The article, entitled "Perverse Perversion: How to Do the History of a Concept"  is published in GLQ, vol. 17, numbers 2-3 (2011), pp.  405-422.

In this essay, co-written with Kevin Lamb, Patrick Singy discusses several historiographical issues related to the history of sexuality. He focuses on Michel Foucault's Abnormal, Arnold Davidson's The Emergence of Sexuality, David Halperin's How To Do the History of Homosexuality, and Richard C. Sha's Perverse Romanticism.  

As a field, the history of sexuality is often divided into Foucauldians and anti-Foucauldians. This essay begins by showing that Foucault’s own methodology is ambiguous. Broad scholarly consensus rightly holds that Foucault took sexuality to be exclusively modern and its emergence, hence, to mark a sharp conceptual break with the past. Yet Foucault himself also traced successive “recodifications” of sexuality, offering a genealogy of practices that presupposed the continuity of sexuality with prior periods, from at least post-Tridentine Catholic confession to the present. In following his example, such distinguished and otherwise like-minded thinkers as Arnold Davidson and David Halperin differ remarkably in preferring one approach (whether conceptual rupture or genealogy) to the other. Yet, despite their internal differences, Foucault, Davidson, and Halperin as a group illustrate the continuing significance of a difficult, deliberate historiography to the history of sexuality. By way of conclusion, Singy and Lamb gauge this significance by contrasting this group's approaches to that of Richard Sha, whose work on Romantic perversion raises many historical as well as methodological problems.