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Feminism & Foucault: Reflections on Resistance

From: Diamond, I. & Quinby, L. (eds) (1988) Feminism & Foucault:

Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. pp.xi-xix.

Introduction

Why this volume? Is this yet another attempt to authorize feminism by

marrying it into respectability? Are we trying to arrange a final divorce from

Marxism - or Freudianism or Lacanian analysis - for a happier union with

Foucauldian genealogy? At one point, the thought that we might be construed

as calling for a new orthodoxy led us to put this project aside. We put that

particular concern to rest because at this historical juncture, when feminism is

on the defensive politically, the contributions of feminists who have drawn on

Foucault's analyses of power in the contemporary world are particularly

helpful in combating this threat. By delineating the different cultural and

political realms where masculinist power is eviscerating feminist gains, such

contributions also uncover a multiplicity of points of resistance without

appealing to a monolithic "politically correct" position. Indeed, the essays

here are notable for challenging tendencies toward either feminist or

Foucauldian orthodoxy precisely because of the new views of empowerment

and resistance gained from working with the two approaches.

Thus, rather than a new marriage or political school, we would say that the

convergences of feminism and Foucault suggest the possibility of a friendship

grounded in a political and ethical commitment. This friendship is not without

tensions of course, but, as we will indicate, such tensions are healthy insofar

as they check closure and sustain reflexivity.

Both Foucault and feminists have pointed to the ways in which friendship

provides a model for nonhierarchical, reciprocal relations that run counter to

the hierarchical modes that have dominated Western society. In oral and

written discussion, friendship's reciprocity takes the form of dialogue, what

Foucault has called "the work of reciprocal elucidation" in which "the rights of

each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion." By respecting

differences without seeking absorption or dialectical synthesis, feminist and

Foucauldian analyses can interact with each other to create dialogical rather

than monological descriptions. Such an enterprise is admittedly difficult, but,

as the following essays suggest, not inherently impossible because of the

ways in which these two otherwise rather different approaches to cultural

analysis converge.

Four convergences of feminism and Foucault are especially striking. Both

identify the body as the site of power, that is, as the locus of domination

through which docility is accomplished and subjectivity constituted. Both point

to the local and intimate operations of power rather than focusing exclusively

on the supreme power of the state. Both bring to the fore the crucial role of

discourse in its capacity to produce and sustain hegemonic power and

emphasize the challenges contained within marginalized and/or unrecognized

discourses. And both criticize the ways in which Western humanism has the

privileged the experience of masculine elite as it proclaims universals about

truth, freedom, and human nature. Despite their seemingly different

objectives, then, feminist and Foucauldian analyses come together in the

ways they have attempted to dismantle existing but heretoforth unrecognized

modes of domination. In short, these convergences comprise some of the

most powerful forms of resistance available to us as we approach the last

decade of the twentieth century. This is not to insist that feminist and

Foucauldian analyses really mirror one another, but, on the contrary, to

suggest that each approach asks different questions and offers distinctive

insights that the other has ignored or missed and to suggest further that

these questions and insights can be mutually corrective.

Certainly one of Foucault's most notable contributions to contemporary social

criticism generally and feminist concerns specifically is his explication of

power/knowledge. According to Foucault, power's relation to knowledge is

never separable, because within each society there is a "regime of truth" with

its own particular mechanisms for producing truth. He describes

contemporary societies as having a "'political economy' of truth" characterized

by five traits:

"Truth" is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions

which produce it; it is subject to constant economic and political incitement

(the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political

power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and

consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information

whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, not withstanding certain

strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant

if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university,

army, writing, media); lastly, it is the issue of a whole political debate and

social-confrontation ("ideological" struggles).

Despite similarities with sociology-of knowledge contentions regarding the

conditions of knowledge creation, Foucault's notion of power/knowledge

challenges assumptions that ideology can be demystified and, hence, that

undistorted truth can be attained. He insists that truth is never "out-side

power, or lacking in power." In rejecting the idea that power functions only

through "Thou shalt nots" or forms of restrictive commandments and laws,

Foucault brings to our attention the complex network of disciplinary systems

and prescriptive technologies through which power operates in the modern

era, particularly since the normalizing disciplines of medicine, education, and

psychology have gained ascendancy. Sexuality, in his view, emerged in this

historical period as a mechanism of new ways of organizing knowledge.

Since feminism also arose in this era, it is important for us to consider the

ways in which it might be implicated in the "technologies of sex", even as it

emerged as a form of resistance to them.

Significantly, the formation of nineteenth-century feminism coincided with

medical and scientific treatments of women's hysteria, invalidism, and

capacity for reproduction. The writings of Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady

Stanton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenged scientific and medical

expertise in these areas. In this sense, feminism may be thought of as what

Foucault called a "reverse" discourse that, as he states about homosexuality,

"began to speak in its own behalf, to demand its legitimacy or 'naturality' be

acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by

which it was medically disqualified." As a reverse discourse, the first wave of

feminism challenged the normalizing powers of medicine, science, and

education at the very time that the deployment of sexuality, with its

"disciplines of the body" and "regulations of the population", took command

over the power of sovereignty. We should also recall, however, that the

power of a reverse discourse is precarious. As the eruption of the second

wave of feminism in our period suggests, over the course of the century

many of the tenets of nineteenth-century feminism have been appropriated

into operations of disciplinary power - hence the need for a new wave.

