When “homosexual” first became a term in 1870 that one was defined by. It gave a name to sexual desires, labelling what one “is” instead of what one “does.” To Foucault, sexuality is entrenched in power and politics. Although the Victorian era is today seen as sexually repressed, according to Foucault it was anything but. In this era, around the time when the term “homosexual” first came into use, there seemed to have been a painstaking attempt to turn sex into discourse. The church started shaping and pushing the discourse of sexuality in a new direction, attempting to turn the banal, passing thought into a sin that must be confessed. Foucault sees this as a state apparatus attempting to control thought and power.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more laws were passed limiting sexual behavior and criminalizing “devious” sexual acts. What once lived in the realm of fantasy, now became something that was intimately connected to who and what one was, and thus, must be governed. Because of the increasing discourse being discussed around sexuality, fringe sexuality was turned into the discourse. Science began quantifying it, the government began to study it, and categories were constructed based upon one’s sexual behavior. Naming this behavior turned a thought into a thing.

By structuralizing and codifying the once-mundane, our thoughts are named and turned into measurable structuralized categories: homosexual, heterosexual, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, cis-gender, queer, etc. It is if by uttering our thoughts, we essentially box ourselves into a category from which there is no getting out of. Speaking these thoughts, then, gives away our free agency to someone more powerful than us, like the government, a priest, or the analyst. We are turned into a number, or assigned a role, rather than seen as individual. Further, as we confess and give this information away to others, we are also gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves. This perhaps leads to self-censorship and self-restriction, at the behest of state apparatuses seeking to control our behavior.

In her book Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick delineates the difference between sex, gender and sexuality. Often, many of us confuse these terms and use them interchangeably, for example, particularly in the use of “sex” and “gender,” which are then inherently linked to sexuality. This is not so. For Sedgwick, while sex, gender, and sexuality are related, they are three separate parts of our identity. Sex, as she explains, references “chromosomal sex” and is differentiated by the XX and XY chromosomes, as well as the genetic traits that come with each—genitalia, bodily hair distribution, hormonal distribution, etc. (2470). Gender, is more fully “dichotomized,” and socially constructed, as social roles are often defined based on our chromosomal sex. Sexuality, Sedgwick says, relies on desire, and is inextricably linked to gender, because “each can only be expressed in terms of one another” (2478), and sexuality is often linked to gender—if one is a male he/she, under a heteronormative viewpoint, should be attracted to women and vice-versa. Because gender is often thought of as the male/female binary, this binary gives way to other binaries that effect sexuality like heterosexual and homosexual. Out of the three, sexuality is most constructed by social norms, and can be defined as “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them.” All three, when spoken of together, become the basis of identity not just for the self but for the outside world, who seeks to name the individual.

When we think about these binaries, it is important to think of those that fall outside of them, like transgendered individuals or others who consider both their gender and sexuality to be fluid. These people are neither homosexual/heterosexual nor are they gendered as male or female. This is especially true of intersexed individuals who cannot readily be identified along the XX/XY, male/female or homosexual/heterosexual binaries. An intersex individual is one that is born with genitals that are ambiguous and unable be identified as male or female at birth, which creates a problem for the child. Because of our societal notion that a child must be defined as male or female both chromosomally as well as in a gendered sense, the parent or doctors decide whether that child will be male or female. The child has no say in this, as they cannot tell their parents if they feel more masculine or feminine, or what sex they identify as. Because of this, many doctors and parents make the decision at birth to surgically alter the child to fit the image of a male or female. Hormones are then often given to these children to ensure their growth into their decided sex.

Because of their genitalia and our societal definitions regarding gender, the binary that they are forced to fit into is both constricting and destructive to the individual. As the intersexed child grows, he or she may feel decidedly more male or female, or perhaps may feel both male and female. However, they will never be able to explore either side of their sexuality because they have been pigeonholed into sex/gender/sexuality binaries without their consent. Oppression and power, then, as we can see, springs out of the need to force the individual into these boxes and binaries in order to control what may fall outside of the heteronormative point-of-view.