and wagons. By 1922,
when my grandparents arrived, Detroit made other spinning things, too: marine engines,
bicycles, hand-rolled cigars.Andyes, finally: cars.
All thiswas visible from the train.Approaching along the shore of theDetroit River, Lefty and
Desdemona watched their new home take shape. They saw farmland give way to fenced lots and
cobblestone streets. The sky darkened with smoke. Buildings flew by, brick warehouses painted
in pragmatic Bookman white: WRIGHT AND KAY CO. . . . J. H. BLACK & SONS . . .
DETROIT STOVE WORKS. Out on the water, squat, tar-colored barges dragged along, and
people popped up on the streets, workmen in grimy overalls, clerks thumbing suspenders, the
signs of eateries and boardinghouses appearing next: We Serve Stroh’s Temperance
Beer . . .MakeThisYourHomeMeals 15 cents . . .
. . . As these new sights flooded my grandparents’ brains, they jostled with images from the
day before. Ellis Island, rising like a Doge’s Palace on the water. The Baggage Room stacked to
the ceiling with luggage. They’d been herded up a stairway to the Registry Room. Pinned with
numbers from the Giulia’smanifest, they’d filed past a line of health inspectorswho’d looked in
their eyes and ears, rubbed their scalps, and flipped their eyelids inside out with buttonhooks.
One doctor, noticing inflammation under Dr. Philobosian’s eyelids, had stopped the examination
and chalked an X on his coat. He was led out of line. My grandparents hadn’t seen him again.
“He must have caught something on the boat,” Desdemona said. “Or his eyes were red from all
that crying.” Meanwhile, chalk continued to do its work all around them. It marked a Pg on the
belly of a pregnant woman. It scrawled an H over an old man’s failing heart. It diagnosed the
C of conjunctivitis, the F of favus, and the T of trachoma. But, no matter how well trained,
medical eyes couldn’t spot a recessive mutation hiding out on a fifth chromosome. Fingers
couldn’t feel it. Buttonhooks couldn’t bring it to light . . .
Now, on the train, my grandparents were tagged not with manifest numbers but with
destination cards: “To theConductor: Please
show bearer where to change and where to get off, as this person does not speak English.
Bearer is bound to: Grand Trunk Sta. Detroit.” They sat next to each other in unreserved seats.
Lefty faced the window, looking out with excitement. Desdemona stared down at her silkworm
box, her cheeks crimson with the shame and fury she’d been suffering for the last thirty-six
hours.
“That’s the last time anyone cutsmyhair,” she said.
“Youlook fine,” saidLefty, not looking. “Youlook like an Amerikanidha.”
“I don’twant to look like an Amerikanidha.”
In the concessions area at Ellis Island, Lefty had cajoled Desdemona to step into a tent run by
the YWCA. She’d gone in, shawled and kerchiefed, and had emerged fifteen minutes later in a
drop-waisted dress and a floppy hat shaped like a chamber pot. Rage flamed beneath her new
face powder. As part of the makeover, the YWCA ladies had cut off Desdemona’s immigrant
braids.
Obsessively, in the way a person worries a rip deep in a pocket, she now reached up under the
floppy hat to feel her denuded scalp for the thirtieth or fortieth time. “That’s the last haircut,” she
said again. (She was true to this vow. From that day on, Desdemona grew her hair out like Lady
Godiva, keeping it under a net in an enormous mass and washing it every Friday; and only after

Lefty died did she ever cut it, giving it to Sophie Sassoon, who sold it for two hundred and fifty
dollars to a wigmaker who made five separate wigs out of it, one of which, she claimed, was
later bought by Betty Ford, post White House and rehab, so that we got to see it on television
once, during Richard Nixon’s funeral, my grandmother’s hair, sitting on the ex-President’s
wife’s head.)
But there was another reason for my grandmother’s unhappiness. She opened the silkworm
box in her lap. Inside were her two braids, still tied with the ribbons of mourning, but otherwise
the box was empty. After carrying her silkworm eggs all the way from Bithynios, Desdemona
had been forced to dump themout at Ellis Island. Silkwormeggs appeared on a list of parasites.
Lefty remained glued to the window. All the way from Hoboken he’d gazed out at the
marvelous sights: electric trams pulling pink faces up Albany’s hills; factories glowing like
volcanoes in theBuffalo night.Once,waking as the train pulled through a city at dawn,Lefty
hadmistaken a pillared bank for the Parthenon, and thought hewas inAthens again.
Now theDetroit River sped past and the city loomed. Lefty stared out at themotor cars parked
like giant beetles at the curbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere, cannons bombarding the
atmosphere. There were red brick stacks and tall silver ones, stacks in regimental rows or all
alone puffing meditatively away, a forest of smokestacks that dimmed the sunlight and then, all
of a sudden, blocked it out completely. Everythingwent black: they’d entered the train station.
GrandTrunkStation, nowa ruin of spectacular dimensions,was then the city’s attempt to one-
up New York. Its base was a mammoth marble neoclassical museum, complete with Corinthian
pillars and carved entablature. From this temple rose a thirteen-story office building. Lefty,
who’d been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at
where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it.
Desdemona, having no alternative, followed.
But just imagine it in those days! Grand Trunk! Telephones in a hundred shipping offices
ringing away, still a relatively new sound; and merchandise being sent east and west; passengers
arriving and departing, having coffee in the Palm Court or getting their shoes shined, the wing
tips of banking, the cap toes of parts supply, the saddle shoes of rum-running.GrandTrunk,with
its vaulted ceilings of Guastavino tilework, its chandeliers, its floors of Welsh quarry stone.
There was a six-chair barbershop, where civic leaders were mummified in hot towels; and
bathtubs for rent; and elevator banks lit by translucent egg-shapedmarble lamps.
Leaving Desdemona behind a pillar, Lefty searched through the mob in the station for the
cousin who was meeting their train. Sourmelina Zizmo, née Papadiamandopoulos, was my
grandparents’ cousin and hence my first cousin twice removed. I knew her as a colorful, older
woman. Sourmelina of the precarious cigarette ash. Sourmelina of the indigo bathwater.
Sourmelina of the Theosophical Society brunches. She wore satin gloves up to the elbow and
mothered a long line of smelly dachshunds with tearstained eyes. Footstools populated her
house, allowing the short-legged creatures access to sofas and chaise longues. In 1922, however,
Sourmelinawas only twenty-eight. Picking her out of this crowd atGrandTrunk
is as difficult for me as identifying guests in my parents’ wedding album, where all the faces
wear the disguise of youth. Lefty had a different problem. He paced the concourse, looking for
the cousin he’d grown up with, a sharp-nosed girl with the grinning mouth of a comedy mask.
Sun slanted in from the skylights above.He squinted, examining the passingwomen, until finally
she called out to him, “Over here, cousin.Don’t you recognizeme? I’m the irresistible one.”
“Lina, is that you?”
“I’mnot in the village anymore.”
In the five years since leaving Turkey, Sourmelina had managed to erase just about everything
identifiably Greek about her, from her hair, which she dyed to a rich chestnut and now wore
bobbed and marcelled, to her accent, which had migrated far enough west to sound vaguely
“European,” to her reading material (Collier’s, Harper’s), to her favorite foods (lobster
thermidor, peanut butter), and finally to her clothes. She wore a short green flapper dress fringed
at the hemline. Her shoes were a matching green satin with sequined toes and delicate ankle

straps. A black feather boa was wrapped around her shoulders, and on her head was a cloche hat
that dangled onyx pendants over her plucked eyebrows.
For the next few seconds she gave Lefty the full benefit of her sleek, American pose, but it
was still Lina inside there (under the cloche) and soon her Greek enthusiasm bubbled out. She
spread her armswide. “Kissmehello, cousin.”
They embraced. Lina pressed a rouged cheek against his neck. Then she pulled back to
examine him and, dissolving into laughter, cupped her hand over his nose. “It’s still you. I’d
know this nose anywhere.” Her laugh completed its follow-through, as her shoulders went up
and down, and then she was on to the next thing. “So, where is she? Where is this new bride of
yours?Yourtelegramdidn’t even give a name.What? Is she hiding?”
“She’s . . . in the bathroom.”
“She must be a beauty. You got married fast enough. Which did you do first, introduce
yourself or propose?”
“I think I proposed.”
“What does she look like?”
“She looks . . . like you.”
“Oh, darling, not that good surely.”
Sourmelina brought her cigarette holder to her lips and inhaled, scanning the crowd. “Poor
Desdemona!Her brother falls in love and leaves her behind inNewYork.How is she?”
“She’s fine.”
“Whydidn’t she comewith you?She’s not jealous of your newwife, is she?”
“No, nothing like that.”
She clutched his arm. “We read about the fire. Terrible! I was so worried until I got your
letter. TheTurks started it. I know it.Of course,myhusband doesn’t agree.”
“He doesn’t?”
“One suggestion, since you’ll be livingwith us?Don’t talk politicswithmyhusband.”
“All right.”
“And the village?” Sourmelina inquired.
“Everybody left the horeo, Lina. There’s nothing now.”
“If I didn’t hate that place,maybe I’d shed two tears.”
“Lina, there’s something I have to explain to you . . .”
But Sourmelinawas looking away, tapping her foot. “Maybe she fell in.”
“. . . Something aboutDesdemona andme . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . .Mywife . . . Desdemona . . .”
“Was I right?They don’t get along?”
“No . . . Desdemona . . .mywife . . .”
“Yes?”
“Sameperson.”He gave the signal.Desdemona stepped frombehind the pillar.
“Hello, Lina,”mygrandmother said. “We’remarried.Don’t tell.”
And thatwas how it came out, for the next-to-last time.Blurted out bymy yia yia, beneath the
echoing roof of Grand Trunk, toward Sourmelina’s cloche-covered ears. The confession hovered
in the air a moment, before floating away with the smoke rising from her cigarette. Desdemona
took her husband’s arm.
My grandparents had every reason to believe that Sourmelina would keep their secret. She’d
come to America with a secret of her own, a secret that would be guarded by our family until
Sourmelina
died in 1979, whereupon, like everyone’s secrets, it was posthumously declassified, so that
people began to speak of “Sourmelina’s girlfriends.” A secret kept, in other words, only by the
loosest definition, so that now—as I get ready to leak the information myself—I feel only a
slight twinge of filial guilt.
Sourmelina’s secret (as Aunt Zo put it): “Lina was one of those women they named the island

after.”
As a girl in the horeo, Sourmelina had been caught in compromising circumstances with a
few female friends. “Not many,” she told me herself, years later, “two or three. People think if
you like girls, you like every single one. I was always picky. And there wasn’t much to pick
from.” For awhile she’d struggled against her predisposition. “Iwent to church. It didn’t help. In
those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be
different.” When Sourmelina was caught not with another girl but with a full-grown woman, a
mother of two children, a scandal arose. Sourmelina’s parents tried to arrange her marriage but
found no takers. Husbands were hard enough to come by in Bithynios without the added liability
of an uninterested, defective bride.
Her father had then done what Greek fathers of unmarriageable girls did in those days: he
wrote toAmerica. TheUnited States aboundedwith dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats,
diamond jewelry—and lonely, immigrant bachelors. With a photograph of the prospective bride
and a considerable dowry, her father had comeupwith one.
Jimmy Zizmo (shortened from Zisimopoulos) had come to America in 1907 at the age of
thirty. The family didn’t knowmuch about him except that hewas a hard bargainer. In a series of
letters to Sourmelina’s father, Zizmo had negotiated the amount of the dowry in the formal
language of a barrister, even going so far as to demand a bank check before the wedding day.
The photograph Sourmelina received showed a tall, handsome man with a virile mustache,
holding a pistol in one hand and a bottle of liquor in the other. When she stepped off the train at
Grand Trunk two months later, however, the short man who greeted her was clean-shaven, with
a sour expression and a laborer’s dark complexion. Such a discrepancy might have disappointed
a normal bride, but Sourmelina didn’t care onewayor another.
Sourmelina had written often, describing her new life in America, but she concentrated on the
new fashions, or her Aeriola Jr., the radio she spent hours each day listening to, wearing
earphones and manipulating the dial, stopping every so often to clean off the carbon dust that
built up on the crystal. She never mentioned anything connected to what Desdemona referred to
as “the bed,” and so her cousins were forced to read between the lines of those aerograms, trying
to see, in a description of a Sunday drive through Belle Isle, whether the face of the husband at
the wheel was happy or unsatisfied; or inferring, from a passage about Sourmelina’s latest
hairstyle—something called “cootie garages”—whether Zizmowas ever allowed tomuss it up.
This same Sourmelina, full of her own secrets, now took in her new co-conspirators.
“Married?Youmean sleeping-togethermarried?”
Leftymanaged, “Yes.”
Sourmelina noticed her ash for the first time, and flicked it. “Just my luck. Soon as I leave the
village, things get interesting.”
But Desdemona couldn’t abide such irony. She grabbed Sourmelina’s hands and pleaded,
“Youhave to promise never to tell.We’ll live,we’ll die, and thatwill be the end of it.”
“Iwon’t tell.”
“People can’t even know I’myour cousin.”
“Iwon’t tell anyone.”
“What about your husband?”
“He thinks I’mpicking upmycousin and his newwife.”
“Youwon’t say anything to him?”
“That’ll be easy.” Lina laughed. “He doesn’t listen tome.”

Sourmelina insisted on getting a porter to carry their suitcases to the car, a black-and-tan
Packard. She tipped him and climbed behind the wheel, attracting looks. A woman driving was
still a scandalous sight in 1922. After resting her cigarette holder on the dashboard, she pulled
out the choke, waited the requisite five seconds, and pressed the ignition button. The car’s tin
bonnet shuddered to life. The leather seats began to vibrate and Desdemona took hold of her
husband’s arm. Up front, Sourmelina took off her satin-strap high heels to drive barefoot. She

put the car into gear and,without checking
traffic, lurched off down Michigan Avenue toward Cadillac Square. My grandparents’ eyes
glazed over at the sheer activity, streetcars rumbling, bells clanging, and the monochrome traffic
swerving in and out. In those days downtown Detroit was filled with shoppers and businessmen.
Outside Hudson’s Department Store the crowd was ten thick, jostling to get in the newfangled
revolving doors. Lina pointed out the sights: the Café Frontenac . . . the Family
Theatre . . . and the enormous electric signs: Ralston . . .Wait&BondBlackstone
Mild 10¢ Cigar. Above, a thirty-foot boy spread Meadow Gold Butter on a ten-foot
slice of bread. One building had a row of giant oil lamps over the entrance to promote a sale on
until October 31. It was all swirl and hubbub, Desdemona lying against the backseat, already
suffering the anxiety that modern conveniences would induce in her over the years, cars mainly,
but toasters, too, lawn sprinklers and escalators; while Lefty grinned and shook his head.
Skyscrapers were going up everywhere, and movie palaces and hotels. The twenties saw the
construction of nearly all Detroit’s great buildings, the Penobscot Building and the second Buhl
Building colored like an Indian belt, the New Union Trust Building, the Cadillac Tower, the
Fisher Building with its gilded roof. To my grandparents Detroit was like one big Koza Han
during cocoon season. What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of
the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square-block area bounded by
Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city’s African Americans, who
weren’t allowed to live anywhere else. They didn’t see, in short, the seeds of the city’s
destruction—its second destruction—because they were part of it, too, all these people coming
fromeverywhere to cash in onHenryFord’s five-dollar-a-day promise.
The East Side of Detroit was a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes, shaded by
cathedral elms. The house on Hurlbut Street Lina drove them to was a modest, two-story
building of root-beer-colored brick. My grandparents gaped at it from the car, unable to move,
until suddenly the front door opened and someone stepped out.
Jimmy Zizmo was so many things I don’t know where to begin. Amateur herbalist;
antisuffragist; big-game hunter; ex-con; drug pusher; teetotaler—take your pick. He was forty-
five years old, nearly
twice as old as his wife. Standing on the dim porch, he wore an inexpensive suit and a shirt
with a pointy collar that had lost most of its starch. His frizzy black hair gave him the wild look
of the bachelor he’d been for so many years, and this impression was heightened by his face,
whichwas rumpled like an unmade bed.His eyebrows, however, were as seductively arched as a
nautch girl’s, his eyelashes so thick he might have been wearing mascara. But my grandmother
didn’t notice any of that. Shewas fixated on something else.
“AnArab?”Desdemona asked as soon as shewas alonewith her cousin in the kitchen. “Is that
whyyoudidn’t tell us about him in your letters?”
“He’s not anArab.He’s from theBlackSea.”
“This is the sala,” Zizmo was meanwhile explaining to Lefty as he showed him around the
house.
“Pontian!” Desdemona gasped with horror, while also examining the icebox. “He’s not
Muslim, is he?”
“Not everybody from the Pontus converted,” Lina scoffed. “What do you think, a Greek takes
a swim in theBlackSea and turns into aMuslim?”
“But does he haveTurkish blood?” She lowered her voice. “Is thatwhyhe’s so dark?”
“I don’t knowand I don’t care.”
“You’re free to stay as long as you like”—Zizmo was now leading Lefty upstairs—“but there
are a few house rules. First, I’m a vegetarian. If your wife wants to cook meat, she has to use
separate pots and dishes.Also, nowhiskey.Doyoudrink?”
“Sometimes.”
“No drinking.Go to a speakeasy if youwant to drink. I don’twant any troublewith the police.

Now, about the rent.Youjust gotmarried?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of dowry did you get?”
“Dowry?”
“Yes.Howmuch?”
“But did you know he was so old?” Desdemona whispered downstairs as she inspected the
oven.
“At least he’s notmybrother.”
“Quiet!Don’t even joke.”
“I didn’t get a dowry,” answeredLefty. “Wemet on the boat over.”
“No dowry!” Zizmo stopped on the stairs to look back at Lefty with astonishment. “Why did
you getmarried, then?”
“We fell in love,” Lefty said. He’d never announced it to a stranger before, and it made him
feel happy and frightened all at once.
“If you don’t get paid, don’t get married,” Zizmo said. “That’s why I waited so long. I was
holding out for the right price.”Hewinked.
“Linamentioned you have your ownbusiness now,”Lefty saidwith sudden interest, following
Zizmo into the bathroom. “What kind of business is it?”
“Me? I’man importer.”
“I don’t know of what,” Sourmelina answered in the kitchen. “An importer. All I know is he
brings homemoney.”
“But howcan youmarry somebody youdon’t knowanything about?”
“Toget out of that country,Des, Iwould havemarried a cripple.”
“I have some experience with importing,” Lefty managed to get in as Zizmo demonstrated the
plumbing. “Back inBursa. In the silk industry.”
“Your portion of the rent is twenty dollars.” Zizmo didn’t take the hint. He pulled the chain,
unleashing a flood ofwater.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Lina was continuing downstairs, “when it comes to husbands, the
older the better.” She opened the pantry door. “A young husband would be after me all the time.
Itwould be toomuch of a strain.”
“Shameon you, Lina.”ButDesdemonawas laughing now, despite herself. It waswonderful to
see her old cousin again, a little piece of Bithynios still intact. The dark pantry, full of figs,
almonds,walnuts, halvah, and dried apricots,made her feel better, too.
“But where can I get the rent?” Lefty finally blurted out as they headed back downstairs. “I
don’t have anymoney left.Where can Iwork?”
“Not a problem.” Zizmo waved his hand. “I’ll speak to a few people.” They came through the
sala again. Zizmo stopped and looked significantly down. “Youhaven’t complimentedmy zebra
skin rug.”
“It’s very nice.”
“I brought it back fromAfrica. Shot itmyself.”
“You’vebeen toAfrica?”
“I’ve been all over.”

