Foucault and Feminism

Power, Gender and the Self

Lois McNay

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745609393, 9780745609386
• eBook ISBN: 9780745667836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book offers a systematic attempt to explore the point of convergance between feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault.

1

Power, Body and Experience

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, I intend to explore the significance of Foucault’s theory of the body for feminist critique. There are two strands to my argument. On the one hand, I show how Foucault’s theory of power and the body indicates to feminists a way of placing a notion of the body at the centre of explanations of women’s oppression that does not fall back into essentialism or biologism. In this respect, Foucault’s work has been the main impetus behind many interesting and original studies into the regulatory mechanisms which circumscribe the sexualized body. Yet, on the other hand, I hope to show that if feminists are to make use of Foucault’s account of the body there are several theoretical problems which need to be overcome.

One such problem is that, in his elaboration of the body, Foucault neglects to examine the gendered character of many disciplinary techniques. This is a problem that has been widely noted by feminists; for example, Rosi Braidotti claims that ‘Foucault never locates woman’s body as the site of one of the most operational internal divisions in our society, and consequently also one of the most persistent forms of exclusion. Sexual difference simply does not play a role in the Foucauldian universe, where the technology of subjectivity refers to a desexualized and general “human” subject’ (Braidotti 1991: 87). For many feminists, Foucault’s indifference to sexual difference, albeit unintended, reproduces a sexism endemic in supposedly gender-neutral social theory. Silence – no matter how diplomatic or tactical – on the specificity of sexual difference does not distinguish Foucault’s thought significantly from the gender blindness and biased conceptual habits of more traditional theoretical discourses. As Schor puts it: ‘What is to say that the discourse of sexual indifference/pure difference is not the last or, (less triumphantly) the latest ruse of phallocentrism?’ (Schor 1987: 109).

Having considered the status of the gendered body in Foucault’s work, I go on to argue that a more serious problem with Foucault’s notion of the body is that it is conceived essentially as a passive entity, upon which power stamps its own images. Such a conception of the body results in a problematic one-dimensional account of identity. In respect to the issue of gendered identity, this unidirectional and monolithic model of power’s operations on the body leads to an oversimplified notion of gender as an imposed effect rather than as a dynamic process. In terms of identity in general, the reduction of individuals to passive bodies permits no explanation of how individuals may act in an autonomous and creative fashion despite overarching social constraints. For feminists – and, indeed, social theorists in general – this is a particular problem given that a significant aim of the feminist project is the rediscovery and revaluation of the experiences of women.

GENEALOGY, THE BODY AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE SUBJECT

The idea of the body is a concept central not only to the work of Michel Foucault, but to much of what is categorized as post-structuralist thought. The reason for the predominance of the idea of the body is that it is one of the central tools through which poststructuralists launch their attack on classical thought and its linchpin the rational subject or cogito. To schematize, the post-structuralist argument holds that the notion of a rational, self-reflective subject, which has dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, is based on the displacement and/or derogation of its ‘other’. Thus the notion of rationality is privileged over the emotions, spirituality over the material, the objective over the subjective. One dualism of central importance to classical thought is the Cartesian opposition between mind and body. This dualism privileges an abstract, pre-discursive subject at the centre of thought and, accordingly, derogates the body as the site of all that is understood to be opposed to the spirit and rational thought, such as the emotions, passions, needs. By prioritizing the first term in the series of dualisms, classical thought thus controls the parameters of what constitutes knowledge and monitors the extent and kind of discourses that are allowed to circulate.

It is the opposition between mind and body which, of all the dualisms, has become the focus of the deconstructive manoeuvres of the poststructuralists and the pivotal point of their attack on classical systems of thought and the philosophy of the subject. In regard to this opposition, a main concern has been to unpack the concept of the stable and unified subject by demonstrating how the ideas of rationality and self-reflection, which underlie it, are based on the exclusion and repression of the bodily realm and all that which, by analogy, it is held to represent – desire, materiality, emotion, need and so on. The category of the body, then, has a tactical value in so far as it is used to counter the ‘ideophilia’ of humanist culture. As Nancy Fraser puts it: ‘The rhetoric of bodies and pleasures . . . can be said to be useful for exposing and opposing, in highly dramatic fashion, the undue privilege modern western culture has accorded subjectivity, sublimation, ideality and the like’ (Fraser 1989: 62).

