Dr Benjamin Kahan's essay, “Volitional Etiologies” is drawn from a larger project theorising an etiological rather than an epistemological approach to the history of sexuality. In this essay, he explores a particularly weak class of etiologies that he refers to as volitional in order both to highlight the possibilities of weak theory and to consider questions of sexual sequence. By weak etiology, he means to examine etiologies which ask questions about origins without establishing cause or which are open to the possibility of etiology without cause. Such etiologies, he contends, not only help us reconfigure the domain of the sexual at the turn of the century, but also remap the relation between ideas of acquisition and congenitality, between acts and identities.