Michel Foucault's 1976 publication of The History of Sexuality established the field of the history of sexuality and created a basis for formulating research questions around sexuality. Now after nearly four decades the contributors of this volume ask whether some of Foucault's insights have become “ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field of the history of sexuality” (pp. 1–2). In order to assess the field and explore the usefulness of Foucault's work today, they organized a series of six interlinked workshops at the 2008 German Studies Association Conference. This volume, as an outcome of those workshops, draws on the work of eighteen scholars of history and literature in Germany and the United States. In the articles, which span a time period from the Middle Ages to postwar Germany, the authors explore the usefulness of Foucault's work for their own research. As Scott Spector points out in his introduction, the authors are not united in their conclusions, but do “present a unity, [if] ... not a unanimity” (p. 6).

The first set of essays in the volume examines Foucault's insistence that both sex and sexuality are modern (and hence Western) phenomena. All four authors challenge this notion. As Helmut Puff argues, Foucault's claim that “‘The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’” has created a premodern/modern divide that has “acquired an almost normative status” (18). Too many scholars of male homosexuality, he claims, take as a starting point Foucault's opposition threshold (acts vs. identities) with the result that “other thresholds: invention of homosexuality, invention of heterosexuality, of homophobia, of hetero-normativity” are ignored or overlooked (p. 19). He encourages historians to move beyond Foucault to “incorporate new methods of inquiry, to find new intellectual alliances, and to forge new narratives” (p. 28). Merry Wiesner-Hanks also disputes the idea that a moment exists in the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when modern sexuality was “born, created, or discursively constructed” (p. 31). Since already in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries discursive practices about marriage were directed at men's and women's behavior and sexual self-control, she concludes that sexuality in the early modern era cannot simply be seen as a prologue to the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but must be considered as “an era of significant transformation itself” (p. 35). Ulinka Rublack's analysis of sixteenth-century courts records, Robert Deam Tobin's study of Heinrich Hosslis's writings and Andreas Krass's literary essay further blur Foucault's periodicity.

The second set of essays examines Foucault's identification of a radical and sudden shift from one mode of understanding the world and oneself in relation to it to another through the definition of normal and pathological behavior and the birth of the clinic and its governing disciplinary mechanisms. Each of the five studies examines an example of disciplinary power—surveillance, regulation, oppression and penalization—and challenges Foucault's understanding of power as a top-down force between the fin d'siècle and the Weimar Republic. Julia Roos's study of prostitution during the Weimar era seems at first to confirm Foucault, since anti-venereal disease legislation did increase the marginalization and state control of prostitutes. Roos reveals, however, that the increasing control of venereal disease simultaneously led many prostitutes to develop a “sense of superior hygienic expertise” that in turn led some “to develop [a] self confident professional” identity (p. 141). Robert Beachy demonstrates that police surveillance not only controlled male homosexuals in nineteenth-century Berlin, but also protected them from blackmail and helped them emerge as a well-defined and cohesive group. Marti Lybeck's study demonstrates that during the nineteenth century, shame not only isolated homosexual women, but also helped them exist as homosexuals within the established nineteenth-century bourgeois norms. Jeffrey Schneider's study of the relationship between soldiers and homosexual citizens in Imperial Berlin, Kristen Leng's study of the “tactical polyvalence” of female homosexuals, and Philipp Sarasin's discussion of methodological questions of a post-Foucauldian historiography offer further insight into the limitations of Foucault's paradigms.

The third set of essays explores the politics of sexual ethics in the twentieth century. The authors all concern themselves with the work of either experts or activists and are interested in the connections between the personal and the political and between sex and power. Andreas Pretzel explores the backlash against the Reichstag Committee's 1929 vote to partially decriminalize homosexuality. He notes that this vote motivated conservative circles to rally against it and “doomed nonreligious ethical attempts to develop a defense of homosexuality” (p. 210). Florian Mildenberger and Erik Huneke provide insight into the relationship between power and sexuality in the German Democratic Republic. Mildenberger uses a case study of Gunter Dörner, who claimed the ability to identify homosexual genes in utero, to demonstrate the link between socialist eugenics and the German Democratic state. Huneke reveals that the marital and sexual counseling centers founded by the GDR to increase the birthrate only became viable after the state shifted its focus to meet popular demand for contraception and sexual help. Through her exploration of Helene Stocker's life, Tracie Matysik shows that in recent years the history of sexuality has turned away from its once strong focus on matters of population policy, hygiene, and normative constructions of sexual identities toward more subjective matters such as emotions, intimacy, self-determination, and memory (p. 197). Finally, Massimo Perinelli's analysis traces how the revolutionary ideals of radical left-wing discourses on sexuality in West German media “that sought to link pleasure and liberation, and to reclaim sexuality as positive and crucial, could be reterritorialized by those who held opposing ideals” (p. 278).

The contributors to the volume all emphasize the stimulating and diverse nature of the field of history of sexuality. Moreover, for all the shortcomings the authors point out in Foucault's work today, they illustrate how the field has developed since the publication of The History of Sexuality. The historiographical reviews imbedded in many of these essays provide a solid overview of the field. Together this is a valuable contribution to the history of sexuality, European and German social history, and gender history.