David Halperin

David M. Halperin is a scholar of classics, English, and women’s studies at the University of Michigan whose work has shaped queer theory’s understanding of sexuality as historically constituted rather than naturally given.

Core ideas

• The historicity of homosexuality: in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), Halperin argued — extending Michel Foucault’s analysis in The History of Sexuality — that “homosexuality” as a category of identity is a modern invention, roughly datable to the late nineteenth century. Ancient Greek sexual practices, though they included male-male sexual contact, were organized through entirely different frameworks (active/passive, citizen/non-citizen, adult/youth) that bear no structural resemblance to the modern homo/heterosexual binary. The claim is not that same-sex desire did not exist before modernity but that the organization of such desire into an identity — “the homosexual” as a type of person — is a specific historical production.
• Saint Foucault: in Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995), Halperin offered a sustained defense and explication of Foucault’s contribution to queer politics and theory, arguing that Foucault’s anti-identitarian analysis — far from depoliticizing gay and lesbian struggle — provided the most radical tools for contesting the normative frameworks that produce and regulate sexual identity. The book also theorized “queer” as a positionality rather than an identity: queer names not what one is but the critical stance one takes toward normalization.
• How to Be Gay: in How to Be Gay (2012), Halperin shifted from historical analysis to the cultural politics of contemporary male homosexuality, arguing that gayness involves not just sexual object choice but a distinctive relationship to cultural forms — a mode of reception, appreciation, and appropriation that is learned, practiced, and transmitted through queer communities.

Notable works

• One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990)
• Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995)
• How to Be Gay (2012)

Related

• Michel Foucault — whose analysis of sexuality Halperin extends and defends
• Queer theory — the tradition his work helped establish
• Normalization — the process his historicist method reveals
• Heteronormativity — the framework his historical analysis denaturalizes
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick — fellow founding queer theorist