Foucault first employs a notion of the body in the essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, where he attacks traditional forms of history which he regards as being dominated by certain metaphysical concepts and totalizing assumptions derived from a philosophy of the subject. Firstly, he argues that traditional or ‘total’ history is a ‘transcendental teleology’; events are inserted in universal explanatory schemas and linear structures and, thereby, given a false unity. The interpretation of events according to a unifying totality deprives them of the impact of their own singularity and immediacy: ‘The world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events’ (Foucault 1984e: 89). Secondly, Foucault sees traditional history as falsely celebrating great moments and situating the self-reflective subject at the centre of the movement of history. Privileging of the individual actor places an emphasis on what are considered to be immutable elements of human nature and history is implicitly conceived in terms of a macroconsciousness. Historical development is interpreted as the unfolding and affirmation of essential human characteristics (Foucault 1984e: 85). Following on from this, history comes to operate around a logic of identity which is to say that the past is interpreted in a way that confirms rather than disrupts the beliefs and convictions of the present. The disparate events of the past are filtered through the categories of the present to produce ‘a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past’ (Foucault 1984e: 86).

Finally, traditional forms of historical analysis seek to document a point of origin as the source of emanation of a specific historical process or sequence. Foucault attacks the search for origins as an epistemologically problematic quest for ahistorical and asocial essences. The search for the origin of a particular historical phenomenon implicitly posits some form of original identity prior to the flux and movement of history. In turn, this original identity is interpreted as an indication of a primordial truth which precedes and remains unchanged by history or ‘the external world of accident and succession’ (Foucault 1984e: 78–9). For Foucault, however, ‘what is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity’ (Foucault 1984e: 79). Thus, if the origin of the concept of liberty is analysed, we find that it is an ‘invention of the ruling classes’ and not a quality ‘fundamental to man’s nature or at the root of his attachment to being and truth’ (Foucault 1984e: 78–9).

Against what are seen as traditional types of history, Foucault poses the notion, derived from Nietzsche, of ‘effective’ history or genealogy. Adopting Nietzsche’s conception of the primacy of force over meaning, Foucault opposes ‘the hazardous play of dominations’ and ‘the exteriority of accidents’ to the conception of an immanent direction to history. History is not the continuous development and working through of an ideal schema, rather it is based on a constant struggle between different power blocks which attempt to impose their own system of domination. These different systems of domination are always in the process of being displaced, overthrown, superseded. The task of the historian is to uncover the contingent and violent emergence of these regimes in order to shatter their aura of legitimacy. The structuring of social relations is perceived in terms of warfare (Foucault 1980: 90–1, 114). ‘Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination’ (Foucault 1984e: 85).

The representation of history as a series of discontinuous structures is directed against the philosophy of history and, in particular, the Marxist aim of comprehending the totality of past and present from the standpoint of a future yet to be realized. An understanding of history as a series of struggles between different forces is also directed against the dialectical idea of the self-reflective subject as the pivot of historical development. Rather than seeing history as a process of reconciliation of the contradictions between subject and object via the human actor’s interaction with and reflection upon the world, Foucault views the forces in history acting upon and through the human body in a manner which resists incorporation into a totalizing historical perspective. The replacement of the self-thematizing subject as the pivot of history with a notion of the body results in a change in the historian’s methodology. Historical development is no longer hermeneutically interpreted in terms of the meanings it reveals but is understood as a conflict between different power blocks, i.e. permanent warfare. As the centre of the struggle for domination, the body is both shaped and reshaped by the different warring forces acting upon it. The body, then, is conceived of in radically anti-essentialist terms; ‘Nothing in man – not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self recognition or for understanding other men’ (Foucault 1984e: 87–8). The body bears the marks, ‘stigmata of past experience’ upon its surface;

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history’s destruction of the body (Foucault 1984e: 83).