Like everybody else in town, they squeezed in together. Desdemona and Lefty slept in a
bedroom directly above Zizmo and Lina’s, and the first few nights my grandmother climbed out
of bed to put her ear to the floor. “Nothing,” she said, “I told you.”
“Comeback to bed,”Lefty scolded. “That’s their business.”
“What business?That’swhat I’m telling you. They aren’t having any business.”
While in the bedroom below, Zizmo was discussing the new boarders upstairs. “What a
romantic!Meets a girl on the boat andmarries her.Nodowry.”
“Somepeoplemarry for love.”
“Marriage is for housekeeping and for children.Which remindsme.”

“Please, Jimmy, not tonight.”
“Then when? Five years we’ve been married and no children. You’re always sick, tired, this,
that.Have you been taking the castor oil?”
“Yes.”
“And themagnesium?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We have to reduce your bile. If the mother has too much bile, the child will lack vigor
and disobey his parents.”
“Goodnight, kyrie.”
“Goodnight, kyria.”
Before the week was out, all my grandparents’ questions about Sourmelina’s marriage had
been answered. Because of his age, Jimmy Zizmo treated his young bride more like a daughter
than a wife. He was always telling her what she could and couldn’t do, howling over the price
and necklines of her outfits, telling her to go to bed, to get up, to speak, to keep silent.He refused
to give her the car keys until she cajoled him with kisses and caresses. His nutritional quackery
even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a
result of his interrogating Lina about her stools. As for sexual relations, they had happened, but
not recently. For the last fivemonthsLina had complained of imaginary ailments,
preferring her husband’s herbal cures to his amatory attentions. Zizmo, in turn, harbored
vaguely yogic beliefs about the mental benefits of semen retention, and so was disposed to wait
until his wife’s vitality returned. The house was sex-segregated like the houses in the patridha,
the old country, men in the sala, women in the kitchen. Two spheres with separate concerns,
duties, even—the evolutionary biologists might say—thought patterns. Lefty and Desdemona,
accustomed to living in their own house, were forced to adapt to their new landlord’s ways.
Besides,mygrandfather needed a job.

In those days there were a lot of car companies to work for. There was Chalmers, Metzger,
Brush, Columbia, and Flanders. There was Hupp, Paige, Hudson, Krit, Saxon, Liberty,
Rickenbacker, andDodge. JimmyZizmo, however, had connections at Ford.
“I’m a supplier,” he said.
“Ofwhat?”
“Assorted fuels.”
Theywere in the Packard again, vibrating on thin tires.A lightmistwas falling. Lefty squinted
through the fogged windshield. Little by little, as they approached along Michigan Avenue, he
began to be aware of a monolith looming in the distance, a building like a gigantic church organ,
pipes running into the sky.
There was also a smell: the same smell that would drift upriver, years later, to find me in my
bed or in the field hockey goal. Like my own, similarly beaked nose at those times, my
grandfather’s nose went on alert. His nostrils flared. He inhaled. At first the smell was
recognizable, part of the organic realm of bad eggs and manure. But after a few seconds the
smell’s chemical properties seared his nostrils, and he covered his nosewith his handkerchief.
Zizmo laughed. “Don’tworry.You’llget used to it.”
“No, Iwon’t.”
“Doyouwant to know the secret?”
“What?”
“Don’t breathe.”
When they reached the factory, Zizmo took him into the PersonnelDepartment.
“How long has he lived inDetroit?” themanager asked.
“Sixmonths.”
“Can you verify that?”
Zizmonowspoke in a low tone. “I could drop the necessary documents by your house.”
The personnelmanager looked bothways. “OldLogCabin?”

“Only the best.”
The chief jutted out his lower lip, examiningmygrandfather. “How’s his English?”
“Not as good asmine.But he learns fast.”
“He’ll have to take the course and pass the test.Otherwise he’s out.”
“It’s a deal. Now, if you’ll write down your home address, we can schedule a delivery. Would
Monday evening, say around eight-thirty, be suitable?”
“Come around to the back door.”
My grandfather’s short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any
Stephanides has ever worked in the automobile industry. Instead of cars, we would become
manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled
cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana creampie.Our assembly linewas the
grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain. Still, those twenty-five weeks gave us a personal
connection to that massive, forbidding, awe-inspiring complex we saw from the highway, that
controlledVesuviusof chutes, tubes, ladders, catwalks, fire, and smoke known, like a plague or a
monarch, only by a color: “theRouge.”
On his first day ofwork, Lefty came into the kitchen modeling his newoveralls. He spread his
flannel-shirted arms and snapped his fingers, dancing in work boots, and Desdemona laughed
and shut the kitchen door so as not towake upLina. Lefty ate his breakfast of prunes and yogurt,
reading a Greek newspaper a few days old. Desdemona packed his Greek lunch of feta, olives,
and bread in a new American container: a brown paper bag. At the back door, when he turned to
kiss her she stepped back, anxious that people might see. But then she remembered that they
were married now. They lived in a place called Michigan, where the birds seemed to come in
only one color, and where no one knew them. Desdemona stepped forward again to meet her
husband’s lips. Their first kiss in the great American outdoors, on the back porch, near a cherry
tree losing its leaves.A
brief flare of happiness went off inside her and hung, raining sparks, until Lefty disappeared
around the front of the house.
My grandfather’s good mood accompanied him all the way to the trolley stop. Other workers
were already waiting, loose-kneed, smoking cigarettes and joking. Lefty noticed their metal
lunch pails and, embarrassed by his paper sack, held it behind him. The streetcar showed up first
as a hum in the soles of his boots. Then it appeared against the rising sun, Apollo’s own chariot,
only electrified. Inside, men stood in groups arranged by language. Faces scrubbed for work still
had soot inside the ears, deep black. The streetcar sped off again. Soon the jovial mood
dissipated and the languages fell silent. Near downtown, a few blacks boarded the car, standing
outside on the runners, holding on to the roof.
And then the Rouge appeared against the sky, rising out of the smoke it generated. At first all
that was visible was the tops of the eight main smokestacks. Each gave birth to its own dark
cloud. The clouds plumed upward and merged into a general pall that hung over the landscape,
sending a shadow that ran along the trolley tracks; and Lefty understood that the men’s silence
was a recognition of this shadow, of its inevitable approach each morning. As it came on, the
men turned their backs so that only Lefty saw the light leave the sky as the shadow enveloped
the streetcar and the men’s faces turned gray and one of the mavros on the runners spat blood
onto the roadside. The smell seeped into the streetcar next, first the bearable eggs and manure,
then the unbearable chemical taint, and Lefty looked at the other men to see if they registered it,
but they didn’t, though they continued to breathe. The doors opened and they all filed out.
Through the hanging smoke, Lefty saw other streetcars letting off other workers, hundreds and
hundreds of gray figures trudging across the paved courtyard toward the factory gates. Trucks
were driving past, andLefty let himself be taken alongwith the flowof the next shift, fifty, sixty,
seventy thousand men hurrying last cigarettes or getting in final words—because as they
approached the factory they’d begun to speak again, not because they had anything to say but
because beyond those doors language wasn’t allowed. The main building, a fortress of dark
brick, was seven stories high, the smokestacks seventeen. Running off it were two chutes topped

bywater towers. These led to observation decks and to adjoining refineries
studded with less impressive stacks. It was like a grove of trees, as if the Rouge’s eight main
smokestacks had sown seeds to the wind, and now ten or twenty or fifty smaller trunks were
sprouting up in the infertile soil around the plant. Lefty could see the train tracks now, the huge
silos along the river, the giant spice box of coal, coke, and iron ore, and the catwalks stretching
overhead like giant spiders. Before he was sucked in the door, he glimpsed a freighter and a bit
of the river French explorers named for its reddish color, long before the water turned orange
from runoff or ever caught on fire.
Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his
cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers
rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since
then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so
thatwe plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitivemotions of a hundred kinds.
But in 1922 itwas still a new thing to be amachine.
On the factory floor, my grandfather was trained for his job in seventeen minutes. Part of the
new production method’s genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you
could hire anyone. And fire anyone. The foreman showed Lefty how to take a bearing from the
conveyor, grind it on a lathe, and replace it. Holding a stopwatch, he timed the new employee’s
attempts. Then, nodding once, he led Lefty to his position on the Line. On the left stood a man
named Wierzbicki; on the right, a man named O’Malley. For a moment, they are three men,
waiting together. Then thewhistle blows.
Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and
O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling
around the factory, through its clouds ofmetal dust, its acid fogs, until anotherworker fifty yards
on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds).
Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the
distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent
heads, huge spindles pound steam-powered fists. No one says a word. Wierzbicki reams a
bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a
camshaft. The camshaft circles around the floor until a hand reaches up to take it down and
attach it to the engine block, growing increasingly eccentric now with swooshes of pipe and the
plumage of fan blades. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and
O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. While other workers screw in the air filter (seventeen
seconds) and attach the starter motor (twenty-six seconds) and put on the flywheel. At which
point the engine is finished and the lastman sends it soaring away . . .
Except that he isn’t the lastman. There are othermen belowhauling the engine in, as a chassis
rolls out to meet it. These men attach the engine to the transmission (twenty-five seconds).
Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to
a camshaft.Mygrandfather sees only the bearing in front of him, his hands removing it, grinding
it, and putting it back as another appears. The conveyor over his head extends back to the men
who stamp out the bearings and load ingots into the furnaces; it goes back to the Foundry where
the Negroes work, goggled against the infernal light and heat. They feed iron ore into the Blast
Oven and pour molten steel into core molds from ladles. They pour at just the right rate—too
quickly and the molds will explode; too slowly and the steel will harden. They can’t stop even to
pick the burning bits of metal from their arms. Sometimes the foreman does it; sometimes not.
The Foundry is the deepest recess of the Rouge, its molten core, but the Line goes back farther
than that. It extends outside to the hills of coal and coke; it goes to the river where freighters
dock to unload the ore, at which point the Line becomes the river itself, snaking up to the north
woods until it reaches its source, which is the earth itself, the limestone and sandstone therein;
and then theLine leads back again, out of substrata to river to freighters and finally to the cranes,
shovels, and furnaces where it is turned into molten steel and poured into molds, cooling and
hardening into car parts—the gears, drive shafts, and fuel tanks of 1922 Model T’s. Wierzbicki

reams a bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft.
Above and behind, at various angles, workers pack sand into core molds, or hammer plugs into
molds, or put casting boxes into the cupola furnace. The Line isn’t a single line but many,
diverging and intersecting.Otherworkers stampout body parts (fifty seconds), bump them
(forty-two seconds), and weld the pieces together (one minute and ten seconds). Wierzbicki
reams a bearing andStephanides grinds a bearing andO’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft.
The camshaft flies around the factory until a man unhooks it, attaches it to the engine block,
growing eccentric now with fan blades, pipes, and spark plugs. And then the engine is finished.
A man sends it dropping down onto a chassis rolling out to meet it, as three other workers
remove a car body from the oven, its black finish baked to a shine in which they can see their
own faces, and they recognize themselves, momentarily, before they drop the body onto the
chassis rolling out to meet it. A man jumps into the front seat (three seconds), turns the ignition
(two seconds), and drives the automobile away.

By day, no words; by night, hundreds. Every evening at quitting time my exhausted grandfather
would come out of the factory and tramp across to an adjacent building housing the FordEnglish
School. He sat in a desk with his workbook open in front of him. The desk felt as though it were
vibrating across the floor at the Line’s 1.2 miles per hour. He looked up at the English alphabet
in a frieze on the classroom walls. In rows around him, men sat over identical workbooks. Hair
stiff from dried sweat, eyes red from metal dust, hands raw, they recited with the obedience of
choirboys:
“Employees should use plenty of soap andwater in the home.
“Nothingmakes for right living somuch as cleanliness.
“Donot spit on the floor of the home.
“Donot allow any flies in the house.
“Themost advanced people are the cleanest.”
Sometimes the English lessons continued on the job. One week, after a lecture by the foreman
on increasing productivity, Lefty speeded up his work, grinding a bearing every twelve seconds
instead of fourteen. Returning from the lavatory later, he found the word “RAT”written on the
side of his lathe. The belt was cut. By the time he found a new belt in the equipment bin, a horn
sounded. TheLine had stopped.
“What the hell’s thematterwith you?” the foreman shouted at him. “Every timewe shut down
the line,we losemoney. If it happens again, you’re out.Understand?”
“Yes,sir.”
“Okay!Let her go!”
And the Line started up again. After the foreman had gone, O’Malley looked both ways and
leaned over to whisper, “Don’t try to be a speed king. You understand? We all have to work
faster thatway.”

Desdemona stayed home and cooked. Without silkworms to tend or mulberry trees to pick,
without neighbors to gossip with or goats to milk, my grandmother filled her time with food.
While Lefty ground bearings nonstop, Desdemona built pastitsio, moussaka and galacto-
boureko. She coated the kitchen table with flour and, using a bleached broomstick, rolled out
paper-thin sheets of dough. The sheets came off her assembly line, one after another. They filled
the kitchen. They covered the living room, where she’d laid bedsheets over the furniture.
Desdemona went up and down the line, adding walnuts, butter, honey, spinach, cheese, adding
more layers of dough, then more butter, before forging the assembled concoctions in the oven.
At the Rouge, workers collapsed from heat and fatigue, while on Hurlbut my grandmother did a
double shift. She got up in the morning to fix breakfast and pack a lunch for her husband, then
marinated a leg of lamb with wine and garlic. In the afternoon she made her own sausages,
spiced with fennel, and hung them over the heating pipes in the basement. At three o’clock she
started dinner, and only when it was cooking did she take a break, sitting at the kitchen table to

consult her dream book on the meaning of her previous night’s dreams. No fewer than three pots
simmered on the stove at all times. Occasionally, Jimmy Zizmo brought home a few of his
business associates, hulking men with thick, ham-like heads stuffed into their fedoras.
Desdemona served them meals at all hours of the day. Then they were off again, into the city.
Desdemona cleaned up.
The only thing she refused to do was the shopping. American stores confused her. She found
the produce depressing. Even many years later, seeing a Kroger’s McIntosh in our suburban
kitchen, she would hold it up to ridicule, saying, “This is nothing. This we fed to goats.” To step
into a local market was to miss the savor of the peaches, figs, and winter chestnuts of Bursa.
Already, in her first months in America, Desdemona was suffering “the homesickness that has
no cure.” So, afterworking at the plant and attendingEnglish
class, Leftywas the one to pick up the lamb and vegetables, the spices and honey.
And so they lived . . . one month . . . three . . . five. They suffered through their first Michigan
winter. A January night, just past 1 a.m. Desdemona Stephanides asleep, wearing her hated
YWCA hat against the wind blowing through the thin walls. A radiator sighing, clanking. By
candlelight, Lefty finishes his homework, notebook propped on knees, pencil in hand. And from
the wall: rustling. He looks up to see a pair of red eyes shining out from a hole in the baseboard.
He writes R-A-T before throwing his pencil at the vermin. Desdemona sleeps on.He brushes her
hair. He says, in English, “Hello, sweetheart.” The new country and its language have helped to
push the past a little further behind. The sleeping formnext to him is less and less his sister every
night and more and more his wife. The statute of limitations ticks itself out, day by day, all
memory of the crime being washed away. (But what humans forget, cells remember. The body,
that elephant . . .)
Spring arrived, 1923. My grandfather, accustomed to the multifarious conjugations of ancient
Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master.
Once he had swallowed a good portion of the English vocabulary, he began to taste the familiar
ingredients, the Greek seasoning in the roots, prefixes, and suffixes. A pageant was planned to
celebrate the FordEnglish School graduation.As a top student, Leftywas asked to take part.
“What kind of pageant?”Desdemona asked.
“I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. But you have to sewme some clothes.”
“What kind?”
“Like from the patridha.”
It was a Wednesday evening. Lefty and Zizmo were in the sala when suddenly Lina came in
to listen to “The Ronnie Ronnette Hour.” Zizmo gave her a disapproving look, but she escaped
behind her headphones.
“She thinks she’s one of these Amerikanidhes,” Zizmo said to Lefty. “Look. See? She even
crosses her legs.”
“This isAmerica,” Lefty said. “We’re all Amerikanidhes now.”
“This is notAmerica,” Zizmo countered. “This ismyhouse.We
don’t live like the Amerikanidhes in here. Yourwife understands. Do you see her in the sala
showing her legs and listening to the radio?”
Someone knocked at the door. Zizmo, who had an inexplicable aversion to unannounced
guests, jumped up and reached under his coat. Hemotioned for Lefty not tomove. Lina, noticing
something, took off her earphones. The knock came again. “Kyrie,” Lina said, “if they were
going to kill you,would they knock?”
“Who’s going to kill!”Desdemona said, rushing in from the kitchen.
“Just a way of speaking,” said Lina, who knew more about her husband’s importing concern
that she’d been letting on. She glided to the door and opened it.
Two men stood on the welcome mat. They wore gray suits, striped ties, black brogues. They
had short sideburns. They carried matching briefcases. When they removed their hats, they
revealed identical chestnut hair, neatly parted in the center. Zizmo took his hand out of his coat.
“We’re from the Ford Sociological Department,” the tall one said. “Is Mr. Stephanides at

home?”
“Yes?”Lefty said.
“Mr. Stephanides, letme tell youwhywe’re here.”
“Management has foreseen,” the short one seamlessly continued, “that five dollars a day in the
hands of some men might work a tremendous handicap along the paths of rectitude and right
living andmightmake of themamenace to society in general.”
“So it was established by Mr. Ford”—the taller one again took over—“that no man is to
receive themoneywho cannot use it advisedly and conservatively.”
“Also”—the short one again—“that where a man seems to qualify under the plan and later
develops weaknesses, that it is within the province of the company to take away his share of the
profits until such time as he can rehabilitate himself.Maywe come in?”
Once across the threshold, they separated. The tall one took a pad from his briefcase. “I’m
going to ask you a fewquestions, if you don’tmind.Doyoudrink,Mr. Stephanides?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Zizmo answered for him.
“Andwho are you,may I ask?”
“Myname isZizmo.”
“Are you a boarder here?”
“This ismyhouse.”
“SoMr. andMrs. Stephanides are the boarders?”
“That’s right.”
“Won’t do.Won’t do,” said the tall one. “We encourage our employees to obtainmortgages.”
“He’sworking on it,” Zizmo said.
Meanwhile, the short one had entered the kitchen. He was lifting lids off pots, opening the
oven door, peering into the garbage can. Desdemona started to object, but Lina checked her with
a glance. (And notice how Desdemona’s nose has begun to twitch. For two days now, her sense
of smell has been incredibly acute. Foods are beginning to smell funny to her, feta cheese like
dirty socks, olives like goat droppings.)
“Howoften do you bathe,Mr. Stephanides?” the tall one asked.
“Every day, sir.”
“Howoften do you brush your teeth?”
“Every day, sir.”
“What do you use?”
“Baking soda.”
Now the short one was climbing the stairs. He invaded my grandparents’ bedroom and
inspected the linens.He stepped into the bathroomand examined the toilet seat.
“Fromnowon, use this,” the tall one said. “It’s a dentifrice.Here’s a new toothbrush.”
Disconcerted, my grandfather took the items. “We come fromBursa,” he explained. “It’s a big
city.”
“Brush along the gum lines. Up on the bottoms and down on the tops. Two minutes morning
and night. Let’s see.Give it a try.”
“We are civilized people.”
“Do I understand you to be refusing hygiene instruction?”
“Listen to me,” Zizmo said. “The Greeks built the Parthenon and the Egyptians built the
pyramids backwhen theAnglo-Saxonswere still dressing in animal skins.”
The tall one took a long look at Zizmo andmade a note on his pad.
“Like this?” my grandfather said. Grinning hideously, he moved the toothbrush up and down
in his drymouth.
“That’s right. Fine.”
The short one now reappeared from upstairs. He flipped open his pad and began: “Item one.
Garbage can in kitchen has no lid. Item two. Housefly on kitchen table. Item three. Too much
garlic in food.Causes indigestion.”
(And now Desdemona locates the culprit: the short man’s hair. The smell of brilliantine on it

makes her nauseous.)
“Veryconsiderate of you to come here and take an interest in your employee’s health,” Zizmo
said. “Wewouldn’twant anybody to get sick, now,wouldwe?Might slowdownproduction.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” said the tall one. “Seeing as you are not an official
employee of the Ford Motor Company. However”—turning back to my grandfather—“I should
advise you,Mr. Stephanides, that inmy report I amgoing tomake a note of your social relations.
I’m going to recommend that you and Mrs. Stephanides move into your own home as soon as it
is financially feasible.”
“Andmay I askwhat your occupation is, sir?” the short onewanted to know.
“I’m in shipping,”Zizmo said.
“Nice of you gentlemen to stop by,” Lina moved in. “But if you’ll excuse us, we’re just about
to have dinner.Wehave to go to church tonight.And, of course, Lefty has to be in bed by nine to
get rest.He likes to be fresh in themorning.”
“That’s fine. Fine.”
Together, they put on their hats and left.

