Magazine: Feminist Studies, SUMMER 1994

        FEMINISM AND EMPOWERMENT: A CRITICAL READING OF FOUCAULT
        --------------------------------------------------------

Few thinkers have influenced contemporary feminist scholarship on the
themes of power, sexuality, and the subject to the extent that Michel
Foucault has. Indeed, even scholars who dispute this thinker's claims
are compelled to acknowledge the contribution represented by his work in
these areas. The years since Foucault's death have been marked by
intense interest in his writings, feminist and otherwise. Today, a
decade after his death, it seems appropriate to reflect critically upon
the central exchanges between feminist thought and Foucauldian theory.

This article looks at three "waves" of Foucauldian literature by
feminist political theorists and philosophers. Although neither
chronologically separate nor thematically discrete, these waves refer to
bodies of work by feminist scholars in which different aspects of
Foucault's work--all related primarily to the problematic of power--are
used for distinctly feminist ends. These waves are first, literature
that appropriates Foucault's analysis of the effects of power on bodies,
or what is known as the "docile-bodies" thesis, as well as a related
aspect of this, the notion of "biopower," which refers to state
regulation of the population; second, analyses that take their cue from
Foucault's later development of an agonistic model of power,[1] in which
multiple, interweaving power relations are viewed as inherently
contested, as best expressed by his adage, "where there is power, there
is resistance"; and third, postmodern feminist writings on sexual and
gender identity informed by Foucault's assertion that prevailing
categories of sex identity are the result of the transition to a modern
regime of power and a proliferation of subjectifying discourses on
sexuality. These three waves are taken up in turn in the first three
sections of this article.

In reviewing the three waves of Foucauldian feminist literature, I argue
that both the paradigms of power and the treatment of the subject[2]
which emerge from Foucault's work are inadequate for feminist projects
that take the delineation of women's oppression and the concrete
transformation of society as central aims. As such, my position stands
in contrast to recent, influential feminist Foucauldian arguments, such
as those of Susan Hekman and Judith Butler.[3] Although Foucault's
writings on power have a certain heuristic value for feminists, I
suggest that two major pitfalls recommend against uncritical
appropriations of his thought: the tendency of a Foucauldian
conceptualization of the subject to erase women's specific experiences
with power; and the inability of the agonistic model of power to account
for, much less articulate, processes of empowerment. Finally, as an
antidote to these problems, section four of the article points to an
emerging body of literature by feminist writers on the issue of
empowerment which, I argue, serves as a more viable basis for feminist
work on the themes of freedom, power, and empowerment.

 THE FIRST WAVE: SURVEILLANCE AND BIOPOWER 

Just So Many Docile Bodies? Feminism and Panopticonism. The transition
from sovereign, or monarchical, power to modern regulatory power
comprised of disciplinary regimes, systems of surveillance, and
normalizing tactics provides the backdrop to Foucault's early "docile
bodies" thesis. Modern power requires "minimum expenditure for the
maximum return," and its central organizing principle is that of
discipline.[4] Aspects of sovereign power are carried over into the
modern period but function as ruses, disguising and legitimating the
emerging discourse of disciplinary power. This new regime of control is
minimalist in its approach (in the sense of lesser expenditures of force
and finance) but more far reaching and localized in its effect on
bodies.

For Foucault, sex is the pivotal factor in the proliferation of
mechanisms of discipline and normalization; it is also at the center of
a system of "dividing practices" that separate off the insane, the
delinquent, the hysteric, and the homosexual. As the sovereign's rights
over the life and death of subjects began to shift in the seventeenth
century, two axes or poles emblematic of the modern power paradigm
evolved. They were the "anatomopolitics of the human body," which
emphasizes a disciplined, useful body (hence, "docile bodies"), and the
model Foucault calls the "biopolitics of the population," in which the
state's attention turns to the reproductive capacities of bodies, and to
health, birth, and mortality.[5] The prime focus of the first axis of
power is thus "the body and its forces, their utility and their docility,
their distribution and their submission."[6] The body becomes a
"political field," inscribed and constituted by power relations.