Effective history takes the examination of the body as its starting point and thus analyses the effects of power in their most specific and concrete form. Correlative to this attention paid to the power relations inscribed on the body, the genealogist focuses on events in their singularity. The genealogist tries to rediscover the multiplicity of factors and processes which constitute an event in order to disrupt the self-evident quality ascribed to events through the employment of historical constants and the ascription of anthropological traits. The aim of effective history is not to systematize but to disperse and fragment the past; ‘History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself (Foucault 1984e: 88).

It is this idea, that the body and the way it is worked upon by power is the proper focus of history, that is the underlying principle of Foucault’s two later studies, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Foucault replaces a method based on the hermeneutic elucidation of contexts of meaning, and a correlative anthropological stress on the subject as the mainspring of history, with an examination of the way in which the body is arbitrarily and violently constructed in order to legitimize different regimes of domination.

FEMINISM AND THE BODY

It is Foucault’s notion of the body as the point where power relations are manifest in their most concrete form which, in the last few years, has made a significant contribution to feminist thinking on the body. Of all poststructuralist work on this theme, Foucault’s has received probably the most attention because of his insistence on the body as an historical and culturally specific entity (Bartkowski 1988). This insistence on the body as an historically specific entity distinguishes Foucault’s theory from those of other theorists, such as Derrida, where the body is a metaphorization of the more general philosophical problem of difference. For feminists, this stress on specificity is important because, as Rosi Braidotti has argued, the representation of the more general philosophical issue of difference in the metaphor of the feminine body allows poststructuralist thinkers to bypass altogether the question of sexual difference as it relates to the experiences of women:

The notion of ‘sexual difference’ has been subjected to such inflationary value that it has led to a paradoxical new uniformity of thought. ‘Postmodern’ . . . ‘deconstructive’ . . . and other kinds of philosophers have first of all sexualised as ‘feminine’ the question of difference and secondly have turned it into a generalised philosophical item. As such it is clearly connected to the critique of classical dualism . . . Yet it is not directly related to either the discursivity or the historical presence of real-life women (Braidotti 1989: 89).

A similar criticism of the poststructuralist tendency to metaphorize the feminine has been made by Alice Jardine in Gynesis (1985). The displacement of classical modes of thought based on dualism and the consequent dislocation of the subject has led post-structuralists to posit a space of unrepresentability or difference – or hetereogeneity, the body, madness, the unconscious, etc. – that new modes of thinking, writing and speaking should try to trace. This space of ‘otherness’ and instability where identity is unfixed is, according to Jardine, generally feminized. However, this putting into discourse of ‘woman’ – ‘woman in effect’ as Jardine calls it – is problematic for feminists. Firstly, it is not clear to what extent the supposedly radical equation of woman with that which cannot be contained within discourse is very different from traditional stereotypes of woman as unknowable and unrepresentable. Secondly, it is difficult for feminists to make the links between this metaphorized idea of woman and the experiences of women as active subjects; indeed, the idea of woman-in-effect may negate the experiences of ‘real’ women altogether.

One of the most important contributions that Foucault’s theory of the body has made to feminist thought is a way of conceiving of the body as a concrete phenomenon without eliding its materiality with a fixed biological or prediscursive essence. The problem of conceptualizing the sexualized body without positing an original sexual difference is one that has preoccupied feminist theorists. On a fundamental level, a notion of the body is central to the feminist analysis of the oppression of women because it is upon the biological difference between the male and female bodies that the edifice of gender inequality is built and legitimized. The idea that women are inferior to men is naturalized and, thus, legitimized by reference to biology. This is achieved through a twofold movement in which, firstly, women’s bodies are marked as inferior by being compared with men’s bodies, according to male standards (homme manqué) and, secondly, biological functions are conflated with social characteristics. In many respects, masculine characteristics can be seen to be related to dominant perceptions of the male body, i.e. firmness, aggression, strength. However, man, unlike woman, is understood as being able to transcend being defined in terms of his biological capacities via the use of his rational faculties. In contrast, women, as de Beauvoir notes, are entirely defined in terms of their physical capacities:

When woman is given over to man as his property, he demands that she represents the flesh purely for its own sake. Her body is not perceived as the radiation of a subjective personality, but as a thing sunk in its own immanence; it is not for such a body to have reference to the rest of the world (de Beauvoir 1972: 189).