And so we come to the weeks leading up to the graduation pageant. To Desdemona sewing a
palikari vest, embroidering it with red, white, and blue thread. To Lefty getting off work one
Friday evening and crossing overMiller Road to be paid from the armored truck. ToLefty again,
the night of the pageant, taking the streetcar to Cadillac Square and walking into Gold’s Clothes.
JimmyZizmomeets him there to help himpick out a suit.
“It’s almost summer.Howabout something cream-colored?With a yellow silk necktie?”
“No.TheEnglish teacher told us.Blue or gray only.”
“Theywant to turn you into a Protestant. Resist!”
“I’ll take the blue suit, please, thank you,”Lefty says in his best English.
(And here, too, the shop owner seems to owe Zizmo a favor. He gives them a 20 percent
discount.)
Meanwhile, on Hurlbut, Father Stylianopoulos, head priest of Assumption Greek Orthodox
Church, has finally come over to bless the house. Desdemona watches the priest nervously as he
drinks the glass of Metaxa she has offered him. When she and Lefty became members of his
congregation, the old priest had asked, as a formality, if they had received anOrthodoxwedding.
Desdemona had replied in the affirmative. She had grown up believing that priests could tell
whether someone was telling the truth or not, but Father Stylianopoulos had only nodded and
written their names into the church register. Now he sets down his glass. He stands and recites
the blessing, shaking holy water on the threshold. Before he’s finished, however, Desdemona’s
nose begins acting up again. She can smell what the priest had for lunch. She can detect the
aroma under his arms as he makes the sign of the cross. At the door, letting him out, she holds
her breath. “Thank you, Father. Thank you.” Stylianopoulos goes on his way. But it’s no use. As
soon as she inhales again, she can smell the fertilized flower beds and Mrs. Czeslawski boiling
cabbage next door and what she swears must be an open jar of mustard somewhere, all these
scents gonewayward on her, as she puts a hand to her stomach.
Right then the bedroom door swings open. Sourmelina steps out. Powder and rouge cover one
side of her face; the other side, bare, looks green. “Doyou smell something?” she asks.
“Yes.I smell everything.”
“OhmyGod.”
“What is it?”
“I didn’t think thiswould happen tome. To youmaybe.But not tome.”
And now we are in the Detroit Light Guard Armory, later that night, 7:00 p.m. An assembled
audience of two thousand settles down as the house lights dim. Prominent business leaders greet
each other with handshakes. Jimmy Zizmo, in a new cream-colored suit with yellow necktie,
crosses his legs, jiggling one saddle shoe. Lina and Desdemona hold hands, joined in a
mysterious union.

The curtain parts to gasps and scattered applause. A painted flat shows a steamship, two huge
smokestacks, and a swath of deck and railing. A gangway extends into the stage’s other focal
point: a giant gray cauldron emblazoned with the words FORD ENGLISH SCHOOL MELTING POT. A
European folk melody begins to play. Suddenly a lone figure appears on the gangway. Dressed
in a Balkan costume of vest, ballooning trousers, and high leather boots, the immigrant carries
his possessions bundled on a stick. He looks around with apprehension and then descends into
themelting pot.
“What propaganda,” Zizmomurmurs in his seat.
Lina shushes him.
Now SYRIA descends into the pot. Then ITALY.POLAND. NORWAY.PALESTINE. And
finally:GREECE.
“Look, it’s Lefty!”
Wearing embroidered palikari vest, puffy-sleeved poukamiso, and pleated foustanella skirt,
my grandfather bestrides the gangway. He pauses a moment to look out at the audience, but the
bright lights blind him. He can’t see my grandmother looking back, bursting with her secret.
GERMANY taps himon the back. “Macht schnell. Excuseme.Go fastly.”
In the front row, Henry Ford nods with approval, enjoying the show. Mrs. Ford tries to
whisper in his ear, but he waves her off. His blue seagull’s eyes dart from face to face as the
English instructors appear onstage next. They carry long spoons, which they insert into the pot.
The lights turn red and flicker as the instructors stir. Steam rises over the stage.
Inside the cauldron, men are packed together, throwing off immigrant costumes, putting on
suits. Limbs are tangling up, feet stepping on feet. Lefty says, “Pardon me, excuse me,” feeling
thoroughly American as he pulls on his blue wool trousers and jacket. In his mouth: thirty-two
teeth brushed in the American manner. His underarms: liberally sprinkled with American
deodorant. And now spoons are descending from above, men are churning around and around
. . .
. . . as twomen, short and tall, stand in thewings, holding a piece of paper . . .
. . . and out in the audiencemygrandmother has a stunned look on her face . . .
. . . and themelting pot boils over. Red lights brighten. The orchestra
launches into “YankeeDoodle.” One by one, the Ford English School graduates rise from the
cauldron. Dressed in blue and gray suits, they climb out, waving American flags, to thunderous
applause.

The curtain had barely come down before the men from the Sociological Department
approached.
“I pass the final exam,” my grandfather told them. “Ninety-three percent! And today I open
savings account.”
“That sounds fine,” the tall one said.
“But unfortunately, it’s too late,” said the short one. He took a slip from his pocket, a color
well known inDetroit: pink.
“We did some checking on your landlord. This so-called Jimmy Zizmo. He’s got a police
record.”
“I don’t knowanything,”mygrandfather said. “I’m sure is amistake.He is a niceman.Works
hard.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stephanides. But you can understand that Mr. Ford can’t have workers
maintaining such associations.Youdon’t need to comedown to the plant onMonday.”
As my grandfather struggled to absorb this news, the short one leaned in. “I hope you learn a
lesson from this. Mixing with the wrong crowd can sink you. You seem like a nice guy, Mr.
Stephanides.Youreally do.Wewish you the best of luck in the future.”
A few minutes later, Lefty came out to meet his wife. He was surprised when, in front of
everyone, she hugged him, refusing to let go.
“Youliked the pageant?”

“It’s not that.”
“What is it?”
Desdemona looked into her husband’s eyes. But it was Sourmelina who explained it all. “Your
wife and I?” she said in plainEnglish. “We’re both knocked up.”

MINOTAURS

Which is something I’ll never have much to do with. Like most hermaphrodites but by no
means all, I can’t have children. That’s one of the reasonswhy I’ve nevermarried. It’s one of the
reasons, aside from shame, why I decided to join the Foreign Service. I’ve never wanted to stay
in one place. After I started living as a male, my mother and I moved away from Michigan and
I’ve been moving ever since. In another year or two I’ll leave Berlin, to be posted somewhere
else. I’ll be sad to go. This once-divided city reminds me of myself. My struggle for unification,
for Einheit. Coming froma city still cut in half by racial hatred, I feel hopeful here inBerlin.
A word on my shame. I don’t condone it. I’m trying my best to get over it. The intersex
movement aims to put an end to infant genital reconfiguration surgery. The first step in that
struggle is to convince the world—and pediatric endocrinologists in particular—that
hermaphroditic genitals are not diseased. One out of every two thousand babies is born with
ambiguous genitalia. In the United States, with a population of two hundred and seventy-five
million, that comes to one hundred and thirty-seven thousand intersexuals alive today.
But we hermaphrodites are people like everybody else. And I happen not to be a political
person. I don’t like groups. Though I’m a member of the Intersex Society of North America, I
have never taken part in its demonstrations. I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It’s
not the bestway to live. But it’s theway I am.
The most famous hermaphrodite in history? Me? It felt good to write that, but I’ve got a long
way to go. I’m closeted at work, revealing myself only to a few friends. At cocktail receptions,
when I find myself standing next to the former ambassador (also a native of Detroit), we talk
about theTigers.Only a fewpeople here inBerlin knowmy secret. I tellmore people than I used
to, but I’m not at all consistent. Some nights I tell people I’ve just met. In other cases I keep
silent forever.
That goes especially for women I’m attracted to. When I meet someone I like and who seems
to like me, I retreat. There are lots of nights out in Berlin when, emboldened by a good-value
Rioja, I forget my physical predicament and allow myself to hope. The tailored suit comes off.
The Thomas Pink shirt, too. My dates can’t fail to be impressed by my physical condition.
(Under the armor of my double-breasted suits is another of gym-built muscle.) But the final
protection, my roomy, my discreet boxer shorts, these I do not remove. Ever. Instead I leave,
making excuses. I leave and never call themagain. Just like a guy.
And soon enough I am at it again. I am trying once more, toeing the line. I saw my bicyclist
again this morning. This time I found out her name: Julie. Julie Kikuchi. Raised in northern
California, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently in Berlin on a grant
from theKünstlerhausBethanien. Butmore important, right now:mydate for Friday night.
It’s just a first date. It won’t come to anything. No reason to mention my peculiarities, my
wandering in themaze thesemany years, shut away from sight.And from love, too.

The Simultaneous Fertilization had occurred in the early morning hours of March 24, 1923, in
separate, vertical bedrooms, after a night out at the theater. My grandfather, not knowing he was
soon to be fired, had splurged on four tickets to The Minotaur, playing at the Family. At first
Desdemona had refused to go. She disapproved of theater in general, especially vaudeville, but
in the end, unable to resist the Hellenic theme, she had put on a new pair of stockings, and a
black dress and overcoat, and made her way with the others down the sidewalk and into the
terrifyingPackard.
When the curtain rose at the Family Theater, my relatives expected to get the whole story.
How Minos, King of Crete, failed to sacrifice a white bull to Poseidon. How Poseidon, enraged,
caused Minos’s wife Pasiphaë to be smitten with love for a bull. How the child of that union,
Asterius, came out with a bull’s head attached to a human body. And then Daedalus, the maze,
etc. As soon as the footlights came on, however, the production’s nontraditional emphasis
became clear. Because now they pranced onstage: the chorus girls. Dressed in silver halters,
robed in see-through shifts, they danced, reciting strophes that didn’t scan to the eerie piping of
flutes. The Minotaur appeared, an actor wearing a papier-mâché bull’s head. Lacking any sense
of classical psychology, the actor played his half-human character as pure movie monster. He
growled; drums pounded; chorus girls screamed and fled. The Minotaur pursued, and of course
he caught them, each one, and devoured her bloodily, and dragged her pale, defenseless body
deeper into themaze.And the curtain camedown.
In the eighteenth row my grandmother gave her critical opinion. “It’s like the paintings in the
museum,” she said. “Just an excuse to showpeoplewith no clothes.”
She insisted on leaving before Act II. At home, getting ready for bed, the four theatergoers
went about their nightly routines. Desdemona washed out her stockings, lit the vigil lamp in the
hallway. Zizmo drank a glass of the papaya juice he touted as beneficial for the digestion. Lefty
neatly hung up his suit, pinching each trouser crease, while Sourmelina removed her makeup
with cold cream and went to bed. The four of them, moving in their individual orbits, pretended
that the play had had no effect on them. But now Jimmy Zizmo was turning off his bedroom
light. Now he was climbing into his single bed—to find it occupied! Sourmelina, dreaming of
chorus girls, had sleepwalked across the throw rug. Murmuring strophes, she climbed on top of
her stand-in husband. (“You see?” Zizmo said in the dark. “No more bile. It’s the castor oil.”)
Upstairs, Desdemona might have heard something through the floor if she hadn’t been
pretending to be asleep. Against her will, the play had aroused her, too. The Minotaur’s savage,
muscular thighs. The suggestive sprawl of his victims. Ashamed of her excitement, she gave no
outward sign. She switched off the lamp. She told her husband good night. She yawned (also
theatrical) and turned her back.While Lefty stole up frombehind.
Freeze the action. A momentous night, this, for all involved (including me). I want to record
the positions (Lefty dorsal, Lina couchant) and the circumstances (night’s amnesty) and the
direct cause (a play about a hybridmonster). Parents are supposed to pass downphysical traits to
their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs,
scenarios, even fates. Wouldn’t I also sneak up on a girl pretending to be asleep? And wouldn’t
there also be a play involved, and somebody dying onstage?
Leaving these genealogical questions aside, I return to the biological facts. Like college girls
sharing a dorm room, Desdemona and Lina were both synchronized in their menstrual cycles.
That night was day fourteen. No thermometer verified this, but a few weeks later the symptoms
of nausea and hypersensitive noses did. “Whoever named it morning sickness was a man,” Lina
declared. “He was just home in the morning to notice.” The nausea kept no schedule; it owned
no watch. They were sick in the afternoon, in the middle of the night. Pregnancy was a boat in a
storm and they couldn’t get off. And so they lashed themselves to the masts of their beds and
rode out the squall. Everything they came in contact with, the bedsheets, the pillows, the air

itself, began to turn on them. Their husbands’ breath became intolerable, and when they weren’t
too sick tomove, theywerewaving their arms, gesturing to themen to keep away.
Pregnancy humbled the husbands. After an initial rush of male pride, they quickly recognized
the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction, and quietly withdrew
into a baffled reserve, catalysts to an explosion they couldn’t explain. While their wives grandly
suffered in the bedrooms, Zizmo and Lefty retreated to the sala to listen to music, or drove to a
coffee house in Greektown where no one would be offended by their smell. They played
backgammon and talked politics, and no one spoke about women because in the coffee house
everyonewas a bachelor, nomatter howold hewas or howmany children he’d given awifewho
preferred their company to his. The talk was always the same, of the Turks and their brutality, of
Venizelos and his mistakes, of King Constantine and his return, and of the unavenged crime of
Smyrna burned.
“Anddoes anybody care?No!”
“It’s likewhatBérenger said toClemenceau: ‘Hewhoowns the oil owns theworld.’ ”
“Those damnTurks!Murderers and rapists!”
“They desecrated theHagia Sophia and now they destroyedSmyrna!”
But hereZizmo spoke up: “Stop bellyaching. Thewarwas theGreeks’ fault.”
“What!”
“Who invadedwho?” askedZizmo.
“TheTurks invaded. In 1453.”
“TheGreeks can’t even run their own country.Whydo they need another?”
At this point, men stood up, chairs were knocked over. “Who the hell are you, Zizmo?
GoddamnedPontian! Turk-sympathizer!”
“I sympathize with the truth,” shouted Zizmo. “There’s no evidence the Turks started that fire.
TheGreeks did it to blame it on theTurks.”
Lefty stepped between the men, preventing a fight. After that, Zizmo kept his political
opinions to himself. He sat morosely drinking coffee, reading an odd assortment ofmagazines or
pamphlets speculating on space travel and ancient civilizations. He chewed his lemon peels and
told Lefty to do so, too. Together, they settled into the random camaraderie of men on the
outskirts of a birth. Like all expectant fathers, their thoughts turned tomoney.

My grandfather had never told Jimmy the reason for his dismissal from Ford, but Zizmo had a
good idea why it might have happened. And so, a few weeks later, he made what restitution he
could.
“Just act likewe’re going for a drive.”
“Okay.”
“Ifwe get stopped, don’t say anything.”
“Okay.”
“This is a better job than the Rouge. Believe me. Five dollars a day is nothing. And here you
can eat all the garlic youwant.”
They are in the Packard, passing the amusement grounds of Electric Park. It’s foggy out, and
late—just past 3 a.m. To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but,
formyownpurposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that
my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A
moment of cheap
symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they
can’t see a thing. Spring fog foams over the ramparts of the newly opened Belle Isle Bridge. The
yellowglobes of streetlamps glow, aureoled in themist.
“Lot of traffic for this late,” Leftymarvels.
“Yes,”saysZizmo. “It’s very popular at night.”
The bridge lifts them gently above the river and sets them back down on the other side. Belle
Isle, a paramecium-shaped island in the Detroit River, lies less than half a mile from the

Canadian shore. By day, the park is full of picnickers and strollers. Fishermen line its muddy
banks. Church groups hold tent meetings. Come dark, however, the island takes on an offshore
atmosphere of relaxed morals. Lovers park in secluded lookouts. Cars roll over the bridge on
shadowy missions. Zizmo drives through the gloom, past the octagonal gazebos and the
monument of the Civil War Hero, and into the woods where the Ottawa once held their summer
camp. Fogwipes thewindshield. Birch trees shed parchment beneath an ink-black sky.
Missing frommost cars in the 1920s: rearviewmirrors. “Steer,” Zizmokeeps saying, and turns
around to see if they’re being followed. In this fashion, trading the wheel, they weave along
Central Avenue and The Strand, circling the island three times, until Zizmo is satisfied. At the
northeastern end, he pulls the car over, facingCanada.
“Why arewe stopping?”
“Wait and see.”
Zizmo turns the headlights on and off three times. He gets out of the car. So does Lefty. They
stand in the darkness amid river sounds, waves lapping, freighters blowing foghorns. Then
there’s another sound: a distant hum. “You have an office?” my grandfather asks. “A
warehouse?” “This is my office.” Zizmo waves his hands through the air. He points to the
Packard. “And that’s my warehouse.” The hum is getting louder now; Lefty squints through the
fog. “I used to work for the railroad.” Zizmo takes a dried apricot out of his pocket and eats it.
“Out West in Utah. Broke my back. Then I got smart.” But the hum has almost reached them;
Zizmo is opening the trunk. And now, in the fog, an outboard appears, a sleek craft with two
men aboard. They cut the engine as the boat glides into the reeds. Zizmo hands an envelope to
oneman. The otherwhisks the tarp off the
boat’s stern. Inmoonlight, neatly stacked, twelvewooden crates gleam.
“Now I run a railroad ofmyown,” saysZizmo. “Start unloading.”
The precise nature of Jimmy Zizmo’s importing business was thus revealed. He didn’t deal in
dried apricots from Syria, halvah from Turkey, and honey from Lebanon. He imported Hiram
Walker’s whiskey from Ontario, beer from Quebec, and rum from Barbados by way of the St.
Lawrence River. A teetotaler himself, he made his living buying and selling liquor. “If these
Amerikani are all drunks,what can I do?” he justified, driving awayminutes later.
“You should have told me!” Lefty shouted, enraged. “If we get caught, I won’t get my
citizenship. They’ll sendmeback toGreece.”
“What choice do you have? You have a better job? And don’t forget. You and I, we have
babies on theway.”
So beganmygrandfather’s life of crime. For the next eightmonths heworked inZizmo’s rum-
running operation, observing its odd hours, getting up in the middle of the night and having
dinner at dawn. He adopted the slang of the illegal trade, increasing his English vocabulary
fourfold. He learned to call liquor “hooch,” “bingo,” “squirrel dew,” and “monkey swill.” He
referred to drinking establishments as “boozeries,” “doggeries,” “rumholes,” and “schooners.”
He learned the locations of blind pigs all over the city, the funeral parlors that filled bodies not
with embalming fluid but with gin, the churches that offered something more than sacramental
wine, and the barbershops whose Barbicide jars contained “blue ruin.” Lefty grew familiar with
the shoreline of theDetroit River, its screened inlets and secret landings.He could identify police
outboards at a distance of a quarter mile. Rum-running was a tricky business. The major
bootlegging was controlled by the Purple Gang and the Mafia. In their beneficence they allowed
a certain amount of amateur smuggling to go on—the day trips to Canada, the fishing boats out
for a midnight cruise. Women took the ferry to Windsor with gallon flasks under their dresses.
As long as such smuggling didn’t cut into the main business, the gangs allowed it. But Zizmo
was far exceeding the limit.
They went out five to six times a week. The Packard’s trunk could fit four cases of liquor, its
commodious, curtained backseat eight more. Zizmo respected neither rules nor territories. “As
soon as they
voted in Prohibition, I went to the library and looked at a map,” he said, explaining how he’d