Although the docile bodies thesis is later amended by Foucault in favor
of a less reductionist, agonistic conception of the subject and power-
and later still, by an emphasis on the "technologies of the self"[7]--
his earlier paradigm has been used by feminists of this first wave of
Foucauldian feminist literature to describe contemporary practices of
femininity. Two specific areas of Foucault's work are drawn on in this
project: the discussion of disciplinary measures in Discipline and
Punish, encompassing the subthemes of docile bodies, surveillance, and
the normalizing gaze; and, in the same text, the thesis on Panopticonism-
-referring to Bentham's design for a prison that would leave prisoners
perpetually exposed to view and therefore likely to police
themselves.[8]

In feminist literature that appropriates the docile bodies paradigm, the
transition from sovereign authority to modern, disciplinary forms of
power is seen to parallel the shift from more overt manifestations of
the oppression of women to more insidious forms of control. This new
method is disciplinary in nature and more subtle in its exercise; it
involves women in the enterprise of surveillance. The following
description of modern power by Foucault provides the basis for an
analysis, by scholars of this first wave, of what they call the
"techniques of femininity":

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just
a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its
weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own
overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and
against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for
what turns out to be at minimal cost.[9]

Feminist scholars who take up this conceptualization of power treat the
account of self-surveillance offered by the model of the Panopticon as a
compelling explanatory paradigm for women's acquiescence to, and
collusion with, patriarchal standards of femininity. However, it is an
explanation which must be modified to fit feminist purposes. Sandra
Bartky applauds Foucault's work on disciplinary practices in modernity
and on the construction of docile bodies, but she cautions that his
analysis "treats the body . . . as if bodily experiences of men and
women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship
to the characteristic institutions of modern life." Thus, Bartky asks:
"Where is the account of the disciplinary practices that engender the
'docile bodies' of women, bodies more docile than the bodies of men? . .
. [Foucault] is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of
embodiment that is peculiarly feminine."[10]

Bartky's two theses are, first, that femininity (unlike femaleness) is
socially constructed, with this feminine mold taking hold most
powerfully through the female body; and, second, that the disciplinary
practices which produce the feminine subject must be viewed as
peculiarly modern in character, symptoms of the "modernization of
patriarchal domination." Bartky describes three kinds of practices that
contribute to the construction of femininity: exercise and diet regimes
aimed at attaining an "ideal" body size and configuration; an attention
to comportment and a range of "gestures, postures and movements"; and
techniques that display the feminine body as an "ornamental surface,"
such as the use of cosmetics. These three areas combine to "produce a
body which in gesture and appearance is recognizably feminine" and
reinforce a "disciplinary project of bodily perfection."[11]

But just who, Bartky asks, is the disciplinarian in all this? Her
response is that we need to look at the dual nature of feminine bodily
discipline, encompassing its socially "imposed" and "voluntary" (or self-
disciplining) characteristics. The imposed aspects of feminine bodily
discipline are not restricted to messages from the beauty industry and
society that women should look a certain way but also include negative
repercussions in terms of personal relationships and job opportunities.
Bartky accounts for the voluntary, self-disciplining dimension of these
techniques of femininity in two ways. Women internalize the feminine
ideal so profoundly that they lack the critical distance necessary to
contest it and are even fearful of the consequences of "noncompliance,"
and ideals of femininity are so powerful that to reject their supporting
practices is to reject one's own identity.[12]

Bartky's use of the docile bodies and Panopticon theses is problematic
for at least two reasons. First, it is not clear why Bartky argues that
more subtle and insidious forms of domination characterize the modern
era or what she calls the "modernization of patriarchal power." In fact,
current examples abound of overt control of women's choices and bodies,
like lack of accessible abortions and frighteningly high rates of rape
and assault. This is not to suggest that glaring barriers to women's
freedom should preclude reflection on less tangible obstacles but,
rather, to point out the danger of taking up the latter in isolation
from a broader discussion of women's social, economic, and political
subordination.