A second area in which Foucault's methodology is especially relevant for

feminism involves the theory of the subject. For Foucault, "there is no

subject", and much of his last work explicitly attempts to dethrone the

sovereignty of the illusory subject that he argues is a product of the particular

disciplinary practices and rationalizing discourses of the modern era. This

subject is marked by a proclivity not only to find its source of meaning and

identity within what is seen to be an individual's deepest recesses but also - in

keeping with its Christian legacy - to renounce the truth it discovers as the

product of a sinful being. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, demonstrates how

the Christian imperatives toward confession and self-renunciation are

transformed into secular injunctions to investigate sexuality and its secrets.

Volume two of The History of Sexuality helps further to refute assumptions of

an unchanging or universal selfhood by contrasting our society's notion of a

deep self with classical Greek society's notion of the individual, which

constitutes itself "as its own master". "What was missing from classical

antiquity", Foucault argues, "was the problematization of the institution of the

self as subject." In our time, such problematization has taken precedence and

renders us particularly susceptible to the operations of normalizing power, for

the theory of the subject carries with it a demand for a unitary morality.

Foucault urges a "search for styles of existence as different from each other

as possible" in resistance to that demand.

The women's movement has certainly been involved in the search for

alternative styles of existence, but at times these "alternatives" have been

founded on the prevailing theory of the subject and hence contribute to,

rather than resist, normalizing power. Feminist works that uphold an eternal

femininity or a natural sexuality are deeply implicated in the deep self notion

of the modern era. The second half of the nineteenth century in particular

was a period in which the idea of a "true self" and a singular identity based

on one's "innate" femininity or masculinity took hold in Western society.

Foucault's publication of the memoirs of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-

century hermaphrodite who was forced by legal and medical authorities to

"choose" a sexual identity as male or female and therefore remain within that

classification, dramatically captures the historical moment when science, law,

and bureaucracy formalized sexual essentialism.

Feminist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have frequently

subscribed to such essentialism, either by casting femininity as morally

superior to masculinity or by arguing that people are "truly" androgynous but

that culture suppresses their other half. From within feminism, a powerful

critique of essentialism has come from Marxist and material feminists, but

that critique remains problematic because, to the extent that their definitions

of power grant primacy to the category of labor, their arguments about the

social construction of the self retain a centering that may be understood as a

type of cultural essentialism.

A similar point may be made regarding feminist works that draw on semiotic

theory and/or Lacanian analysis: they challenge assumptions of innate

femininity and masculinity, yet their focus on the site of the linguistic subject

often employs an all-too-familiar binary opposition between masculinity and

femininity, albeit one in which traditional hierarchy is reversed.

Foucault's methodology is valuable not only as it pertains to discourse's

relation to power/knowledge and practices of the self, but also because of the

way in which its epistemological tenets acknowledge uncertainty and

indeterminacy. For Foucault, explanation is necessarily partial, blending with

interpretation's capacity to illuminate, clarify and decipher. He warns against

the seduction of totalizing theory, which appears to resolve all differences and

contradictions through unified and cohesive explanation. In place of history's

search for "origins", with its corresponding teleological spirit-of-the-age

arguments, he proposes genealogy, which, with "patience and knowledge of

details", "operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on

documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times". What is

at stake in replacing history with genealogy is nothing less than the

"destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment

of the will to knowledge". These arguments, which call for caution and

reflexivity, need not lead to paralysis, as is sometimes claimed, either in the

search for greater understanding of historical change or in political efforts to

effect change.

Foucault's challenge to our society's will to knowledge and his assessment of

the mechanisms of power/knowledge are consonant with his ethics, one of

the most frequently overlooked contributions to contemporary social criticism.

In his later interviews and analyses in particular, he proposes that ethics

should be grounded in resistance to whatever form totalitarian power might

take, whether it stem from religion, science, or political oppression. In

Western societies, he adds, religion and law have lost their viability for

grounding ethical practices. An ethics based on the "so-called scientific

knowledge of what the self is", moreover, is also a dead end.

One direction he does point to for contemporary society is some version of an

aesthetics of daily life. But because his intellectual stance is more is to reject

the role of the prophet or the legislator of morality, Foucault refuses to draw

up a blueprint for contemporary ethics and, indeed, assaults the notion of a

single ethic. As he puts it, "The search for a form of morality acceptable to

everybody in the sense that everyone should submit to it strikes me as

catastrophic." In place of a unitary morality, he upholds the "philosophical

ethos" found in "the very specific transformations that have proved to be

possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern

our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the

sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness."

The value of Foucault is not that he puts forward a set of ethical mandates

but that he refuses to do so, offering instead a method that exposes the

totalizing proclivities of conventional ethical visions. John Rajchman has

argued that Foucault's work is an unfamiliar "modern" ethic, "which, instead

of attempting to determine what we should do on the basis of what we

essentially are, attempts by analyzing who we have been constituted to be, to

ask what we might become Its principle is freedom, but a freedom which

does not follow from any postulation of our nature genealogical investigation;

it requires, in Foucault's words, "a patient labor giving form to our impatience

for liberty".

Foucault's own labors in explicating how disciplinary power molds through

localized mechanisms of enticement, regulation, surveillance, and

classification are invaluable for demonstrating how specific historical and

cultural practices constitute distinct forms of selfhood. Yet it is also precisely

this feature of Foucault's methodology that has most to gain from the crucial

contributions of feminists to social theory and action. For, although Foucault's

descriptions of historical practices of self-help counter claims of an eternal,

unified self, his discussions gloss over the gender configurations of power. As

feminists have shown, power has long been masculinist, and a primary target

of masculinist power has been the subjugation of women, most especially

through their bodies.

Feminism & Foucault - Reflections On Resistance.pdf

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