gotten into the business. “There they were, Canada and Michigan, almost kissing. So I bought a
ticket to Detroit. When I got here, I was broke. I went to see a marriage broker in Greektown.
The reason I let Lina drive this car? She paid for it.” He smiled with satisfaction, but then
followed his thoughts a little further and his face darkened. “I don’t approve of women driving,
mind you. And now they get to vote!” He grumbled to himself. “Remember that play we saw?
Allwomen are like that.Given the chance, they’d all fornicatewith a bull.”
“Those are just stories, Jimmy,” saidLefty. “Youcan’t take them literally.”
“Why not?” Zizmo continued. “Women aren’t like us. They have carnal natures. The best
thing to dowith them is to shut themup in amaze.”
“What are you talking about?”
Zizmo smiled. “Pregnancy.”
It was like a maze. Desdemona kept turning this way and that, left side, right side, trying to
find a comfortable position. Without leaving her bed, she wandered the dark corridors of
pregnancy, stumbling over the bones ofwomenwho had passed thisway before her. For starters,
her mother, Euphrosyne (whom she was suddenly beginning to resemble), her grandmothers, her
great-aunts, and all the women before them stretching back into prehistory right back to Eve, on
whose womb the curse had been laid. Desdemona came into a physical knowledge of these
women, shared their pains and sighs, their fear and protectiveness, their outrage, their
expectation. Like them she put a hand to her belly, supporting theworld; she felt omnipotent and
proud; and then amuscle in her back spasmed.
I give you now the entire pregnancy in time lapse. Desdemona, at eight weeks, lies on her
back, bedcovers drawnup to her armpits. The light at thewindow flickerswith the change of day
and night. Her body jerks; she’s on her side, her belly; the covers change shape. A wool blanket
appears and disappears. Food trays fly to the bedside table, then jump away before returning. But
throughout the mad dance of inanimate objects the continuity of Desdemona’s shifting body
remains at center. Her breasts inflate. Her nipples darken. At fourteen weeks her face begins to
growplump, so that for the first
time I can recognize the yia yia of my childhood. At twenty weeks a mysterious line starts
drawing itself down from her navel. Her belly rises like Jiffy Pop. At thirty weeks her skin thins,
and her hair gets thicker. Her complexion, palewith nausea at first, grows less so until there it is:
a glow.The bigger she gets, themore stationary. She stops lying on her stomach.Motionless, she
swells toward the camera. Thewindow’s strobe effect continues.At thirty-sixweeks she cocoons
herself in bedsheets. The sheets go up and down, revealing her face, exhausted, euphoric,
resigned, impatient.Her eyes open. She cries out.
Lina wrapped her legs in putties to prevent varicose veins. Worried that her breath was bad,
she kept a tin of mints beside her bed. She weighed herself each morning, biting her lower lip.
She enjoyed her newbuxom figure but fretted about the consequences. “Mybreastswill never be
the same. I know it. After this, just flaps. Like in the National Geographic.” Pregnancy made
her feel too much like an animal. It was embarrassing to be so publicly colonized. Her face felt
on fire during hormone surges. She perspired; hermakeup ran. The entire processwas a holdover
from more primitive stages of development. It linked her with the lower forms of life. She
thought of queen bees spewing eggs. She thought of the collie next door, digging its hole in the
backyard last spring.
The only escape was radio. She wore her earphones in bed, on the couch, in the bathtub.
During the summer she carried her Aeriola Jr. outside and sat under the cherry tree. Filling her
headwithmusic, she escaped her body.
On a third-trimester October morning, a cab pulled up outside 3467 Hurlbut Street and a tall,
slender figure climbed out. He checked the address against a piece of paper, collected his
things—umbrella and suitcase—and paid the driver. He took off his hat and stared into it as
though reading instructions along the lining. Then he put the hat back on and walked up onto the
porch.
Desdemona andLina both heard the knocking. Theymet at the front door.

When they opened it, theman looked frombelly to belly.
“I’m just in time,” he said.
It was Dr. Philobosian. Clear-eyed, clean-shaven, recovered from his grief. “I saved your
address.” They invited him in and he told his
story. He had indeed contracted the eye disease favus on the Giulia. But his medical license
had saved him from being sent back to Greece; America needed physicians. Dr. Philobosian had
stayed a month in the hospital at Ellis Island, after which, with sponsorship from the Armenian
Relief Agency, he had been admitted into the country. For the last eleven months he’d been
living inNew York,on the Lower East Side. “Grinding lenses for an optometrist.” Recently he’d
managed to retrieve some assets from Turkey and had come to the Midwest. “I’m going to open
a practice here.NewYorkhas toomanydoctors already.”
He stayed for dinner. The women’s delicate conditions didn’t excuse them from domestic
duties. On swollen legs they carried out dishes of lamb and rice, okra in tomato sauce, Greek
salad, rice pudding. Afterward, Desdemona brewed Greek coffee, serving it in demitasse cups
with the brown foam, the lakia, on top. Dr. Philobosian remarked to the seated husbands,
“Hundred-to-one odds.Are you sure it happened on the samenight?”
“Yes,”Sourmelina replied, smoking at the table. “Theremust have been a fullmoon.”
“It usually takes a woman five or six months to get pregnant,” the doctor went on. “To have
you twodo it on the samenight—a-hundred-to-one odds!”
“Hundred-to-one?”Zizmo looked across the table at Sourmelina,who looked away.
“Hundred-to-one at least,” assured the doctor.
“It’s all theMinotaur’s fault,” Lefty joked.
“Don’t talk about that play,”Desdemona scolded.
“Why are you looking atme like that?” askedLina.
“I can’t look at you?” asked her husband.
Sourmelina let out an exasperated sigh and wiped her mouth with her napkin. There was a
strained silence.Dr. Philobosian, pouring himself another glass ofwine, rushed in.
“Birth is a fascinating subject. Take deformities, for instance. People used to think they were
caused by maternal imagination. During the conjugal act, whatever the mother happened to look
at or think about would affect the child. There’s a story in Damascene about a woman who had a
picture of John the Baptist over her bed. Wearing the traditional hair shirt. In the throes of
passion, the poorwoman
happened to glance up at this portrait. Ninemonths later, her babywas born—furry as a bear!”
The doctor laughed, enjoying himself, sippingmorewine.
“That can’t happen, can it?”Desdemona, suddenly alarmed,wanted to know.
But Dr. Philobosian was on a roll. “There’s another story about a woman who touched a toad
whilemaking love.Her baby cameoutwith pop eyes and coveredwithwarts.”
“This is in a book you read?”Desdemona’s voicewas tight.
“Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels has most of this. The Church got into it, too. In his
Embryological Sacra, Cangiamilla recommended intra-uterine baptisms. Suppose you were
worried that youmight be carrying amonstrous baby.Well, therewas a cure for that.Yousimply
filled a syringewith holywater and baptized the infant before itwas born.”
“Don’t worry, Desdemona,” Lefty said, seeing how anxious she looked. “Doctors don’t think
that anymore.”
“Of course not,” said Dr. Philobosian. “All this nonsense comes from the Dark Ages. We
knownow thatmost birth deformities result from the consanguinity of the parents.”
“From thewhat?” askedDesdemona.
“From families intermarrying.”
Desdemonawentwhite.
“Causes all kinds of problems. Imbecility. Hemophilia. Look at the Romanovs. Look at any
royal family.Mutants, all of them.”

“I don’t remember what I was thinking that night,” Desdemona said later while washing the
dishes.
“I do,” saidLina. “Third one from the right.With the red hair.”
“I hadmyeyes closed.”
“Then don’tworry.”
Desdemona turned on the water to cover their voices. “And what about the other thing? The
con . . . the con . . .”
“The consanguinity?”
“Yes.Howdoyouknow if the baby has that?”
“Youdon’t knowuntil it’s born.”
“Mana!”
“Why do you think the Church doesn’t let brothers and sisters get married? Even first cousins
have to get permission fromabishop.”
“I thought itwas because . . .” and she trailed off, having no answer.
“Don’t worry,” Lina said. “These doctors exaggerate. If families marrying each other was so
bad,we’d all have six arms and no legs.”
But Desdemona did worry. She thought back to Bithynios, trying to remember how many
children had been born with something wrong with them. Melia Salakas had a daughter with a
piece missing from the middle of her face. Her brother, Yiorgos, had been eight years old his
whole life. Were there any babies with hair shirts? Any frog babies? Desdemona recalled her
mother telling stories about strange infants born in the village. They came every fewgenerations,
babies who were sick in some way, Desdemona couldn’t remember how exactly—her mother
had been vague. Every so often these babies appeared, and they always met with tragic ends:
they killed themselves, they ran off and became circus performers, they were seen years later in
Bursa, begging or prostituting themselves. Lying alone in bed at night, with Lefty out working,
Desdemona tried to recall the details of these stories, but it was too long ago and now
Euphrosyne Stephanides was dead and there was no one to ask. She thought back to the night
she’d gotten pregnant and tried to reconstruct events. She turned on her side. She made a pillow
stand in for Lefty, pressing it against her back. She looked around the room. There were no
pictures on the walls. She hadn’t been touching any toads. “What did I see?” she asked herself.
“Only thewall.”
But she wasn’t the only one tormented by anxieties. Recklessly now, and with an official
disclaimer as to the veracity of what I’m about to tell you—because, of all the actors in my
midwestern Epidaurus, the one wearing the biggest mask is Jimmy Zizmo—I’ll try to give you a
glimpse into his emotions that last trimester. Was he excited about becoming a father? Did he
bring home nutritive roots and brew homeopathic teas? No, he wasn’t, he didn’t. After Dr.
Philobosian came to dinner that night, Jimmy Zizmo began to change. Maybe it was what the
doctor had said regarding the synchronous pregnancies. A-hundred-to-one odds. Maybe it was
this stray bit of information that was responsible for Zizmo’s increasing moodiness, his
suspicious glances at his pregnant wife. Maybe he was doubting the likelihood that a single act
of intercourse in a five-month dry spell would result in a successful pregnancy. Was Zizmo
examining his youngwife and feeling old?Tricked?
In the late autumn of 1923, minotaurs haunted my family. To Desdemona they came in the
form of children who couldn’t stop bleeding, or who were covered with fur. Zizmo’s monster
was the well-known one with green eyes. It stared out of the river’s darkness while he waited
onshore for a shipment of liquor. It leapt up from the roadside to confront him through the
Packard’s windshield. It rolled over in bed when he got home before sunrise: a green-eyed
monster lying next to his young, inscrutable wife, but then Zizmo would blink and the monster
would disappear.

When the women were eight months pregnant, the first snow fell. Lefty and Zizmo wore gloves
and mufflers as they waited on the shore of Belle Isle. Nevertheless, despite his insulation, my

grandfather was shivering. Twice in the last month they’d had close calls with the police. Sick
with jealous suspicions, Zizmo had been erratic, forgetting to schedule rendezvous, choosing
drop-off points with insufficient preparation. Worse, the Purple Gang was consolidating its hold
on the city’s rum-running. Itwas only amatter of time before they ran afoul of it.
Meanwhile, back on Hurlbut, a spoon was swinging. Sourmelina, legs bandaged, lay back in
her boudoir as Desdemona performed the first of the many prognostications that would end with
me.
“Tellme it’s a girl.”
“Youdon’t want a girl. Girls are too much trouble. Youhave to worry about them going with
the boys.Youhave to get a dowry and find a husband—”
“They don’t have dowries inAmerica,Desdemona.”
The spoon began tomove.
“If it’s a boy, I’ll kill you.”
“Adaughter you’ll fightwith.”
“Adaughter I can talk to.”
“A son youwill love.”
The spoon’s arc increased.
“It’s . . . it’s . . .”
“What?”
“Start savingmoney.”
“Yes?”
“Lock thewindows.”
“Is it? Is it really?”
“Get ready to fight.”
“Youmean it’s a . . .”
“Yes.Agirl.Definitely.”
“Oh, thankGod.”
. . . And a walk-in closet being cleaned out. And the walls being painted white to serve as a
nursery. Two identical cribs arrive from Hudson’s. My grandmother sets them up in the nursery,
then hangs a blanket between them in case her child is a boy.Out in the hall, she stops before the
vigil light to pray to the All-Holy: “Please don’t let my baby be this thing a hemophiliac. Lefty
and I didn’t know what we were doing. Please, I swear I will never have another baby. Just this
one.”

Thirty-three weeks. Thirty-four. In uterine swimming pools, babies perform half-gainers,
flipping over headfirst. But Sourmelina and Desdemona, so synchronized in their pregnancies,
diverged at the end. On December 17, while listening to a radio play, Sourmelina removed her
earphones and announced that shewas having pains. Three hours later, Dr. Philobosian delivered
a girl, as Desdemona predicted. The baby weighed only four pounds three ounces and had to be
kept in an incubator for a week. “See?” Lina said to Desdemona, gazing at the baby through the
glass. “Dr. Philwaswrong. Look.Her hair’s black.Not red.”
Jimmy Zizmo approached the incubator next. He removed his hat and bent very close to
squint. And did he wince? Did the baby’s pale complexion confirm his doubts? Or provide
answers? As to why a wife might complain of aches and pains? Or why she might be
conveniently cured, in order to prove his paternity? (Whatever his doubts, the child was his.
Sourmelina’s complexion hadmerely stolen the show.Genetics, a crapshoot, entirely.)
All I know is this: shortly after Zizmo saw his daughter, he came up with his final scheme. A
week later, he toldLefty, “Get ready.Wehave business tonight.”

And now themansions along the lake are lit withChristmas lights. The great snow-covered lawn
of Rose Terrace, the Dodge mansion, boasts a forty-foot Christmas tree trucked in from the
Upper Peninsula.

Elves race around the pine in miniature Dodge sedans. Santa is chauffeured by a reindeer in a
cap. (Rudolph hasn’t been created yet, so the reindeer’s nose is black.) Outside the mansion’s
gates, a black-and-tan Packard passes by. The driver looks straight ahead. The passenger gazes
out at the enormous house.
Jimmy Zizmo is driving slowly because of the chains on the tires. They’ve come out along E.
Jefferson, past Electric Park and the Belle Isle Bridge. They’ve continued through Detroit’s East
Side, following Jefferson Avenue. (And now we’re here, my neck of the woods: Grosse Pointe.
Here’s the Starks’ house, where Clementine Stark and I will “practice” kissing the summer
before third grade. And there’s the Baker & Inglis School for Girls, high on its hill over the
lake.) My grandfather is well aware that Zizmo hasn’t come to Grosse Pointe to admire the big
houses. Anxiously, he waits to see what Zizmo has in mind. Not far from Rose Terrace, the
lakefront opens up, black, empty, and frozen solid. Near the bank the ice piles up in chunks.
Zizmo follows the shoreline until he comes to a gap in the road where boats launch in summer.
He turns in to it and stops.
“We’re going over the ice?”mygrandfather says.
“Easiestway toCanada at themoment.”
“Are you sure itwill hold?”
In response to my grandfather’s question, Zizmo only opens his door: to facilitate escape.
Lefty follows suit. The Packard’s front wheels drop onto ice. It feels as if the entire frozen lake
shifts. A high-pitched noise follows, as when teeth bear down on ice cubes. After a few seconds,
this stops. The rearwheels drop. The ice settles.
My grandfather, who hasn’t prayed since he was in Bursa, has the impulse to give it another
go. Lake St. Clair is controlled by the Purple Gang. It provides no trees to hide behind, no side
roads to sneak down.He bites his thumbwhere the nail ismissing.
Without a moon, they see only what the insectile headlamps illuminate: fifteen feet of
granular, ice-blue surface, crisscrossed by tire tracks. Vorticesof snow whirl up in front of them.
Zizmowipes the foggedwindshieldwith his shirt sleeve. “Keep a lookout for dark ice.”
“Why?”
“Thatmeans it’s thin.”
It’s not long before the first patch appears. Where shoals rise, lapping water weakens the ice.
Zizmo steers around it. Soon, however, another patch appears and he has to go in the other
direction.Right.
Left. Right. The Packard snakes along, following the tire tracks of other rumrunners.
Occasionally an ice house blocks their path and they have to back up, return the way they came.
Now to the right, now the left, nowbackward, now forward,moving into the darkness over ice as
smooth as marble. Zizmo leans over the wheel, squinting toward where the beams die out. My
grandfather holds his door open, listening for the sound of the ice groaning . . .
. . . But now, over the engine noise, another noise starts up. Across town on this very same
night, my grandmother is having a nightmare. She’s in a lifeboat aboard the Giulia. Captain
Kontoulis kneels between her legs, removing her wedding corset. He unlaces it, pulls it open,
while puffing on a clove cigarette. Desdemona, filled with embarrassment at her sudden
nakedness, looks down at the object of the captain’s fascination: a heavy ship’s rope disappears
inside her. “Heave ho!” Captain Kontoulis shouts, and Lefty appears, looking concerned. He
takes the end of the rope and begins pulling.And then:
Pain. Dream pain, real but not real, just the neurons firing. Deep inside Desdemona, a water
balloon explodes. Warmth gushes against her thighs as blood fills the lifeboat. Lefty gives a tug
on the rope, then another. Blood spatters the captain’s face, but he lowers his brim and weathers
it. Desdemona cries out, the lifeboat rocks, and then there’s a popping sound and she feels a sick
sensation, as if she’s being torn in two, and there, on the end of the rope, is her child, a little knot
of muscle, bruise-colored, and she looks to find the arms and cannot, and she looks to find the
legs and cannot, and then the tiny head lifts and she looks into her baby’s face, a single crescent
of teeth opening and closing, no eyes, nomouth, only teeth, flapping open and shut . . .

