I take my understanding of genealogy in part from Foucault, who, working in a Nietzschean vein, sought not just to uncover the history of people and things, but also the conditions in and through which people and things are made thinkable, or available to be thought. The difference is crucial. A history might record events, but a genealogy asks that we consider why those events, recorded in that order, as opposed to other events, other orders. For instance, Foucault famously analyzes the emergence of sexual identity in The History of Sexuality, claiming that sexuality, far from being a thing “discovered” by scientific and empirical inquiry, is a construct developed at the intersection of various forms of knowledge production and attempts at social control—the application of scientific classificatory schemas on human behavior (sexology) as well as a need to promote particular kinds of intimate relations in the production and reproduction of a workforce (capitalism). In this power–knowledge mix, homosexuality becomes not the hidden identity revealed at last but the necessarily stigmatized possibility of identification that must be avoided at all costs in order to maintain and develop a particular order of sociality. Foucault’s genealogical approach to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular was designed to reveal these pressures and forces, the circulation of power, in the creation of personal and political constructs that masked themselves as “natural.” Such denaturalization opens up potentialities for reconfiguration in the face of radical historicization. As Foucault puts it in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” genealogy "disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself" (139). Or, as philosopher Ladelle McWhorter writes, a genealogy “affirms the existence of something while at the same time acknowledging its historicity, its inessentiality” (30); as such, a genealogy “functions as a critique of the dominant view, not merely as a supplement or a thought-provoking alternative” (43).