In the same way, studying the genealogy of the object "sexuality" through a number of institutions meant trying to identify in things like confessional practices, spirittlal direction, the medical relationship, and so on, the moment when the exchange and cross-over took place between a jurisdiction of sexual relations, defining the permitted and the prohibited, and the veridiction of desire, in which the basic armature of the object "sexuality" currently appears.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 334