Desdemona bolts awake. It’s a moment before she realizes that her actual, real-life bed is
soaked through.Herwater has broken . . .
. . . while out on the ice the Packard’s headlamps brighten with each acceleration, as more
juice flows from the battery. They’re in the shipping lane now, equidistant fromboth shores. The
sky a great black bowl above them, pierced with celestial fires. They can’t remember the way
they came now, how many turns they took, where the bad ice is. The frozen terrain is scrawled
with tire tracks leading in every possible direction. They pass the carcasses of old jalopies, front
ends fallen through the ice, doors riddledwith bullet holes. There are
axles lying about, and hubcaps, and a few spare tires. In the darkness and whirling snow, my
grandfather’s eyes play tricks on him. Twice he thinks he sees a phalanx of cars approaching.
The cars toy with them, appearing now in front, now to the side, now behind, coming and going
so quickly he can’t be sure if he saw them at all. And there is another smell in the Packard now,
above leather andwhiskey, a stringent,metallic smell overpoweringmygrandfather’s deodorant:
fear. It’s right then that Zizmo, in a calmvoice, says, “Something I alwayswondered about.Why
don’t you ever tell anyone that Lina is your cousin?”
The question, coming out of the blue, takes my grandfather off guard. “We don’t keep it a
secret.”
“No?” saysZizmo. “I’ve never heard youmention it.”
“Where we come from, everybody is a cousin,” Lefty tries to joke. Then: “How much farther
dowehave to go?”
“Other side of the shipping lane.We’re still on theAmerican side.”
“Howare you going to find themout here?”
“We’ll find them. Youwant me to speed up?” Without waiting for a reply, Zizmo steps on the
accelerator.
“That’s okay.Go slow.”
“Something else I alwayswanted to know,”Zizmo says, accelerating.
“Jimmy, be safe.”
“WhydidLina have to leave the village to getmarried?”
“You’regoing too fast. I don’t have time to check the ice.”
“Answerme.”
“Whydid she leave?Therewas no one tomarry. Shewanted to come toAmerica.”
“Is thatwhat shewanted?”He accelerates again.
“Jimmy. Slowdown!”
ButZizmopushes the pedal to the floor.And shouts, “Is it you!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it you!” Zizmo roars again, and now the engine is whining, the ice is whizzing by
underneath the car. “Who is it!” he demands to know. “Tellme!Who is it?” . . .
. . . But before my grandfather can come up with an answer, another memory comes careening
across the ice. It is a Sunday night duringmy childhood andmy father is takingme to themovies
at the
Detroit YachtClub. We ascend the red-carpeted stairs, passing silver sailing trophies and the
oil portrait of the hydroplane racer Gar Wood. On the second floor, we enter the auditorium.
Wooden folding chairs are set up before a movie screen. And now the lights have been switched
off and the clanking projector shoots out a beamof light, showing amillion dustmotes in the air.
The onlywaymy father could think of to instill inme a sense ofmyheritagewas to takeme to
dubbed Italian versions of the ancient Greek myths. And so, every week, we saw Hercules
slaying the Nemean lion, or stealing the girdle of the Amazons (“That’s some girdle, eh,
Callie?”), or being thrown gratuitously into snake pits without textual support. But our favorite
was theMinotaur . . .
. . . On the screen an actor in a bad wig appears. “That’s Theseus,” Milton explains. “He’s got
this ball of string his girlfriend gave him, see. And he’s using it to find his way back out of the
maze.”

Now Theseus enters the Labyrinth. His torch lights up stone walls made of cardboard. Bones
and skulls litter his path. Bloodstains darken the fake rock. Without taking my eyes from the
screen, I hold out my hand. My father reaches into the pocket of his blazer to find a butterscotch
candy.As he gives it tome, hewhispers, “Here comes theMinotaur!”And I shiverwith fear and
delight.
Academic tome then, the sad fate of the creature. Asterius, through no fault of his own, born a
monster. The poisoned fruit of betrayal, a thing of shame hidden away; I don’t understand any of
that at eight. I’m just rooting forTheseus . . .
. . . as my grandmother, in 1923, prepares to meet the creature hidden in her womb. Holding
her belly, she sits in the backseat of the taxi, while Lina, up front, tells the driver to hurry.
Desdemona breathes in and out, like a runner pacing herself, and Lina says, “I’m not even mad
at you for waking me up. I was going to the hospital in the morning anyway. They’re letting me
take the baby home.” But Desdemona isn’t listening. She opens her prepacked suitcase, feeling
among nightgown and slippers for her worry beads. Amber like congealed honey, cracked by
heat, they’ve gotten her through massacres, a refugee march, and a burning city, and she clicks
themas the taxi rattles over the dark streets, trying to outrace her contractions . . .
. . . as Zizmo races the Packard over the ice. The speedometer needle rises. The engine
thunders. Tire chains rooster-tail snow.The
Packard hurtles into the darkness, skidding on patches, fishtailing. “Did you two have it all
planned?” he shouts. “HaveLinamarry anAmerican citizen so she could sponsor you?”
“What are you talking about?” my grandfather tries to reason. “When you and Lina got
married, I didn’t even know Iwas coming toAmerica. Please slowdown.”
“Was that the plan? Find a husband and thenmove into his house!”
The never-failing conceit of Minotaur movies. The monster always approaches from the
direction you least expect. Likewise, out on Lake St. Clair, my grandfather has been looking out
for the Purple Gang, when in reality the monster is right next to him, at the wheel of the car. In
the wind from the open door, Zizmo’s frizzy hair streams back like a mane. His head is lowered,
his nostrils flared.His eyes shinewith fury.
“Who is it!”
“Jimmy!Turn around!The ice!You’renot looking at the ice.”
“Iwon’t stop unless you tellme.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Lina’s a good girl. Agoodwife to you. I swear!”
But the Packard hurtles on.Mygrandfather flattens himself against his seat.
“What about the baby, Jimmy?Think about your daughter.”
“Who says it’smine?”
“Of course it’s yours.”
“I never should havemarried that girl.”
Lefty doesn’t have time to argue the point.Without answering anymore questions, he rolls out
the open door, free of the car. The wind hits him like a solid force, knocking him back against
the rear fender. He watches as his muffler, in slow motion, winds itself around the Packard’s
back wheel. He feels it tighten like a noose, but then the scarf comes loose from his neck, and
time speeds up again as Lefty is thrown clear of the auto. He covers his face as he hits the ice,
skidding a great distance. When he looks up again, he sees the Packard, still going. It’s
impossible to tell if Zizmo is trying to turn, to brake. Lefty stands up, nothing broken, and
watches asZizmohurtles crazily on into the darkness . . . sixty yards . . . eighty . . . a hundred . . .
until suddenly another sound is heard.Above the engine
roar comes a loud crack, followed by a scintillation spreading underfoot, as the Packard hits a
dark patch on the frozen lake.
Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the
Packard’swheel, has already changed past understanding. Right here iswhere the trail goes cold.
I can take you this far and no further.Maybe itwas a jealous rage.Ormaybe hewas just figuring
his options. Weighing a dowry against the expense of raising a family. Guessing that it couldn’t

goon forever, this boom time of Prohibition.
And there’s one further possibility: hemight have been faking thewhole thing.
But there’s no time for these ruminations. Because the ice is screaming. Zizmo’s front wheels
crash through the surface. The Packard, as gracefully as an elephant standing on its front legs,
flips up onto its grille. There’s a moment where the headlamps illuminate the ice and water
below, like a swimming pool, but then the hood crashes through and, with a shower of sparks,
everything goes dark.

At Women’s Hospital, Desdemona was in labor for six hours. Dr. Philobosian delivered the
baby, whose sex was revealed in the usual manner: by spreading the legs apart and looking.
“Congratulations.A son.”
Desdemona,with great relief, cried out, “The only hair is on his head.”
Lefty arrived at the hospital soon thereafter.He hadwalked back to shore and hitched a ride on
a milk truck home. Now he stood at the window of the nursery, his armpits still rank with fear,
his right cheek roughened by his fall on the ice and his lower lip swollen. Just that morning,
fortuitously, Lina’s baby had gained enough weight to leave the incubator. The nurses held up
both children. The boy was named Miltiades after the great Athenian general, but would be
known asMilton, after the great English poet. The girl, whowould growupwithout a father,was
named Theodora, after the scandalous empress of Byzantium whom Sourmelina admired. She
would later get anAmerican nickname, too.
But there was something else I wanted to mention about those babies. Something impossible
to seewith the naked eye. Look closer. There. That’s right:
Onemutation apiece.

MARRIAGEONICE

JimmyZizmo’s funeralwas held thirteen days later by permission of the bishop inChicago. For
nearly two weeks the family stayed at home, polluted by death, greeting the occasional visitor
who came to pay respects. Black cloths covered the mirrors. Black streamers draped the doors.
Because a person should never show vanity in the presence of death, Lefty stopped shaving and
by the day of the funeral had grownnearly a full beard.
The failure of the police to recover the body had caused the delay. On the day after the
accident, two detectives had gone out to inspect the scene. The ice had refrozen during the night
and a few inches of new snow had fallen. The detectives trudged back and forth, searching for
tire tracks, but after a half hour gave up. They accepted Lefty’s story that Zizmo had gone ice-
fishing and might have been drinking. One detective assured Lefty that bodies often turned up in
the spring, remarkably preserved because of the freezingwater.
The family went ahead with their grief. Father Stylianopoulos brought the case to the attention
of the bishop,who granted the request to giveZizmo anOrthodox funeral, provided an interment
ceremony be held at the graveside if the body were later found. Lefty took care of the funeral
arrangements. He picked out a casket, chose a plot, ordered a headstone, and paid for the death
notices in the newspaper. In those days Greek immigrants were beginning to use funeral parlors,
but Sourmelina insisted that the viewing be held at
home. For over a week mourners arrived into the darkened sala, where the window shades
had been drawn and the scent of flowers hung heavy in the air. Zizmo’s shadowy business
associates made visits, as well as people from the speakeasies he supplied and a few of Lina’s
friends. After giving the widow their condolences, they crossed the living room to stand before
the open coffin. Inside, resting on a pillow, was a framed photograph of Jimmy Zizmo. The
picture showed Zizmo in three-quarters profile, gazing up toward the celestial glow of studio
lighting. Sourmelina had cut the ribbon between their wedding crowns and placed her husband’s
inside the coffin, too.
Sourmelina’s anguish at her husband’s death far exceeded her affection for him in life. For ten
hours over two days she keened over Jimmy Zizmo’s empty coffin, reciting the mirologhia. In
the best histrionic village style, Sourmelina unleashed soaring arias in which she lamented the
death of her husband and castigated him for dying.When shewas finishedwith Zizmo she railed
at God for taking him so soon, and bemoaned the fate of her newborn daughter. “You are to
blame! It is all your fault!” she cried. “What reason was there for you to die? Youhave left me a
widow! Youhave left your child on the streets!” She nursed the baby as she keened and every so
often held her up so that Zizmo and God could see what they had done. The older immigrants,
hearing Lina’s rage, found themselves returning to their childhood in Greece, to memories of
their own grandparents’ or parents’ funerals, and everyone agreed that such a display of grief
would guarantee JimmyZizmo’s soul eternal peace.
In accordance with Church law, the funeral was held on a weekday. Father Stylianopoulos,
wearing a tall kalimafkion on his head and a large pectoral cross, came to the house at ten in the

morning. After a prayer was said, Sourmelina brought the priest a candle burning on a plate. She
blew it out, the smoke rose and dispersed, and Father Stylianopoulos broke the candle in two.
After that, everyone filed outside to begin the procession to the church. Lefty had rented a
limousine for the day, and opened the door for his wife and cousin. When he got in himself, he
gave a smallwave to themanwhohad been chosen to stay behind, blocking the doorway to keep
Zizmo’s spirit from reentering the house. This man was Peter Tatakis, the future chiropractor.
Following tradition,Uncle Pete guarded the doorway
formore than twohours, until the service at the churchwas over.
The ceremony contained the full funeral liturgy, omitting only the final portion where the
congregation is asked to give the deceased a final kiss. Instead, Sourmelina passed by the casket
and kissed thewedding crown, followed byDesdemona andLefty.AssumptionChurch,which at
that time operated out of a small storefront on Hart Street, was still less than a quarter full.
Jimmy and Lina had not been regular churchgoers. Most of the mourners were old widows for
whom funerals were a form of entertainment. At last the pallbearers brought the casket outside
for the funeral photograph. The participants clustered around it, the simple Hart Street church in
the background. Father Stylianopoulos took his position at the head of the casket. The casket
itself was reopened to show the photo of Jimmy Zizmo resting against the pleated satin. Flags
were held over the coffin, the Greek flag on one side, the American flag on the other. No one
smiled for the flash. Afterward, the funeral procession continued to Forest Lawn Cemetery on
VanDyke, where the casket was put in storage until spring. There was still a possibility that the
bodymightmaterializewith the spring thaw.
Despite the performance of all the necessary rites, the family remained aware that Jimmy
Zizmo’s soulwasn’t at rest. After death, the souls of theOrthodox do notwing theirway directly
to heaven. They prefer to linger on earth and annoy the living. For the next forty days, whenever
my grandmother misplaced her dream book or her worry beads, she blamed Zizmo’s spirit. He
haunted the house, making fresh milk curdle and stealing the bathroom soap. As the mourning
period drew to an end, Desdemona and Sourmelina prepared the kolyvo. It was like a wedding
cake,made in three blindinglywhite tiers. A fence surrounded the top layer, fromwhich grew fir
treesmade of green gelatin. Therewas a pond of blue jelly, andZizmo’s namewas spelled out in
silver-coated dragées. On the fortieth day after the funeral, another church ceremony was held,
after which everyone returned to Hurlbut Street. They gathered around the kolyvo, which was
sprinkled with the powdered sugar of the afterlife and mixed with the immortal seeds of
pomegranates. As soon as they ate the cake, they could all feel it: Jimmy Zizmo’s soul was
leaving the earth and entering heaven,where it couldn’t bother themanymore.
At the height of the festivities, Sourmelina caused a scandal when she returned from her room
wearing a bright orange dress.
“What are you doing?”Desdemonawhispered. “Awidowwears black for the rest of her life.”
“Forty days is enough,” saidLina, andwent on eating.
Only then could the babies be baptized. The next Saturday, Desdemona, seized with
conflicting emotions, watched as the children’s godfathers held them above the baptismal font at
Assumption. As she entered the church, my grandmother had felt an intense pride. People
crowded around, trying to get a look at her new baby, who had the miraculous power of turning
even the oldest women into young mothers again. During the rite itself, Father Stylianopoulos
clipped a lock of Milton’s hair and dropped it into the water. He chrismed the sign of the cross
on the baby’s forehead. He submerged the infant under the water. But as Milton was cleansed of
original sin,Desdemona remained cognizant of her iniquity. Silently, she repeated her vownever
to have another child.
“Lina,” she began a fewdays later, blushing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Not nothing. Something.What?”
“I was wondering. How do you . . . if you don’t want . . .” And she blurted it out: “How do

youkeep fromgetting pregnant?”
Lina gave a low laugh. “That’s not something I have toworry about anymore.”
“But do you knowhow? Is there away?”
“My mother always said as long as you’re nursing, you can’t get pregnant. I don’t know if it’s
true, but that’swhat she said.”
“But after that,what then?”
“Simple.Don’t sleepwith your husband.”
At present, it was possible. Since the birth of the baby, my grandparents had taken a hiatus
from lovemaking. Desdemona was up half the night breast-feeding. She was always exhausted.
In addition, her perineum had torn during the delivery and was still healing. Lefty politely kept
himself from starting anything amorous, but after the secondmonth he began to comeover to her
side of the bed. Desdemona held him off as long as she could. “It’s too soon,” she said. “We
don’twant another baby.”
“Whynot?Milton needs a brother.”
“You’rehurtingme.”
“I’ll be gentle. Comehere.”
“No, please, not tonight.”
“What?Are you turning into Sourmelina?Once a year is enough?”
“Quiet.You’llwake the baby.”
“I don’t care if Iwake the baby.”
“Don’t shout.Okay.Here. I’m ready.”
But fiveminutes later: “What’s thematter?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tellme nothing. It’s like beingwith a statue.”
“Oh, Lefty!”And she burst into sobs.
Lefty comforted her and apologized, but as he turned over to go to sleep he felt himself being
enclosed in the loneliness of fatherhood. With the birth of his son, Eleutherios Stephanides saw
his future and continuing diminishment in the eyes of his wife, and as he buried his face in his
pillow, he understood the complaint of fathers everywhere who lived like boarders in their own
homes. He felt a mad jealousy toward his infant son, whose cries were the only sounds
Desdemona seemed to hear, whose little body was the recipient of unending ministrations and
caresses, and who had muscled his own father aside in Desdemona’s affections by a seemingly
divine subterfuge, a god taking the form of a piglet in order to suckle at a woman’s breast. Over
the next weeks and months, Lefty watched from the Siberia of his side of the bed as this mother-
infant love affair blossomed. He saw his wife scrunch her face up against the baby’s to make
cooing noises; he marveled at her complete lack of disgust toward the infant’s bodily processes,
the tendernesswithwhich she cleaned up and powdered the baby’s bottom, rubbingwith circular
motions and even once, to Lefty’s shock, spreading the tiny buttocks to daub the rosebud
betweenwith petroleum jelly.
From then on, my grandparents’ relationship began to change. Up until Milton’s birth, Lefty
and Desdemona had enjoyed an unusually close and egalitarian marriage for its time. But as
Lefty began to feel left out, he retaliatedwith tradition.He stopped calling hiswife kukla, which
meant “doll,” and began calling her kyria, which meant “Madame.” He reinstituted sex
segregation in the house, reserving
the sala for his male companions and banishing Desdemona to the kitchen. He began to give
orders. “Kyria, my dinner.” Or: “Kyria, bring the drinks!” In this he acted like his
contemporaries and no one noticed anything out of the ordinary except Sourmelina. But even she
couldn’t entirely throw off the chains of the village, and when Lefty had his male friends over to
the house to smoke cigars and sing kleftic songs, she retreated to her bedroom.
Shut up in the isolation of paternity, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on finding a safer way to
make a living. He wrote to the Atlantis Publishing Company in New York, offering his services
as a translator, but received in return only a letter thanking him for his interest, along with a

catalogue. He gave the catalogue to Desdemona, who ordered a new dream book. Wearing his
blue Protestant suit, Lefty visited the local universities and colleges in person to inquire about
the possibility of becoming a Greek instructor. But there were few positions, and all were filled.
My grandfather lacked the necessary classics degree; he hadn’t even graduated from university.
Though he learned to speak a fluent, somewhat eccentric English, his written command of the
language was mediocre at best. With a wife and child to support, there was no thought of his
returning to school. Despite these obstacles or maybe because of them, during the forty-day
mourning period Lefty had set up a study for himself in the living room and returned to his
scholarly pursuits. Obstinately, and for sheer escape, he spent hours translating Homer and
Mimnermos into English. He used beautiful, much too expensive Milanese notebooks and wrote
with a fountain pen filled with emerald ink. In the evenings, other young immigrant men came
over, bringing bootleg whiskey, and they all drank and played backgammon. Sometimes
Desdemona smelled the familiarmusky-sweet scent seeping under the door.
During the daytime, if he felt cooped up, Lefty pulled his new fedora low on his forehead and
left the house to think. He walked down to Waterworks Park, amazed that the Americans had
built such a palace to house plumbing filters and intake valves. He went down to the river and
stood among the dry-docked boats. German shepherds, chained in ice-whitened yards, snarled at
him. He peeked into the windows of bait shops closed for the winter. During one of these walks
he passed a demolished apartment building. The façade
had been torn down, revealing the inner rooms like a dollhouse. Lefty saw the brightly tiled
kitchens and bathrooms hanging in midair, half-enclosed spaces whose rich colors reminded him
of the sultans’ tombs, and he had an idea.
The next morning he climbed down into the basement on Hurlbut and went to work. He
removed Desdemona’s spiced sausages from the heating pipes. He swept up the cobwebs and
laid a rug over the dirt floor. He brought down Jimmy Zizmo’s zebra skin from upstairs and
tacked it on thewall. In front of the sink he built a small bar out of discarded lumber and covered
it with scavenged tiles: blue-and-white arabesques; Neapolitan checkerboard; red heraldic
dragons; and local, earth-tone Pewabics. For tables, he upended cable reels and spread themwith
cloths. He tented bedsheets overhead, hiding the pipes. From his old connections in the rum-
running business he rented a slotmachine and ordered aweek’s supply of beer andwhiskey.And
on a cold Friday night in February of 1924, he opened for business.
The Zebra Room was a neighborhood place with irregular hours. Whenever Lefty was open
for business he put an icon of St. George in the living room window, facing the street. Patrons
came around back, giving a coded knock—a long and two shorts followed by two longs—on the
basement door. Then they descended out of the America of factory work and tyrannical foremen
into an Arcadian grotto of forgetfulness. My grandfather put the Victrola in the corner. He set
out braided sesame koulouria on the bar. He greeted people with the exuberance they expected
from a foreigner and he flirted with the ladies. Behind the bar a stained glass window of liquor
bottles glowed: the blues of English gin, the deep reds of claret and Madeira, the tawny browns
of scotch and bourbon.Ahanging lamp spun on its chain, speckling the zebra skinwith light and
making the customers feel even drunker than they were. Occasionally someone would stand up
from his chair and begin to twitch and snap his fingers to the strange music, while his
companions laughed.
Down in that basement speakeasy, my grandfather acquired the attributes of the barkeep he
would be for the rest of his life. He channeled his intellectual powers into the science of
mixology. He learned how to serve the evening rush one-man-band style, pouring whiskeys with
his right handwhile filling beer steinswith his left, as he pushed
out coasters with his elbow and pumped the keg with his foot. For fourteen to sixteen hours a
day he worked in that sumptuously decorated hole in the ground and never stopped moving the
entire time. If hewasn’t pouring drinks, hewas refilling the koulouria trays. If hewasn’t rolling
out a new beer keg, he was placing hard-boiled eggs in a wire hamper. He kept his body busy so
that his mind wouldn’t have a chance to think: about the growing coldness of his wife, or the

