In his revolutionary book of 1976, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Michel Foucault announced what is one of the most counterintuitive challenges to our conceptions of human identity. Sexuality, far from being a given, Foucault argued, is thoroughly constructed – it is the product of discursive regimes operating on the subject. Foucault's argument was an assault on the final stronghold of the Enlightenment subject, a subject understood to be autonomous and self-determining. For sexuality offered thinkers as diverse as Freudians and feminists, traditionalists and revolutionaries, a place to stand. Sexuality – and its concomitant conceptions of gender difference – afforded, it would seem, an unambiguously material and concrete starting point. Theologians of various stripes were keen to explore the new ‘sciences’ of sexuality, and specifically to offer a uniquely theological framing of their discoveries. But what if sexuality is far less straightforward than it would seem? What if, for all its seeming self-evidence, sexuality serves as a cipher for other cultural anxieties and preoccupations? What if the final unveiling of sex's meaning leads to further concealment? Foucault puts it thus:

Even if we wish to concede that there are material and biological data that can be read off human anatomy and experience, Foucault warns us that we should be cautious about the meaning that we attribute to these, and about the directives that theologians, like others, wish to mandate from the seemingly raw ‘facts’ of sexuality. Of specific concern for this essay are the heightened anthropological claims that sexuality appears to commend.