Why is the colonial context absent from Michel Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? This book challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire.

"Ann Stoler combines impressive historical and ethnographic scholarship with moral fervor to turn Foucault's definition of critique as the 'art of reflective insolence' back on his own work. A controversial "tour de force"!"--Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley