living history of sexuality
Michel Foucault's treatments of the Jouy-Adam case in History of Sexuality and in Abnormal have been the subject of much criticism. For the uninitiated, Charles-Joseph Jouy was a farmhand accused of (what would now be widely considered) child sexual assault in a rural area of France in 1867. In History of Sexuality Foucault uses this case as an example of shifting institutional responses and emerging figurations of sexuality and deviance that will shape modern thinking about sex. In so doing, Foucault brings into sharp focus the normalizing forces at work in constructing the pervert or pedophile, but he does so at the cost of obscuring the victim, Sophie Adam, in bokeh. Adam and other victims/survivors2 of sexual violence occupy a gap in Foucault's genealogy of modern sexuality. My project aims to give shape to this gap, to bring Adam into the foreground, and to ask the questions: If Foucault had taken Sophie Adam as a subject in the History of Sexuality, what would this undertaking have looked like? What does Foucault's work on sexuality do for Sophie Adam or for sexual violence survivors more broadly?
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