way their crime pursued them. Lefty had dreamed of opening a casino, and the Zebra Room was
as close as he ever came to it. There was no gambling, no potted palms, but there was rebetika
and, onmany nights, hashish.Only in 1958,when he had stepped frombehind the bar of another
ZebraRoom,wouldmygrandfather have the leisure to remember his youthful dreams of roulette
wheels. Then, trying to make up for lost time, he would ruin himself, and finally silence his
voice inmy life forever.
Desdemona and Sourmelina remained upstairs, raising the children. Practically speaking, this
meant that Desdemona got them out of bed in the morning, fed them, washed their faces, and
changed their diapers before bringing them in to Sourmelina,who by thenwas receiving visitors,
still smelling of the cucumber slices she put over her eyelids at night. At the sight of Theodora,
Sourmelina spread her arms and crooned, “Chryso fili!”—snatching her golden girl from
Desdemona and covering her face with kisses. For the rest of the morning, drinking coffee, Lina
amused herself by applying kohl to little Theodora’s eyelashes. When odors arose, she handed
the baby back, saying, “Something happened.”
Itwas Sourmelina’s belief that the soul didn’t enter the body until a child started speaking. She
let Desdemona worry about the diaper rashes and whooping coughs, the earaches and
nosebleeds. Whenever company came over for Sunday dinner, however, Sourmelina greeted
them with the overdressed baby pinned to her shoulder, the perfect accessory. Sourmelina was
bad with babies but terrific with teenagers. She was there for your first crushes and heartbreaks,
your party dresses and spins at sophisticated states like anomie. And so, in those early years,
Milton andTheodora grew up together in the traditional Stephanides way. As once a kelimi had
separated a brother and sister, now a wool blanket separated second cousins. As once a double
shadowhad leapt up against amountainside, nowa similarly conjoined
shadowmoved across the back porch of the house onHurlbut.
They grew. At one, they shared the same bathwater. At two, the same crayons. At three,
Milton sat in a toy airplane while Theodora spun the propeller. But the East Side of Detroit
wasn’t a small mountain village. There were lots of kids to play with. And so when he turned
four, Milton renounced his cousin’s companionship, preferring to play with neighborhood boys.
Theodora didn’t care. By then she had another cousin to playwith.
Desdemona had done everything she could to fulfill her promise of never having another child.
She nursed Milton until he was three. She continued to rebuff Lefty’s advances. But it was
impossible to do so every night. There were times when the guilt she felt for marrying Lefty
conflicted with the guilt she felt for not satisfying him. There were times when Lefty’s need
seemed so desperate, so pitiful, that she couldn’t resist giving in to him. And there were times
when she, too, needed physical comfort and release. It happened nomore than a handful of times
each year, though more often in the summer months. Occasionally Desdemona had too much
wine on somebody’s name day, and then it also happened. And on a hot night in July of 1927 it
significantly happened, and the resultwas a daughter: ZoëHelenStephanides,myAuntZo.
From the moment she learned that she was pregnant, my grandmother was again tormented by
fears that the baby would suffer a hideous birth defect. In the Orthodox Church, even the
children of closely related godparents were kept from marrying, on the grounds that this
amounted to spiritual incest. What was that compared with this? This was much worse! So
Desdemona agonized, unable to sleep at night as the new baby grew inside her. That she had
promised the Panaghia, the All-Holy Virgin, that she would never have another child only made
Desdemona feel more certain that the hand of judgment would now fall heavy on her head. But
once again her anxieties were for naught. The following spring, on April 27, 1928, Zoë
Stephanides was born, a large, healthy girl with the squarish head of her grandmother, a
powerful cry, and nothing at all thematterwith her.
Milton had little interest in his new sister. He preferred shooting his slingshot with his friends.
Theodorawas just the opposite. She
was enthralled with Zoë. She carried the new baby around with her like a new doll. Their
lifelong friendship, which would suffer many strains, began from day one, with Theodora

pretending to beZoë’smother.
The arrival of another baby made the house on Hurlbut feel crowded. Sourmelina decided to
move out. She found a job in a florist’s shop, leaving Lefty and Desdemona to assume the
mortgage on the house. In the fall of that same year, Sourmelina andTheodora took up residence
nearby in theO’Toole Boardinghouse, right behindHurlbut onCadillac Boulevard. The backs of
the two houses faced each other and Lina and Theodora were still close enough to visit nearly
every day.

On Thursday, October 24, 1929, on Wall Street in New YorkCity, men in finely tailored suits
began jumping from the windows of the city’s famous skyscrapers. Their lemming-like despair
seemed far away from Hurlbut Street, but little by little the dark cloud passed over the nation,
moving in the opposite direction to the weather, until it reached the Midwest. The Depression
made itself known to Lefty by a growing number of empty barstools. After nearly six years of
operating at full capacity, there began to be slow periods, nights when the place was only two-
thirds full, or just half. Nothing deterred the stoic alcoholics from their calling. Despite the
international banking conspiracy (unmasked by Father Coughlin on the radio), these stalwarts
presented themselves for duty whenever St. George galloped in the window. But the social
drinkers and familymen stopped showing up.ByMarch of 1930, only half asmany patrons gave
the secret dactylic-spondaic knock on the basement door. Business picked up during the summer.
“Don’t worry,” Lefty told Desdemona. “President Herbert Hoover is taking care of things. The
worst is over.” They skated along through the next year and a half, but by 1932 only a few
customers were coming in each day. Lefty extended credit, discounted drinks, but it was no use.
Soon he couldn’t pay for shipments of liquor. One day twomen came in and repossessed the slot
machine.
“It was terrible. Terrible!” Desdemona still cried fifty years later, describing those years.
Throughout my childhood the slightest mention of the Depression would set my yia yia off into
a full cycle of
wailing and breast-clutching. (Even once when the subject was “manic depression.”) She
would go limp in her chair, squeezing her face in both hands like the figure in Munch’s The
Scream—and then would do so: “Mana! The Depression! So terrible you no can believe!
Everybody they no have work. I remember the marches for the hunger, all the people they are
marching in the street, amillion people, one after one, one after one, to go to tellMr.Henry Ford
to open the factory. Thenwe have in the alley one night a noisewas terrible. The people they are
killing rats, plam plam plam, with sticks, to go to eat the rats. Oh my God! And Lefty he was no
working in the factory then.He only having, you know, the speakeasy,where the people they use
to come to drink. But in the Depression was in the middle another bad time, economy very bad,
and nobody they have money to drink. They no can eat, how they can drink? So soon papou
and yia yia weno havemoney.And then”—hand to heart—“then theymakeme go towork for
those mavros. Black people!OhmyGod!”
It happened like this. One night,my grandfather got into bedwithmy grandmother to find that
she wasn’t alone. Milton, eight years old now, was snuggled up against her side. On her other
side was Zoë, who was only four. Lefty, exhausted from work, looked down at the spectacle of
thismenagerie. He loved the sight of his sleeping children.Despite the problems of hismarriage,
he could never blame his son or daughter for them. At the same time, he rarely saw them. In
order to make enough money he had to keep the speakeasy open sixteen, sometimes eighteen,
hours a day.Heworked seven days aweek. To support his family he had to be exiled from them.
In the mornings when he was around the house, his children treated him like a familiar relative,
an unclemaybe, but not a father.
And then there was the problem of the bar ladies. Serving drinks day and night, in a dim
grotto, he had many opportunities to meet women drinking with their friends or even alone. My
grandfather was thirty years old in 1932. He had filled out and become a man; he was charming,
friendly, always well dressed—and still in his physical prime. Upstairs his wife was too

frightened to have sex, but down in the Zebra Room women gave Lefty bold, hot looks. Now, as
my grandfather gazed down at the three sleeping figures in the bed, his head contained all these
things at once: love for his children, love
for his wife, along with frustration with his marriage, and boyish, unmarried-feeling
excitement around the bar ladies. He bent his face close to Zoë’s. Her hair was still wet from the
bath, and richly fragrant. He took his fatherly delights while at the same time he remained a man
apart. Lefty knew that all the things in his head couldn’t hold together. And so after gazing on
the beauty of his children’s faces, he lifted them out of the bed and carried them back to their
own room. He returned and got into bed beside his sleeping wife. Gently, he began stroking her,
moving his hand up under her nightgown.And suddenlyDesdemona’s eyes opened.
“What are you doing!”
“What do you think I’mdoing?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“I’mwaking you up.”
“Shame on you.” My grandmother pushed him away. And Lefty relented. He rolled angrily
away fromher. Therewas a long silence before he spoke.
“I don’t get anything fromyou. Iwork all the time and I get nothing.”
“Youthink I don’twork? I have two children to take care of.”
“If youwere a normalwife, itmight beworth it forme to beworking all the time.”
“If youwere a normal husband, youwould helpwith the children.”
“Howcan I help you?Youdon’t even understand what it takes tomake money in this country.
Youthink I’mhaving a good time down there?”
“Youplaymusic, you drink. I can hear themusic in the kitchen.”
“That’s my job. That’s why the people come. And if they don’t come, we can’t pay our bills.
The whole thing rests on me. That’s what you don’t understand. I work all day and night and
thenwhen I come to bed I can’t even sleep. There’s no room!”
“Milton had a nightmare.”
“I’mhaving a nightmare every day.”
He switched the light on and, in its glow, Desdemona saw her husband’s face screwed up with
a malice she’d never seen before. It was no longer Lefty’s face, no longer that of her brother or
her husband. Itwas the face of someone new, a stranger shewas livingwith.
And this terrible new face delivered an ultimatum:
“Tomorrowmorning,”Lefty spat, “you’re going to go get a job.”

The next day, when Lina came over for lunch, Desdemona asked her to read the newspaper for
her.
“Howcan Iwork? I don’t even knowEnglish.”
“Youknowa little.”
“We should have gone to Greece. In Greece a husband wouldn’t make his wife go out and get
a job.”
“Don’t worry,” Lina said, holding up the recycled newsprint. “There aren’t any.” The 1932
Detroit Times classifieds, advertised to a population of fourmillion, ran to just over one column.
Sourmelina squinted, looking for something appropriate.
“Waitress,” Lina read.
“No.”
“Whynot?”
“Menwould flirtwithme.”
“Youdon’t like to flirt?”
“Read,”Desdemona said.
“Tool and dye,” saidLina.
Mygrandmother frowned. “What is that?”
“I don’t know.”

“Like dyeing fabric?”
“Maybe.”
“Goon,” saidDesdemona.
“Cigar roller,” Lina continued.
“I don’t like smoke.”
“Housemaid.”
“Lina, please. I can’t be amaid for somebody.”
“Silkworker.”
“What?”
“Silkworker. That’s all it says.And an address.”
“Silkworker? I’ma silkworker. I knoweverything.”
“Then congratulations, you have a job. If it’s not gone by the time you get there.”
An hour later, dressed for job hunting, my grandmother reluctantly left the house. Sourmelina
had tried to persuade her to borrow a dress with a low neckline. “Wear this and no one will
noticewhat
kind of English you speak,” she said. But Desdemona set out for the streetcar in one of her
plain dresses, gray with brown polka dots. Her shoes, hat, and handbag were each a brown that
almostmatched.
Though preferable to automobiles, streetcars didn’t appeal to Desdemona either. She had
trouble telling the lines apart. The fitful, ghost-powered trolleys were always making unexpected
turns, shuttling her off into unknownparts of the city.When the first trolley stopped, she shouted
at the conductor, “Downtown?”He nodded. She boarded, flipped down a seat, and took fromher
purse the addressLina hadwritten out.When the conductor passed by, she showed it to him.
“Hastings Street? Thatwhat youwant?”
“Yes.Hastings Street.”
“Stay on this car toGratiot. Then take theGratiot car downtown.Get off atHastings.”
At the mention of Gratiot, Desdemona felt relieved. She and Lefty took the Gratiot line to
Greektown. Now everything made sense. So, they don’tmake silk in Detroit? she triumphantly
asked her absent husband. That’s how much you know. The streetcar picked up speed. The
storefronts of Mack Avenue passed by, more than a few closed up, windows soaped over.
Desdemona pressed her face to the glass, but now, because she was alone, she had a few more
words to say to Lefty. If those policemen at Ellis Island hadn’t taken my silkworms, I could set
up a cocoonery in the backyard. I wouldn’t have to get a job. We could make a lot of money. I
told you so. Passengers’ clothes, still dressy in those days, nevertheless showed wear and tear:
hats gone unblocked for months, hemlines and cuffs frayed, neckties and lapels gravy-stained.
On the curb a man held up a hand-painted sign: WORK-iS-WHAT-I-WANT-AND-NOT-
CHARiTY-WHO-WiLL-HELP-ME-GET-A-JOB.-7 YEARS-IN-DETROIT. NO-MONEy.-
SENT-AWAY-FURNISH-BEST-OF-REFERENCES.Look at that poor man. Mana! He looks
like a refugee. Might as well be Smyrna, this city. What’s the difference? The streetcar labored
on, moving away from the landmarks she knew, the greengrocer’s, the movie theater, the fire
hydrants and neighborhood newspaper stands. Her village eyes, which could differentiate
between trees and bushes at a glance, glazed over at the signage along the route, the meaningless
roman letters swirling into one another
and the ragged billboards showing American faces with the skin peeling off, faces without
eyes, or with no mouth, or with nothing but a nose. When she recognized Gratiot’s diagonal
swath, she stood up and called out in a ringing voice: “Sonnamabiche!” She had no idea what
this English word meant. She had heard Sourmelina employ it whenever she missed her stop. As
usual, it worked. The driver braked the streetcar and the passengers moved quickly aside to let
her off. They seemed surprisedwhen she smiled and thanked them.
On theGratiot streetcar she told the conductor, “Please, IwantHastings Street.”
“Hastings?Yousure?”
She showedhim the address and said it louder: “Hastings Street.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know.”
The streetcarmade forGreektown.Desdemona checked her reflection in thewindowand fixed
her hat. Since her pregnancies she had put on weight, thickened in the waist, but her skin and
hair were still beautiful and she was still an attractive woman. After looking at herself, she
returned her attention to the passing scenery. What else would my grandmother have seen on the
streets of Detroit in 1932? She would have seen men in floppy caps selling apples on corners.
She would have seen cigar rollers stepping outside windowless factories for fresh air, their faces
stained a permanent brown from tobacco dust. She would have seen workers handing out pro-
union pamphlets while Pinkerton detectives tailed them. In alleyways, she might have seen
union-busting goonsworking over those same pamphleteers. Shewould have seen policemen, on
foot and horseback, 60 percent of whom were secretly members of the white Protestant Order of
the Black Legion, who had their own methods for disposing of blacks, Communists, and
Catholics. “But come on,Cal,” I hearmymother’s voice, “don’t you have anything nice to say?”
Okay, all right. Detroit in 1932 was known as “The City of Trees.” More trees per square mile
here than any other city in the country. To shop, you had Kern’s and Hudson’s. On Woodward
Avenue the auto magnates had built the beautiful Detroit Institute of Arts, where, that very
minute while Desdemona rode to her job interview, a Mexican artist named Diego Rivera was
working on his own new commission: a mural depicting the new mythology of the automobile
industry.On
scaffolding he sat on a folding chair, sketching the great work: the four androgynous races of
humankind on the upper panels, gazing down on the River Rouge assembly line, where auto
workers labored, their bodies harmonized with effort. Various smaller panels showed the “germ
cell” of an infant wrapped in a plant bulb, the wonder and dread of medicine, the indigenous
fruits and grains of Michigan; and way over in one corner Henry Ford himself, gray-faced and
tight-assed, going over the books.
The trolley passed McDougal, Jos. Campau, and Chene, and then, with a little shiver, it
crossed Hastings Street. At that moment every passenger, all of whom were white, performed a
talismanic gesture.Men pattedwallets, women refastened purses. The driver pulled the lever that
closed the rear door.Desdemona, noticing all this, looked out to see that the streetcar had entered
theBlackBottomghetto.
There was no roadblock, no fence. The streetcar didn’t so much as pause as it crossed the
invisible barrier, but at the same time in the length of a block the world was different. The light
seemed to change, growing gray as it filtered through laundry lines. The gloom of front porches
and apartments without electricity seeped out into the streets, and the thundercloud of poverty
that hung over the neighborhood directed attention downward toward the clarity of forlorn,
shadowless objects: red bricks crumbling off a stoop, piles of trash and ham bones, used tires,
crushed pinwheels from last year’s fair, someone’s old lost shoe. The derelict quiet lasted only a
moment before Black Bottom erupted from all its alleys and doorways. Look at all the children!
So many! Suddenly children were running alongside the streetcar, waving and shouting. They
played chicken with it, jumping in front of the tracks. Others climbed onto the back. Desdemona
put a hand to her throat. Why do they have so many children? What’s the matter with these
people? The mavro women should nurse their babies longer.Somebody should tell them. Now
in the alleys she saw men washing themselves at open faucets. Half-dressed women jutted out
hips on second-story porches. Desdemona looked in awe and terror at all the faces filling the
windows, all the bodies filling the streets, nearly a half million people squeezed into twenty-five
square blocks. Ever since World War I when E. I. Weiss, manager of the Packard Motor
Company, had brought, by his own report, the first “load of
niggers” to the city, here in Black Bottom was where the establishment had thought to keep
them. All kinds of professions now crowded in together, foundry workers and lawyers, maids
and carpenters, doctors and hoodlums, but most people, this being 1932, were unemployed. Still,
more and more were coming every year, every month, seeking jobs in the North. They slept on
every couch in every house. They built shacks in the yards. They camped on roofs. (This state of

