Coda

Abstract

This closing chapter reviews the techniques and institutions examined in the book. To write a genealogy of sexuality through the lens of sexual appetite does not only involve interrogating how concepts of amount, balance and frequency were problematised in the past, but also examining how psychiatric institutions continue to question the use of pleasure and develop techniques for its medicalisation today. The chapter argues that to write a genealogy of appetite in the sexual sciences, we need to consider concepts such as amount, balance and frequency alongside object choice. While sexual appetite requires its own genealogy—and this book has endeavoured to delineate its parameters and write this genealogy—it remains germane to avoid thoroughly disentangling sexual appetite and sexual object choice, as they continually inform and depart from each other, while remaining inextricable. Continuing to ask how sexual appetite circulates in the present does not require that we dispense with object choice, but rather that we interrogate how appetite manifests—sometimes in unexpected spaces—and continues to influence how we recognise and imagine ourselves as subjects of sexual knowledge.