on that she controlled. The fact that there were huge geographic stretches of places populated by those who had only the vaguest awareness of who Queen Victoria even was is not especially important to FoucaultÆs argument.
Carolyn Dinshaw suggests that this fuzzy historical specificity is a key to understanding Foucault. She writes:
My concern . . . is not so much FoucaultÆs vision of modernity as it is with his Middle Ages . . . At first glance it seems merely nostalgic, idealized, totalized; I argue, however, that the nostalgia is tactical, that what I call FoucaultÆs desire for the premodern is part of a serious ethical and political vision of a future that is not straitened by modern sexuality (15).
Foucault does not use history to talk about the past. Instead, he plays fast and loose with the specific time periods to which he refers in order to emphasize that modern man (and modern woman) has not come so far out of the shadow of Victorian morality as he (or she) would like to believe.
In this, he has a real point, and this is the heart of hi
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