Any attempt to map the political complexities of the queer movement must begin with an acknowledgement of its theoretical indebtedness to the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1976) which, mainly owing to its radical reconception of sexuality and power, has become “the text that, everyone now says, you can't even begin to practice queer politics without reading.” Foucault dismantles traditional views of sexuality as an instinctual quality and encourages us to conceive of it instead as a discourse, arguing that the ways in which sexuality expresses and manifests itself are subject rather than, as previously assumed, impervious to the specificity of their historical and cultural context. As Angela Carter, doubtlessly Foucault’s queerest English contemporary, expressed it so pertinently in The Sadeian Woman: