A sociolinguistic critique of the Foucauldian paradigm shift view of sexuality

Nicholas Lo Vecchio. “A Sociolinguistic Critique of the Foucauldian Paradigm Shift View of Sexuality.” Reassessing Foucault’s Transhistorical and Transdisciplinary Legacy. Online conference, Università di Pisa, 30–31 January 2026.

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➔ Download presentation slides here [here]

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The assumption of a historical paradigm shift in the conception of sexuality is universally attributed to Foucault’s famed 1976 volume hypothesizing a rupture in how sexuality is articulated: from acts to personhood, in the received telling. No shortage of commentators have contested this interpretation, though its legacy remains persistent in both scholarship and activist queer discourse, largely in mutated form(s) detached from Foucault’s oeuvre itself. The significant flaws in this idea – not least of which is its top-down Eurocentrism – point to the continued need for historical revisionism about what has become its own sort of theoretical hegemony, through no fault of Foucault’s own.

As an argument about discourse, the Foucauldian hypothesis on sexual modernity can be interrogated empirically in linguistic terms: that is, by looking at actual discourse on sexuality, across the range of language practices, usage contexts, ideologies, and time and space. Drawing on LoVecchio (2024 and 2026), this talk critiques the paradigm shift view of sexuality from a variational sociolinguistic perspective. It argues that the paradigm shift hypothesis mistakenly attributes broad applicability to a single linguistic diastratum that must be situated against widespread discursive variation. By deproblematizing sexuality out of a totalizing paradigm, it becomes possible to look at languaging on sexuality in its discursive heterogeneity, past and present, across the spectrum of discourse practices – including queerphobic ones, which merit scrutiny in dangerous fascistic times. A Bourdieusian reading, in which the Foucauldian personnage is only one framing among competing discourses in the arena of the linguistic marketplace, is far more linguistically compelling.

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