Furthermore, the way Bartky conceives of women's interaction with their
bodies seems needlessly reductionist. Women's choices and differences
are lost altogether in Bartky's description of the feminine body and its
attendant practices:

To subject oneself to the new disciplinary power is to be up-to-date . .
. it represents a saving m the economy of enforcement: since it is women
themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own bodies,
men get off scot-free. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a
dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has
run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who
looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who,
feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as
the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed
to a relentless self-surveillance.[13]

This description may draw attention to the pernicious effects of
cultural standards of attractiveness, but it blocks meaningful
discussion of how women feel about their bodies, their appearance, and
social norms. It obscures the complex ways in which gender is
constructed, and the fact that differences among women-age, race,
culture, sexual orientation, and class-translate into myriad variations
in responses to ideals of femininity and their attendant practices.
Bartky's use of the docile bodies thesis has the effect of diminishing
and delimiting women's subjectivity, at times treating women as robotic
receptacles of culture rather than as active agents who are both
constituted by, and reflective of, their social and cultural contexts.

Susan Bordo, in "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity," also
takes up Foucault's docile bodies thesis to show the ways in which
women's bodies serve as a locus for the social construction of
femininity. Bordo argues that anorexia nervosa and bulimia are located
on a continuum with feminine normalizing phenomena such as the use of
makeup, fashion, and dieting, all of which contribute to the
construction of docile, feminine bodies. Thus, "anorexia begins, emerges
out of . . . conventional feminine practice"[14]; the docile feminine
body becomes, in the case of the anorectic, the ultimate expression of
the self-disciplining female caught up in an insane culture.

There are similarities between Bordo's and Bartky's appropriation of
Foucault's model of disciplining power, but the two treatments are dis-
analogous in significant ways. Bordo's thesis that cultural practices
are inscribed onto bodies is not so extreme as Bartky's "woman-as-
Panopticon" picture. In contrast to the thesis that women's bodies and
psyches are molded by a patriarchal culture, Bordo focuses on
anorectics' and bulimics' relationships to social practices and the ways
in which they mediate the demands of a contradictory culture. For
instance, she describes a teenage girl's growing awareness of social
expectations and values and her impulse to both suppress feminine bodily
development and resist the influence of her family by restricting her
eating.[15] This does not indicate that it is appropriate to borrow the
docile bodies thesis from Foucault unamended; instead, it seems that
Bordo is able to steer clear of the totalizing picture of the self-
disciplining Panopticon by modifying the paradigm to include accounts of
women's understandings of their experiences. The modification is
insufficient, however, for Bordo, like Bartky, loosely employs such
concepts as "disciplinary techniques" and "normalization" to explain the
forms and effects of feminine cultural practices.

This unhelpful account of subjectivity derives from problems inherent in
the docile bodies paradigm. Foucault's extreme reluctance to attribute
explicit agency to subjects in this early account of power results in a
portrayal of individuals as passive bodies, constituted by power and
immobilized in a society of discipline. Significantly, this analysis
gives way, in Foucault's later works, to a more complex understanding of
power as a field of relationships between free subjects. Yet feminists
have clearly found this first power paradigm's emphasis on the body a
useful analytic tool with which to examine women's subjectification.
However, the limitations of Foucault's account of the modernization of
power give us reason to take a critical distance from this aspect of his
work. The appropriations discussed above indicate that there is a danger
in employing the notion of self-policing, disciplined subjects in an
ahistorical, metaphorical sense. Bartky--and to a lesser extent, Bordo--
uses the docile body and the Panopticon as if these describe a wide
range of subjectivities and practices, and this leads her to conflate
women's myriad experiences of femininity. Lost are the historical
context of Foucault's account of the modernization of power and the
subtleties of his usage of "normalization" and bodily discipline by
institutions and discourses.[16] Moreover, by treating the metaphor of
docile bodies as a paradigm for women's experiences of femininity,
Bartky and Bordo foreclose the integration of Foucault's later work,
including his admission that resistance is inherent to the strategic
model of disciplined bodies. Indeed, given Foucault's subsequent
revisions and his preference for a more constitutive understanding of
power in his later writings, we should ask whether any version of the
"docile bodies" paradigm is useful for feminists.