This derogation of the female body through comparison with the male body, and the consequent definition of femininity through reference to biological capacities, leads to a series of different strategies of corporeal oppression: the restriction of sexuality within the framework imposed by the opposition of masculinity and femininity, the subjection of women in confinement to medical power, the contemptuousness of menstruation, the construction of female sexuality as ‘lack’ or frigidity, etc.

THE PROBLEM OF ESSENTIALISM

Although a notion of the body is central to a feminist understanding of the oppression of women, it needs to be thought through carefully if what is regarded as patriarchal logic – the definition of the social category of woman in terms of biological functions – is to be subverted and not compounded. This conflation of the social existence of women with their biological functions is a problematic tendency of some types of feminism, most notably radical feminism and some of the ‘new French’ feminisms. The theoretical difficulties inherent in these approaches have been widely commented on and need only be considered briefly here (see Butler 1990a; Plaza 1978; Soper 1989 and 1990). The work of the French feminist Annie Leclerc exemplifies the problems inherent in such an approach to the body. Leclerc argues that women must re-appropriate their bodies from patriarchal forms of control and, thereby, learn to revalue them outside of the framework of male norms and standards. By recovering a positive image of their biological selves, women will find fulfilment in what Leclerc regards as their ‘innate’ caring and nurturing functions:

Washing dishes, peeling vegetables, cleaning clothes, ironing . . . Menial, gloomy, thankless, futile, degrading work? . . . A varied, multiple occupation, work that can be done while singing or day dreaming, work which, like all happy tasks, is obviously meaningful, work where one produces with one’s own hands all that life requires . . . How can work that produces immediate results, results which are carried forward in the very task itself, be thankless? The house takes on a festive air, the meal smells good, the child burbles contentedly while showing off its silky little bottom, and an hour’s dreamy efforts grant the trousers another year’s wear (Leclerc 1987: 75–6).

Whilst most feminists would agree that there is a need to revalue women’s physical way of being in the world, in particular the task of reproduction, the shortcomings of Leclerc’s approach are clear. Her notion of femininity is based on a sentimentalized image of motherhood which comes close to reinforcing patriarchal conceptions of gender difference. Moreover, the elevation of the maternal function as the essence of femininity excludes many women, who are not mothers, from the category of ‘true womanhood’. As Soper trenchantly observes about this extreme difference feminism: ‘it is particularly offensive and arrogant – to the point in fact of operating a kind of theft of subjectivity or betrayal of all those who fail to recognize themselves in the mirror it offers’ (Soper 1990: 15).

An appeal to difference, which is based in an essentialism of the female physique, reinforces traditional notions of a male/female divide and ‘leaves woman once again reduced to her body . . . rather than figuring as a culturally shaped, culturally complex, evolving, rational, engaged and noisy opposition’ (Soper 1990: 13). Because the category of the ‘natural sexed body’ only makes sense in terms of a binary discourse on sex, in which men and women exhaust the possibilities of sex and relate to each other as complementary opposites, the category of sex is always subsumed under a discourse of heterosexuality. Christine Delphy makes a similar point in her attack on Leclerc in Parole de Femme. Delphy argues that Leclerc confuses biological males and females with the social categories of men and women. This derivation of absolute psycholog...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Power, Body and Experience
• 2 From the Body to the Self
• 3 Ethics of the Self
• 4 The Problem of Justification
• 5 Self and Others
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index