Sexuality is a concept we owe to Melville's time. As the theorist Michel Foucault has argued, prior to some point in the later nineteenth century, there were no sexual identities, but only sexual acts that could be committed by anyone. What sexuality does is to associate acts and “tastes” with identity, to say, for instance, putting it simply, that there are those who prefer the same sex and those who prefer the other sex, and that these “preferences” are crucial to the construction of the self. The effect of the creation of this binary of sexuality is at once an enlargement of possibility and the assurance of an identity that may serve to create community, as well as an augmentation of the power of social discipline through the creation of manageable, confinable groups. Melville's career coincides with these developments, both reflecting them and participating in their elaboration. The Melville of the earliest travel writings still operates largely in a realm of undifferentiated sexuality, while his final work, Billy Budd, is an enactment of a drama figuring the exclusion and execution of the homosexual.