affairs couldn’t last, of course. Over the years, Black Bottom, for all the whites’ attempts to
contain it—and because of the inexorable laws of poverty and racism—would slowly spread,
street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the so-called ghetto would become the
entire city itself, and by the 1970s, in the no-tax-base, white-flight, murder-capital Detroit of the
ColemanYoungadministration, black people could finally livewherever theywanted to . . .)
But now, back in 1932, something oddwas happening. The streetcarwas slowing down. In the
middle of Black Bottom, it was stopping and—unheard of!—opening its doors. Passengers
fidgeted. The conductor tappedDesdemona on the shoulder. “Lady, this is it. Hastings.”
“Hastings Street?” She didn’t believe him. She showed him the address again. He pointed out
the door.
“Silk factory here?” she asked the conductor.
“No tellingwhat’s here.Notmyneighborhood.”
And so my grandmother stepped off onto Hastings Street. The streetcar pulled away, as white
faces looked back at her, a woman thrown overboard. She started walking. Gripping her purse,
she hurried down Hastings as though she knew where she was going. She kept her eyes fixed
straight ahead. Children jumped rope on the sidewalk. At a third-story window a man tore up a
piece of paper and shouted, “From now on, you can send my mail to Paris, postman.” Front
porches were full of living room furniture, old couches and armchairs, people playing checkers,
arguing,waving fingers, and breaking into laughter. Always laughing, these mavros. Laughing,
laughing, as though everything is funny. What is so funny, tell me? And what is—oh my God!—a
man doing his business in the street! I won’t look. She passed the yard of a junk artist: the Seven
Wonders of theWorldmade in bottle caps.An ancient drunk in a colorful sombreromoved
in slow motion, sucking his toothless maw and holding out a hand for spare change. But what
can they do? They don’t have any plumbing. No sewers, terrible, terrible. She walked by a
barbershop where men were getting their hair straightened, wearing shower caps like women.
Across the street youngmenwere calling out to her:
“Baby, you got somany curves youmake a car crash!”
“Youmust be a doughnut, baby, ’cause youmakemy jelly roll!”
Laughter erupted behind her as she hurried on. Farther and farther in, past streets she didn’t
know the names of. The smell of unfamiliar food in the air now, fish caught from the nearby
river, pig knuckles, hominy grits, fried baloney, black-eyed peas. But also many houses where
nothingwas cooking,where no onewas laughing or even talking, dark rooms full ofweary faces
and scroungy dogs. It was from a porch like this that somebody finally spoke. A woman, thank
God.
“Youlost?”
Desdemona took in the soft,molded face. “I am looking for factory. Silk factory.”
“No factories around here. If therewas they’d be closed.”
Desdemona handed her the address.
The lady pointed across the street. “Youthere.”
And turning, what did Desdemona see? Did she see a brown brick building known until
recently as McPherson Hall? A place rented out for political meetings, weddings, or
demonstrations by the occasional traveling clairvoyant? Did she notice the ornamental touches
around the entrance, the Roman urns spilling granite fruit, the harlequin marble? Or did her eyes
focus instead on the two young black men standing at attention outside the front door? Did she
notice their impeccable suits, one the light blue of a globe’s watery portions, the other the pale
lavender of French pastilles? Certainly she must have noticed their military bearing, the high
polish of their shoes, their vivid neckties. She must have felt the contrast between the young
men’s confident air and that of the downtrodden neighborhood, but whatever she felt at that
moment, her complex reaction has comedown tome as a single, shocked realization.
Fezzes. They were wearing fezzes. The soft, maroon, flat-topped headgear of my
grandparents’ former tormentors. The hats named for the city in Morocco where the blood-
colored dye came from, and

which (on the heads of soldiers) had chased my grandparents out of Turkey, staining the earth
a dark maroon. Now here they were again, in Detroit, on the heads of two handsome young
Negroes. (And fezzes will appear once more in my story, on the day of a funeral, but the
coincidence, being the kind of thing only real life can come up with, is too good to give away
right now.)
Tentatively, Desdemona crossed the street. She told the men she’d come about the ad. One
nodded. “Youhave to go around back,” he said. Politely, he led her down an alley and into the
well-swept backyard. At that moment, as at a discreet signal, the back door swung open and
Desdemona received her second shock. Two women in chadors appeared. They looked, to my
grandmother, like devout Muslims from Bursa, except for the color of their garments. They
weren’t black. They were white. The chadors started at their chins and hung all the way to their
ankles. White headscarves covered their hair. They wore no veils, but as they came forward,
Desdemona sawbrown school oxfords on their feet.
Fezzes, chadors, and next this: a mosque. Inside, the former McPherson Hall had been
redecorated according to a Moorish theme. The attendants led Desdemona over geometric
tilework. They took her past thick, fringed draperies that shut out the light. There was no sound
but the swishing of the women’s robes and, from far off, what sounded like a voice speaking or
praying. Finally, they showedher into an officewhere awomanwas hanging a picture.
“I’m Sister Wanda,” the woman said, without turning around. “Supreme Captain, Temple No.
1.” She wore another sort of chador entirely, with piping and epaulettes. The picture she was
hanging showed a flying saucer hovering over the skyline ofNewYork.Itwas shooting out rays.
“Youcome about the job?”
“Yes. I am silk worker. Have lot experience. Farming the silk, making the cocoonery, weaving
the . . .”
Sister Wanda swiveled around. She scanned Desdemona’s face. “We got a problem. What you
is?”
“I’mGreek.”
“Greek, huh. That’s a kind ofwhite, isn’t it?Youborn inGreece?”
“No. FromTurkey.We come fromTurkey.Myhusband andme, too.”
“Turkey!Whydidn’t you say so?Turkey’s aMuslim country.YouaMuslim?”
“No,Greek.GreekChurch.”
“But you born inTurkey.”
“Ne.”
“What?”
“Yes.”
“Andyour people come fromTurkey?”
“Yes.”
“So you probablymixed up a little bit, right?Younot allwhite.”
Desdemona hesitated.
“See, I’m trying to see howwe canwork it,” SisterWandawent on. “Minister Fard,who come
to us from the Holy City of Mecca, he always be impressing on us the importance of self-
reliance. Can’t rely on no white man no more. Got to do for ourself, understand?” She lowered
her voice. “Problem is, nobodyworth a toot come for the ad. People come in here, they say they
know silk, but they don’t knownothing. Just hoping to get hired and fired.Get a day’s pay.” She
narrowed her eyes. “Thatwhat you planning?”
“No. Iwant only hire.No fire.”
“Butwhat you is?Greek, Turkish, orwhat?”
Again Desdemona hesitated. She thought about her children. She imagined coming home to
them without any food. And then she swallowed hard. “Everybody mixed. Turks, Greeks, same
same.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Sister Wanda smiled broadly. “Minister Fard, he mixed, too.
Letme showyouwhatwe need.”

She led Desdemona down a long, wainscoted corridor, through a telephone operator’s office,
and into another darker hallway. At the far end heavy drapes blocked off the main lobby. Two
young guards stood at attention. “Youcome to work for us, few things you should know. Never,
ever, go through them curtains. Main temple in there, where Minister Fard deliver his sermons.
Youstay back here in the women’s quarters. Best cover your hair, too. That hat shows your ears,
which be an enticement.”
Desdemona instinctively touched her ears, looking back at the guards. Their expressions
remained impassive. She turned back, following the SupremeCaptain.
“Letme showyou the operationwegot going,” SisterWanda
said. “We got everything. All we need is a little, you know, know-how.” She started up the
stairs andDesdemona followed.
(It’s a long stairway, three flights up, and Sister Wanda has bad knees, so it will take some
time for them to reach the top. Leave them there, climbing,while I explainwhatmygrandmother
had gotten herself into.)
“Sometime in the summer of 1930, an amiable but faintly mysterious peddler suddenly
appeared in the black ghetto of Detroit.” (I’m quoting from C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black
Muslims of America.) “He was thought to be an Arab, although his racial and national identity
remain undocumented. He was welcomed into homes of culture-hungry African-Americans who
were eager to purchase his silks and artifacts, which he claimedwere thoseworn by black people
in their homeland across the sea . . . His customerswere so anxious to learn of their ownpast and
the country from which they came that the peddler soon began holding meetings from house to
house throughout the community.
“At first, the ‘prophet,’ as he came to be known, confined his teachings to a recitation of his
experiences in foreign lands, admonitions against certain foods, and suggestions for improving
listeners’ physical health.Hewas kind, friendly, unassuming and patient.”
“Having aroused the interests of his host” (we move now to An Original Man by Claude
Andrew Clegg III), “[the peddler] would then deliver his sales pitch on the history and future of
African-Americans. The tacticworkedwell, and eventually he honed it to the point thatmeetings
of curious blackswere held in private homes. Later, public hallswere rented for his orations, and
an organizational structure for his ‘Nation of Islam’ began to take shape in the midst of poverty-
strickenDetroit.”
The peddler had many names. Sometimes he called himself Mr. Farrad Mohammad, or Mr. F.
Mohammad Ali. Other times he referred to himself as Fred Dodd, Professor Ford, Wallace Ford,
W. D. Ford, Wali Farrad, Wardell Fard, or W. D. Fard. He had just as many origins. People
claimed he was a black Jamaican whose father was a Syrian Muslim. One rumor maintained that
he was a Palestinian Arab who had fomented racial unrest in India, South Africa, and London
before moving to Detroit. There was a story that he was the son of rich parents from the tribe of
Koreish, the ProphetMuhammad’s
own tribe, while FBI records stated that Fard was born in either New Zealand or Portland,
Oregon, to eitherHawaiian orBritish andPolynesian parents.
One thing is clear: by 1932, Fard had established Temple No. 1 in Detroit. It was the back
stairs of this temple thatDesdemona found herself climbing.
“We sell the silks right from the temple,” Sister Wanda explained above. “Make the clothes
ourself according to Minister Fard’s own designs. From clothes our forefathers wore in Africa.
Used to be we just ordered the fabric and sewed up the clothes ourself. But with this De-
pression, fabric getting harder and harder to come by. So Minister Fard he had one of his
revelations. Come to me one morning and said, ‘We must own the means and ends of sericulture
itself.’ That howhe talk. Eloquent?Man could talk a dog off ameat truck.”
Climbing, Desdemona was beginning to make sense of things. The fancy suits of the men
outside. The redecoration within. Sister Wanda reached the landing—“In here our training
class”—and threwopen the door.Desdemona stepped up and saw them.
Twenty-three teenage girls, in bright chadors and head scarves, sewing clothes. They didn’t so

much as look up from their labor as the Supreme Captain brought in the stranger. Heads bent,
mouths fanning straight pins, hem-covered oxfords working unseen treadles, they continued
production. “This be our Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class. See how good
and proper they are?Don’t say aword unless you do. ‘Islam’means submission.Youknow that?
But getting back to why I run the ad. We running low on fabric. Everybody out of business
seems like.”
She ledDesdemona across the room.Awooden box full of dirt lay open.
“So what we did was, we ordered these silkworms from a company. You know, mail order?
Wegotmore on theway. Problem is, they don’t seem to like it here inDe-troit. Don’t blame ’em
myself. They keep dying on us, andwhen they do?Ooowhee,what a stink!My sweet Jes—”She
caught herself. “Just an expression. I was brought up Sanctified. Listen, what you say your name
was?”
“Desdemona.”
“Listen,Des, before I becameSupremeCaptain, I did hair and nails. Not no farmer’s daughter,
understand?This thumb look green
to you? Help me out. What do these silkworm fellas like? How we get them to, you know,
silkify?”
“It hardwork.”
“Wedon’tmind.”
“It takemoney.”
“Wegot plenty.”
Desdemona picked up a shriveledworm, barely alive. She cooed to it inGreek.
“Listen up now, little sisters,” Sister Wanda said, and, as one, the girls stopped sewing,
crossed hands in laps, and looked up attentively. “This the new lady gonna teach us how tomake
silk. She a mulatto like Minister Fard and she gonna bring us back the knowledge of the lost art
of our people. Sowe can do for ourself.”
Twenty-three pairs of eyes fell on Desdemona. She gathered courage. She translated what she
wanted to say into English and went over it twice before she spoke. “To make good silk,” she
then pronounced, beginning her lessons to the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization
Class, “you have to be pure.”
“We trying,Des. PraiseAllah.We trying.”

TRICKNOLOGY

That was how my grandmother came to work for the Nation of Islam. Like a cleaning lady
working inGrosse Pointe, she came andwent by the back door. Instead of a hat, shewore a head
scarf to conceal her irresistible ears. She never spoke above awhisper. She never asked questions
or complained. Having grown up in a country ruled by others, she found it all familiar. The
fezzes, the prayer rugs, the crescentmoons: itwas a little like going home.
For the residents of Black Bottom it was like traveling to another planet. The temple’s front
doors, in a sweet reversal of most American entrances, let blacks in and kept whites out. The
former paintings in the lobby—landscapes aglow with Manifest Destiny, scenes of Indians being
slaughtered—had been carted down to the basement. In their place were depictions of African
history: a prince and princess strolling beside a crystal river; a conclave of black scholars
debating in an outdoor forum.
People came to Temple No. 1 to hear Fard’s lectures. They also came to shop. In the old
cloakroom, Sister Wanda displayed the garments that the Prophet said were “the same kind that
the Negro people use in their home in the East.” She rippled the iridescent fabrics under the
lights as converts stepped up to pay. Women exchanged the maids’ uniforms of subservience for
thewhite chadors of emancipation.Men replaced the overalls of oppressionwith the silk suits of
dignity. The temple’s cash register overflowed. In lean times, the mosque was flush. Ford was
closing factories but, at 3408Hastings Street, Fardwas open for business.
Desdemona saw little of all this up on the third floor. She spent her mornings teaching in the
classroom and her afternoons in the Silk Room, where the uncut fabrics were stored. One
morning she brought in her silkworm box for show-and-tell. She passed the box around, telling
the story of its travels, how her grandfather had carved it from olivewood and how it had
survived a fire, and she managed to do all this without saying anything derogatory about the
students’ co-religionists. In fact, the girls were so sweet and friendly that Desdemona
rememberedwhat it had been like in the timeswhen theGreeks andTurks used to get along.
Nevertheless: black people were still new to my yia yia. She was shocked by various
discoveries: “Inside the hands,” she informed her husband, “the mavros are white like us.” Or:
“The mavros don’t have scars, only bumps.” Or: “Do you know how the mavro men shave?
With a powder! I saw it in the store window.” In the streets of Black Bottom, Desdemona was
appalled at the way people lived. “Nobody sweeps up. Garbage on the porches and nobody
sweeps it. Terrible.” But at the temple things were different. The men worked hard and didn’t
drink. The girlswere clean andmodest.
“ThisMr. Fard is doing something right,” she said at Sunday dinner.
“Please,” Sourmelina dismissed this, “we left veils back inTurkey.”
ButDesdemona shook her head. “TheseAmerican girls could use a veil or two.”
The Prophet himself remained veiled to Desdemona. Fard was like a god: present everywhere
and visible nowhere. His glow lingered in the eyes of people leaving a lecture. He expressed
himself in the dietary laws, which favored native African foods—the yam, the cassava—and

prohibited the consumption of swine. Every so often Desdemona saw Fard’s car—a brand-new
Chrysler coupe—parked in front of the temple. It always looked freshly washed and waxed, its
chromegrille polished.But she never sawFard at thewheel.
“How do you expect to see him if he’s God?” Lefty asked with amusement one night as they
were going to bed.Desdemona lay
smiling, as though tickled by her first week’s pay hidden under the mattress. “I’ll have to have
a vision,” she said.

Her first project at Temple No. 1 was to convert the outhouse into a cocoonery. Calling upon the
Fruit of Islam, as the military wing of the Nation was known, she stood by while the young men
pulled out thewooden commode from the rickety shack. They covered the cesspoolwith dirt and
removed old pinup calendars from the walls, averting their eyes as they threw the offending
material in the trash. They installed shelves and perforated the ceiling for ventilation. Despite
their efforts, a bad smell lingered. “Just wait,” Desdemona told them. “Compared to silkworms,
this is nothing.”
Upstairs, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class wove feeding trays.
Desdemona tried to save the initial batch of silkworms. She kept them warm under electric
lightbulbs and sang Greek songs to them, but the silkworms weren’t fooled. Hatching from their
black eggs, they detected the dry, indoor air and the false sun of the lightbulbs, and began to
shrivel up. “Got more on the way,” Sister Wanda said, brushing off this setback. “Be here
directly.”
The days passed. Desdemona became accustomed to the pale palms of Negro hands. She got
used to using the back door and to not speaking until spoken to. When she wasn’t teaching the
girls, shewaited upstairs in the SilkRoom.
The Silk Room: a description is in order. (So much happened in that fifteen-by-twenty-foot
space: God spoke; my grandmother renounced her race; creation was explained; and that’s just
for starters.) It was a small, low-ceilinged room, with a cutting table at one end. Bolts of silk
leaned against thewalls. The plushness extended floor to ceiling, like the inside of a jewelry box.
Fabricwas getting harder to comeby, but SisterWanda had stockpiled quite a bit.
Sometimes the silks seemed to be dancing. Stirred by air currents of a mysterious origin, the
fabrics flapped up and floated around the room. Desdemona would have to catch the cloth and
roll it back up.
And one day, in the middle of a ghostly pas de deux—a green silk leading as Desdemona
backpedaled—she heard a voice.
“IWASBORNINTHEHOLYCITYOFMECCA,ONFEBRUARY17, 1877.”
At first she thought someone had come into the room.Butwhen she turned, no onewas there.
“MY FATHER WAS ALPHONSO, AN EBONY-HUED MAN OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ. MY MOTHER’S NAME
WASBABYGEE. SHEWASACAUCASIAN,ADEVIL.”
A what? Desdemona couldn’t quite hear. Or determine the location of the voice. It seemed to
be coming from the floor now. “MY FATHER MET HER IN THE HILLS OF EAST ASIA. HE SAW POTENTIAL
INHER.HELEDHER INTHERIGHTEOUSWAYSUNTILSHEBECAMEAHOLYMUSLIM.”
It wasn’t what the voice was saying that intrigued Desdemona—she didn’t catch what it was
saying. It was the sound of the voice, a deep bass that set her breastbone humming. She let go of
the dancing silk. She lowered her kerchiefed head to listen. Andwhen the voice started up again,
she searched through bolts of silk for its source. “WHY DID MY FATHER MARRY A CAUCASIAN DEVIL?
BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT HIS SON WAS DESTINED TO SPREAD THE WORD TO THE LOST PORTION OF THE
TRIBE OF SHABAZZ.” Three, four, five bolts, and there it was: a heating grate. And the voice was
louder now. “THEREFORE, HE FELT THAT I, HIS SON, SHOULD HAVE A SKIN COLOR THAT WOULD ALLOW
ME TO DEAL WITH BOTH WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE JUSTLY AND RIGHTEOUSLY. SO I AM HERE, A
MULATTO,LIKEMUSABEFOREME,WHOBROUGHTTHECOMMANDMENTSTOTHEJEWS.”
From the depths of the building the Prophet’s voice rose. It began in the auditorium three
floors below. It filtered down through the trapdoor in the stage out of which, at the old
tobacconist conventions, the Rondega girl used to pop, clad in nothing but a cigar ribbon. The

voice reverberated in the crawl space that led to the wings, whereupon it entered a heating vent
and circulated around the building, growing distorted and echoey, until it rushed hotly out the
grate at which Desdemona now crouched. “MY EDUCATION, AS WELL AS THE ROYAL BLOOD THAT
RUNS IN MY VEINS, MIGHT HAVE LED ME TO SEEK A POSITION OF POWER. BUT I HEARD MY UNCLE
WEEPING,BROTHERS. IHEARDMYUNCLE INAMERICAWEEPING.”
She couldmake out a faint accent now. Shewaited formore, but
there was only silence. Furnace smell blew into her face. She bent lower, listening. But the
next voice she heardwasSisterWanda’s on the landing: “Yoo-hoo!Des!We ready for you.”
And she tore herself away.
My grandmother was the only white person who ever heard W. D. Fard sermonize, and she
understood less than half of what he said. It was a result of the heating vent’s bad acoustics, her
own imperfect English, and the fact that she kept lifting her head to hear if anyone was coming.
Desdemona knew that it was forbidden for her to listen to Fard’s lectures. The last thing she
wantedwas to jeopardize her new job.But therewas no other place for her to go.
Every day, at one o’clock, the grate began to rumble. At first she heard the noise of people
coming into the auditorium. Thiswas followed by chanting. She rolled extra bolts of silk in front
of the grate to muffle the sound. She moved her chair to the far corner of the Silk Room. But
nothing helped.
“PERHAPS YOU RECALL, IN OUR LAST LECTURE, HOW I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE DEPORTATION OF THE
MOON?”
“No, I don’t,” saidDesdemona.
“SIXTY TRILLION YEARS AGO A GOD-SCIENTIST DUG A HOLE THROUGH THE EARTH, FILLED IT WITH
DYNAMITE AND BLEW THE EARTH IN TWO. THE SMALLER OF THESE TWO PIECES BECAME THE MOON. DO
YOURECALLTHAT?”
My grandmother clamped her hands over her ears; on her face was a look of refusal. But
through her lips a question slipped out: “Somebody blewup the earth?Who?”
“TODAY I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT ANOTHER GOD-SCIENTIST. AN EVIL SCIENTIST. BY THE NAME OF
YACUB.”
Andnowher fingers spread apart, letting the voice reach her ears . . .
“YACUB LIVED EIGHTY-FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO IN THE PRESENT TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-YEAR-
CYCLE OF HISTORY. HE WAS POSSESSED, THIS YACUB, OF AN UNUSUALLY LARGE CRANIUM. A SMART
MAN. A BRILLIANT MAN. ONE OF THE PREEMINENT SCHOLARS OF THE NATION OF ISLAM. THIS WAS A MAN
WHODISCOVERED
THE SECRETS OF MAGNETISM WHEN HE WAS ONLY SIX YEARS OLD. HE WAS PLAYING WITH TWO PIECES
OFSTEELANDHEHELDTHEMTOGETHERANDDISCOVEREDTHATSCIENTIFICFORMULA:MAGNETISM.”
Like a magnet itself, the voice worked on Desdemona. Now it was pulling her hands down to
her sides. Itwasmaking her lean forward in her chair . . .
“BUT YACUB WASN’T CONTENT WITH MAGNETISM. WITH HIS LARGE CRANIUM HE HAD OTHER GREAT
IDEAS. AND SO ONE DAY YACUB THOUGHT TO HIMSELF THAT IF HE COULD CREATE A RACE OF PEOPLE
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE—GENETICALLY DIFFERENT—THAT RACE COULD
COMETODOMINATETHEBLACKNATIONTHROUGHTRICKNOLOGY.”
. . . And when leaning wasn’t enough, she moved closer. Walking across the room, moving
silk bolts aside, she knelt down before the grate, as Fard continued his explanation: “EVERY
BLACK MAN IS MADE OF TWO GERMS: A BLACK GERM AND A BROWN GERM. AND SO YACUB CONVINCED
FIFTY-NINE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE MUSLIMS TO EMIGRATE TO THE ISLAND OF
PELAN. THE ISLAND OFPELAN IS INTHE AEGEAN. YOUWILL FIND ITTODAY ONEUROPEAN MAPS,UNDER A
FALSE NAME. TO THIS ISLAND YACUB BROUGHT HIS FIFTY-NINE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-
NINEMUSLIMS.ANDTHEREHECOMMENCEDHISGRAFTING.”
She could hear other things now. Fard’s footsteps as he paced the stage. The squeaking of
chairs as his listeners bent forward, hanging on his everyword.
“IN HIS LABORATORIES ON PELAN, YACUB KEPT ALL ORIGINAL BLACK PEOPLE FROM REPRODUCING. IF
A BLACK WOMAN GAVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, THAT CHILD WAS KILLED. YACUB ONLY LET BROWN BABIES
LIVE.HEONLYLETBROWN-SKINNEDPEOPLEMATE.”
“Terrible,”Desdemona said, up on the third floor. “Terrible, thisYacubperson.”
“YOU HAVE HEARD OF THE DARWINIAN THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION? THIS WAS UNNATURAL
SELECTION. BY HIS SCIENTIFIC GRAFTING YACUB PRO-DUCED THE FIRST YELLOW AND RED PEOPLE. BUT

HE DIDN’T STOP THERE. HE WENT ON MATING THE LIGHT-SKINNED OFFSPRING OF THOSE PEOPLE. OVER
MANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGED THE BLACK MAN, ONE GENERATION AT A TIME, MAKING
HIM PALER AND WEAKER, DILUTING HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY, TURNING HIM INTO THE PATHS
OFEVIL.ANDTHEN,MYBROTHERS,ONEDAYYACUBWASDONE.ONEDAYYACUBWASFINISHEDWITHHIS
WORK. AND WHAT HAD HIS WICKEDNESS CREATED? AS I HAVE TOLD YOU BEFORE: LIKE CAN ONLY COME
FROM LIKE. YACUB HAD CREATED THE WHITE MAN! BORN OF LIES. BORN OF HOMICIDE. A RACE OF BLUE-
EYEDDEVILS.”
Outside, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class installed silkworm trays.
They worked in silence, daydreaming of various things. Ruby James was thinking about how
handsome John 2X had looked that morning, and wondered if they would get married someday.
Darlene Wood was beginning to get miffed because all the brothers had gotten rid of their slave
names but Minister Fard hadn’t gotten around to the girls yet, so here she was, still Darlene
Wood. Lily Hale was thinking almost entirely about the spit curl hairdo she had hidden up under
her headscarf and how tonight she was going to stick her head out her bedroom window,
pretending to check the weather, so that Lubbock T. Hass next door could see. Betty Smith was
thinking, Praise Allah Praise Allah Praise Allah. Millie Littlewanted gum.
While upstairs, her face hot from the air rushing out of the vent, Desdemona resisted this new
twist in the story line. “Devils? All white people?” She snorted. She got up from the floor,
dusting herself off. “Enough. I’m not going to listen to this crazy person anymore. I work. They
payme. That’s it.”
But the next morning, she was back at the temple. At one o’clock the voice began speaking,
and againmygrandmother paid attention:
“NOWLETUSMAKEAPHYSIOLOGICALCOMPARI-SONBETWEENTHEWHITERACEANDTHEORIGINAL
PEOPLE. WHITE BONES, ANATOMICALLY SPEAKING, ARE MORE FRAGILE. WHITE BLOOD IS THINNER.
WHITESPOSSESSROUGHLYONE-THIRDTHEPHYSICALSTRENGTHOFBLACKS.WHOCANDENYTHIS?WHAT
DOESTHEEVIDENCEOFYOUROWNEYESSUGGEST?”
Desdemona argued with the voice. She ridiculed Fard’s pronouncements. But as the days
passed, my grandmother found herself obediently spreading out silk before the heating vent to
cushion her knees. She knelt forward, putting her ear to the grate, her forehead nearly touching
the floor. “He’s just a charlatan,” she said. “Taking everyone’smoney.” Still, she didn’tmove. In
amoment, the heating system rumbledwith the latest revelations.
What was happening to Desdemona? Was she, always so receptive to a deep priestly voice,
coming under the influence of Fard’s disembodied one? Or was she just, after ten years in the
city, finally becoming aDetroiter,meaning that she saweverything in terms of black andwhite?
There’s one last possibility. Could it be that my grandmother’s sense of guilt, that sodden,
malarial dread that swamped her insides almost seasonally—could this incurable virus have
opened her up to Fard’s appeal? Plagued by a sense of sin, did she feel that Fard’s accusations
hadweight?Did she take his racial denunciations personally?
One night she askedLefty, “Doyou think anything iswrongwith the children?”
“No.They’re fine.”
“Howdoyouknow?”
“Look at them.”
“What’s thematterwith us?Howcouldwedowhatwe did?”
“Nothing’s thematterwith us.”
“No, Lefty.We”—she started to cry—“we are not good people.”
“The children are fine.We’re happy. That’s all in the past now.”
But Desdemona threw herself onto the bed. “Why did I listen to you?” she sobbed. “Why
didn’t I jump into thewater like everybody else!”
Mygrandfather tried to embrace her, but she shrugged himoff. “Don’t touchme!”
“Des, please . . .”
“Iwish I had died in the fire! I swear to you! Iwish I had died in Smyrna!”
She began to watch her children closely. So far, aside from one scare—at five, Milton had
nearly died from a mastoid infection—they had both been healthy. When they cut themselves,
their blood congealed. Milton got good marks at school, Zoë above average. But Desdemona

wasn’t reassured by any of this. She kept waiting for something to happen, some disease, some
abnormality, fearing that the punishment for her crime was going to be taken out in the most
devastatingwaypossible: not on her own soul but in the bodies of her children.

I can feel how the house changed in the months leading to 1933. A coldness passing through its
root-beer-colored bricks, invading its rooms and blowing out the vigil light burning in the hall. A
cold wind that fluttered the pages of Desdemona’s dream book, which she consulted for
interpretations to increasingly nightmarish dreams. Dreams of the germs of infants bubbling,
dividing. Of hideous creatures growing up from pale foam. Now she avoided all lovemaking,
even in the summer, even after three glasses of wine on somebody’s name day. After a while,
Lefty stopped persisting. My grandparents, once so inseparable, had drifted apart. When
Desdemona went off to Temple No. 1 in the morning, Lefty was asleep, having kept the
speakeasy open all night.He disappeared into the basement before she returned home.
Following this coldwind,which kept blowing through the Indian summer of 1932, I sail down
the basement stairs to find my grandfather, one morning, counting money. Shut out of his wife’s
affections, Lefty Stephanides concentrated on work. His business, however, had gone through
some changes. Responding to the fall-off in customers at the speakeasy, my grandfather had
diversified.
It is a Tuesday, just past eight o’clock.Desdemona has left forwork.And in the frontwindow,
a hand is removing the icon of St. George fromview. At the curb, an oldDaimler pulls up. Lefty
hurries outside and gets into the backseat.
My grandfather’s new business associates: in the front seat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-six years
old, from Kentucky, face rouged, hair giving off a burnt smell from the morning’s curling iron.
“Back in Paducah,” she is telling the driver, “there’s this deaf man who’s got a camera. He just
goes up and down the river, taking pictures.He takes the darndest things.”
“So do I,” responds the driver. “But mine make money.” Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak box
camera sitting in the backseat beside Lefty, smiles at Mabel and drives out Jefferson Avenue.
Plantagenet has found these pre-WPA years inimical to his artistic inclinations. As they head
towardBelle Isle he delivers a disquisition on the history of photography, howNicéphoreNiepce
invented it, and howDaguerre got all the credit. He describes the first photograph ever taken of a
human being, a Paris street scene done with an exposure so long that none of the fast-moving
pedestrians showed up except for a lone figure who had stopped to get his shoes shined. “I want
to get in the history booksmyself. But I don’t think this is the right route, exactly.”
OnBelle Isle, Plantagenet pilots theDaimler alongCentral Avenue. Instead of heading toward
TheStrand, however, he takes a small turnoff down a dirt road that dead-ends.He parks and they
all get out. Plantagenet sets up his camera in favorable light, while Lefty attends to the
automobile. With his handkerchief he polishes the spoked hubcaps and the headlamps; he kicks
mud off the running board, cleans the windows and windshield. Plantagenet says, “The maestro
is ready.”
Mabel Reese takes off her coat. Underneath she is wearing only a corset and garter belt.
“Where do youwantme?”
“Stretch out over the hood.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah.Good. Face against the hood.Nowspread your legs just a bit.”
“Like this?”
“Yeah. Now turn your head and look back at the camera. Okay, smile. Like I’m your
boyfriend.”
That was how itwent everyweek. Plantagenet took the photographs.My grandfather provided
the models. The girls weren’t hard to find. They came into the speakeasy every night. They
needed money like everybody else. Plantagenet sold the photos to a distributor downtown and
gave Lefty a percentage of the take. The formula was straightforward: women in lingerie
lounging in cars. The scantily dressed girls curled up in the backseat, or bared breasts in the

front, or fixed flat tires, bending way over. Usually there was one girl, but sometimes there were
two. Plantagenet teased out all the harmonies, between a buttock’s curve and a fender’s, between
corset and upholstery
pleats, between garter belts and fan belts. It was my grandfather’s idea. Remembering his
father’s old hidden treasure, “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” he’d had a vision for updating
an old ideal. The days of the harem were over. Bring on the era of the backseat! Automobiles
were the new pleasure domes. They turned the common man into a sultan of the open road.
Plantagenet’s photographs suggested picnics in out-of-the-way places. The girls napped on
running boards, or dipped to get a tire iron out of the trunk. In the middle of the Depression,
when people had no money for food, men found money for Plantagenet’s auto-erotica. The
photographs provided Lefty with a steady side income. He began to save money, in fact, which
later brought about his next opportunity.
Every now and then at flea markets, or in the occasional photography book, I come across one
of Plantagenet’s old pictures, usually erroneously ascribed to the twenties because of the
Daimler. Sold during the Depression for a nickel, they now fetch upward of six hundred dollars.
Plantagenet’s “artistic” work has all been forgotten, but his erotic studies of women and
automobiles remain popular. He got into the history books on his day off, when he thought he
was compromising himself. Going through the bins, I look at his women, their engineered
hosiery, their uneven smiles. I gaze into those faces my grandfather gazed into, years ago, and I
ask myself: Why did Lefty stop searching for his sister’s face and start searching for others, for
blondes with thin lips, for gun molls with provocative rumps? Was his interest in these models
merely pecuniary? Did the cold wind blowing through the house lead him to seek warmth in
other places?Or had guilt begun to infect him, too, so that to distract himself from the thing he’d
done he ended upwith theseMabels andLucies andDoloreses?
Unable to answer these questions, I return now to Temple No. 1, where new converts are
consulting compasses. Tear-shaped, white with black numbers, the compasses have a drawing of
the Kaaba stone at the center. Still hazy about the actual requirements of their new faith, these
men pray at no prescribed times. But at least they’ve got these compasses, bought from the same
good sister who sells the clothes. The men revolve, one step at a time, until compass needles
point to 34, the number coding for Detroit. They consult the rim’s arrow to determine the
direction ofMecca.
“LET US MOVE NOW TO CRANIOMETRY. WHAT IS CRANIOMETRY? IT IS THE SCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENT
OF THE BRAIN, OF WHAT IS CALLED BY THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY ‘GRAY MATTER.’ THE BRAIN OF THE
AVERAGE WHITE MAN WEIGHS SIX OUNCES. THE BRAIN OF THE AVERAGE BLACK MAN WEIGHS SEVEN
OUNCES AND ONE HALF.” Fard lacks the fire of a Baptist preacher, the deep-gut oratory, but to his
audience of disaffected Christians (and one Orthodox believer) this turns out to be an advantage.
They’re tired of the holy-rolling, the shouting and brow-mopping, the raspy breathing. They’re
tired of slave religion, bywhich theWhiteMan convinces theBlack that servitude is holy.
“BUT THERE IS ONE THING AT WHICH THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE. BY DESTINY,
AND BY THEIR OWN GENETIC PROGRAMMING, THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED AT TRICKNOLOGY. DO I HAVE
TO TELL YOU THIS? THIS IS WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY THE EUROPEANS
BROUGHT THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE FROM MECCA AND OTHER PARTS OF EAST ASIA. IN 1555 A SLAVE TRADER
NAMEDJOHNHAWKINSBROUGHTTHEFIRSTMEMBERSOFTHETRIBEOFSHABAZZTOTHESHORESOFTHIS
COUNTRY. 1555. THE NAME OF THE SHIP? JESUS. THIS IS IN THE HISTORY BOOKS. YOU CAN GO TO THE
DETROITPUBLICLIBRARYANDLOOKTHISUP.
“WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST GENERATION OF ORIGINAL PEOPLE IN AMERICA? THE WHITE MAN
MURDERED THEM. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY. HE MURDERED THEM SO THAT THEIR CHILDREN WOULD
GROW UP WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR OWN PEOPLE, OF WHERE THEY CAME FROM. THE DESCENDANTS
OFTHOSE CHILDREN, THEDESCENDANTS OFTHOSE POORORPHANS—THAT ISWHOYOUARE. YOUHERE IN
THIS ROOM. AND ALL THE SO-CALLED NEGROES IN THE GHETTOS OF AMERICA. I HAVE COME HERE TO
TELLYOUWHOYOUARE.YOUARETHELOSTMEMBERSOFTHETRIBEOFSHABAZZ.”
And riding throughBlackBottomdidn’t help.Desdemona realized
now why there was so much trash in the streets: the city didn’t pick it up. White landlords let
their apartment buildings fall into disrepair while they continued to raise the rents. One day
Desdemona saw a white shop clerk refuse to take change from a Negro customer. “Just leave it

on the counter,” she said. Didn’twant to touch the lady’shand! And in those guilt-ridden days,
her mind crammed with Fard’s theories, my grandmother started to see his point. There were
blue-eyed devils all over town. The Greeks had an old saying, too: “Red beard and blue eyes
portend theDevil.” Mygrandmother’s eyeswere brown, but that didn’tmake her feel any better.
If anybody was a devil it was her. There was nothing she could do to change the way things
were. But she couldmake sure that it didn’t happen again. Shewent to seeDr. Philobosian.
“That’s a very extrememeasure,Desdemona,” the doctor told her.
“Iwant tomake sure.”
“But you’re still a youngwoman.”
“No, Dr. Phil, I’m not,” my grandmother said in a weary voice. “I’m eighty-four hundred
years old.”

On November 21, 1932, the Detroit Times ran the following headline: “Altar Scene of Human
Sacrifice.” The story followed: “One hundred followers of a negro cult leader, who is held for
human sacrifice on a crude altar in his home, were being rounded up today by police for
questioning. The self-styled king of theOrder of Islam isRobertHarris, 44, of 1429DuboisAve.
The victim, whom he admits bludgeoning with a car axle and stabbing with a silver knife
through the heart, was James J. Smith, 40, negro roomer in the Harris home.” This Harris, who
came to be known as the “voodoo slayer,” had hung around Temple No. 1. Just possibly, he had
read Fard’s “Lost Found Muslim Lessons No. 1 and 2,” including the passage: “ALL MUSLIMS
WILL MURDER THE DEVIL BECAUSE THEY KNOW HE IS A SNAKE AND ALSO IF HE BE ALLOWED TO LIVE, HE
WOULD STING SOMEONE ELSE.” Harris had then founded his own order. He had gone looking for a
(white) devil but, finding one hard to come by in his neighborhood, had settled for a devil closer
at hand.
Three days later, Fard was arrested. Under interrogation, he insisted that he had never
commanded anyone to sacrifice a humanbeing.
He claimed that he was the “supreme being on earth.” (At least, that was what he said during
his first interrogation. The second time he was arrested, months later, he “admitted,” according
to the police, that theNation of Islamwas nothing but “a racket.”He had invented the prophecies
and the cosmologies “to get all the money he could.”) Whatever the truth of the matter, the
upshot was this: in exchange for having the charges dropped, Fard agreed to leave Detroit once
and for all.
And so we come to May 1933. And to Desdemona, saying goodbye to the Muslim Girls
Training and General Civilization Class. Head scarves frame faces streaked with tears. The girls
file by, kissing Desdemona on both cheeks. (My grandmother will miss the girls. She has grown
very fond of them.) “My mother used to tell me in bad times silkworms no can spin,” she says.
“Make bad silk. Make bad cocoons.” The girls accept this truth and examine the newly hatched
worms for signs of despair.
In the Silk Room, all the shelves are empty. Fard Muhammad has transferred power to a new
leader. Brother Karriem, the former Elijah Poole, is now Elijah Muhammad, Supreme Minister
of the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad has a different vision for the Nation’s economic
future. Fromnowon, itwill be real estate, not clothing.
And now Desdemona is descending the stairs on her way out. She reaches the first floor and
turns to look back at the lobby. For the first time ever, the Fruit of Islam do not guard the lobby
entrance. The drapes hang open.Desdemona knows she should keep going out the back door, but
she has nothing to lose now, and so ventures toward the front. She approaches the double doors
and pushes herway into the sanctum sanctorum.
For the first fifteen seconds, she stands still, as her idea of the room switches places with
reality. She had imagined a soaring dome, a richly colored Ezine carpet, but the room is just a
simple auditorium. A small stage at one end, folding chairs stacked along the walls. She absorbs
all this quietly.And then, oncemore, there is a voice:
“Hello,Desdemona.”
On the empty stage, the Prophet, the Mahdi, Fard Muhammad, stands behind the podium. He

is barely