Feminism and the Rise of Biopower. The second axis of modern power is
what Foucault calls the "biopolitics of the population," or simply
"biopower." The account of the rise of biopower in the West in the
modern period, signaling a whole new politics of population control and
management, is used by some Foucauldian feminists of this first wave to
cast light on those "discourses"--such as fetal protection laws and new
reproductive and genetic technologies (NRGTs)--that directly affect
women's control of their bodies and reproductive choices.[17]

Foucault uses the term "biopower" to denote a transformation in the
nature of the sovereign's power over its subjects, in which the state's
focus on prohibition and juridical authority is replaced by new
interests in the birth rate, education, discipline, health, and
longevity of its population. Thus, what Foucault calls a "normalizing
society" replaces the juridical authority of the sovereign. There is a
concurrent shift from struggles for political rights to "life rights"--
that is, a right to one's body, health, and the fulfillment of basic
needs. As with the "docile bodies" aspect of modern power, sexuality is
key to the exercise of biopower: both axes of power-the body and
biopower--revolve around sexuality, which in turn becomes "a crucial
target of a power organized around the management of life rather than
the menace of death." This focus is manifested in the sciences of the
"new technology of sex" starting from the end of the eighteenth century-
namely, pedagogy, medicine, and demography.[18] Of particular interest
to feminists who employ the biopower analysis are the accounts of
discourses and innovations which facilitate increased state control of
reproduction or what Foucault calls the "socialization of procreation."
These developments are used by feminists to theorize about current
reproductive practices, ranging from birth control and abortion to new
reproductive and genetic technologies.

Jennifer Terry uses Foucault's account of modern power to examine such
issues as "prenatal surveillance," fetal rights discourse, and
surrogacy. These practices stem from increased state concern for issues
of population--birth, longevity, eugenics, health--and the focus for
intervention is, not surprisingly, the domain of reproduction and
prenatal care. Terry situates fetal rights discourses and "natal
Panopticonism" against the backdrop of regulatory prenatal technologies,
including "amniocentesis, sonograms, electronic fetal monitoring . . .
sonar-produced video images," and "life-style monitoring" of pregnant
women, which can include regular Breathalizer tests for women suspected
of alcohol abuse.[19] She also points to legislative proposals in the
United States that advocate mandatory HIV antibody testing for any woman
who becomes pregnant and wishes to have a child, and notes that there
are several states that require HIV testing to obtain a marriage
license. This ominous form of medical interference holds particularly
serious implications for childbearing women, because it implies that the
state should be permitted to override their choices on the grounds that
they are potential transmitters of disease.

Similarly, Terry views fetal rights discourse as a new, legitimating
ideology whose deeper aspiration is the control of reproduction and the
lives of pregnant women. The new prenatal screening technologies are
instrumental in allowing both state and medical authorities to view the
fetus as separate from the mother, who is then subject to a range of
suspicions concerning her behavior during pregnancy. Furthermore, the
articulation of distinct fetal rights has been the outcome of a series
of civil court cases throughout the 1980s in which mothers were sued for
allegedly damaging their fetuses through irresponsible behavior.[20]
Terry relates these developments to Foucault's biopower paradigm so as
to situate them within the overall context of increased state interest
in population regulation.

