system
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human
Empirically testing Foucault's ideas

I have read some excerpts of Foucault's work which seems to be a geneology of various topics. As a non-analytic philosopher his writing is definitely more "flowery" for a lack of a better word. My question is this, some of his ideas seem like speculation. I think I understand what he is saying at times but how do we know he is correct?

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A quote from volume 1 of the history of sexuality for example:

>Homosexuality appears as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

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His writing seems to be descriptive of the past but is it fair to say that this is just one man's take? It appears that this quote is saying that before being transposed homosexuality was not a "thing" in the context of humanity. I think it would follow also that he thinks sexuality is completely socially constructed. Maybe so, maybe not. How can we know if he is just speculating or if this is truth? Can this be empirically tested?

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gpt
Just to clarify, what he's saying is that "homosexuality" as a category of behavior and way of classifying a person didn't exist before that transposition. He's referring here strictly to the social ontology. Note that he says "transposed from the practice of sodomy", meaning that people were engaging in behaviors we would now characterize as homosexual acts before the "homosexual" construction existed. So people were doing things we would consider "gay" but there were no "gay people" prior to that transposition. They were, at that point in time, just committing acts of sodomy (which themselves were socially constructed as "sodomy").