Although part of Terry's argument falls back on the docile bodies thesis,
the biopower paradigm nevertheless seems appropriate to describe the
dramatic character of medical and state intervention. Yet like the
docile bodies thesis, Foucault's biopower model deemphasizes agents' ca-
pacifies to resist regulatory and disciplinary technologies. Terry is
able to avoid the worst excesses of the paradigm by inserting
descriptions of various resistances, both individual and collective,
into her account. She points, for instance, to the Women's AIDS Network,
an international group of women in law, health, and education who are
concerned with HIV and AIDS and advocate women's rights to freedom from
medical surveillance. Without such correctives, readers would be left
with a profound sense of disempowerment in the face of ubiquitous state
and medical surveillance of our reproductive lives. More importantly,
failing to point out women's responses to this intervention would give a
false picture of feminist politics: women's health issues have been a
constant focus for feminist activism--more so today than ever, as
evidenced by the renewed prochoice movement, groups demanding increased
funding for breast cancer research and treatment, grassroots initiatives
to establish women's community health clinics, and so forth.

Foucault's biopower analysis helps to reveal the implications of the
mechanisms for the control and regulation of our bodies discussed by
Terry. However, taken unamended, the paradigm obscures both individual
women's and collective struggles against coercive medical and social
practices. As Terry's work shows, feminist appropriation of Foucault's
biopower framework must include discussions of strategies employed by
women to mediate and resist encroachments on their bodies and lives.

 THE SECOND WAVE: "WHERE THERE IS POWER, THERE IS RESISTANCE" 

A second wave of feminist literature has taken up Foucault's work on
power in a different way, stressing the possibilities of resistance over
the fact of domination. Here the focus is on Foucault's later
development of an agonistic model of power--the notion that "where there
is power, there is resistance"--as well as on the assertion that
individuals contest fixed identities and relations in ongoing and
sometimes subtle ways. This power paradigm has proven particularly
helpful for feminists who want to show the diverse sources of women's
subordination as well as to demonstrate that we engage in resistance in
our everyday lives. Drawing upon Foucault's treatment of power and
resistance in his Power/Knowledge, History of Sexuality (vol. 1), and
"The Subject and Power," this literature illustrates how he challenges
the assumption that power is located exclusively or even primarily in
state apparatuses or in prohibition. By demanding that we look to the
productive character of power and to the existence of multiple power
relations--rather than to dualistic, top-down force--Foucault helps us
move from a "state of subordination" explanation of gender relations,
which emphasizes domination and victimization, to a more textured
understanding of the role of power in women's lives. Viewing power as
constitutive has helped many of us to grasp the interweaving nature of
our social, political, and personal relationships.

Jana Sawicki points out that Foucault both reminds us of the importance
of looking to subjugated knowledges and makes us circumspect about
theories or movements that claim to offer a transcendence of power, or a
power-free context. Sawicki argues that Foucault's account of power
complements feminist concerns in that he "proposes that we think of
power outside the confines of State, law or class. . . . Thus, Foucault
frees power from the political domain in much the same way as radical
feminists did."[21] Similarly, Susan Hekman argues that feminists have
much to learn from Foucault's antitotalizing conception of power,
because it cautions us against invoking universalisms and quick-fix
solutions for complex social and political relations. Moreover, she
asserts that a Foucauldian view of power necessarily reveals resistance
to discourses and practices that subordinate women, a conclusion she
reaches by high-lighting-and I would argue, embellishing--accounts of
resistance and political action in Foucault's work.[22]

A more critical body of work by feminist scholars takes issue with
precisely those aspects of the agonistic model of power that this second
wave finds so useful--the notion that power circulates and is exercised
rather than possessed. However, this criticism stems in part from
wrongly reading Foucault as a certain kind of postmodernist thinker,
reflected in the allegation that he is a relativist (because
antihumanist) and consequently guilty of overlooking the political
aspects of power and resistance. Foucault's antimodernist rejection of
truth is invoked to corroborate this analysis, as is his reluctance in
his middle and later works to speak of social systems of domination.
This position is best represented by Nancy Fraser, who contends that
Foucault's agonistic notion of power posits that "power is productive,
ineliminable, and therefore normatively neutral." By contrast, Fraser
asserts that feminism needs to be able to distinguish between social
practices which are "good" (less coercive) and "bad" (very coercive) and
expresses nostalgia for Weberian distinctions between violence,
domination, and authority.[23] Integral to this charge is Fraser's
reading of Foucault as an antihumanist thinker who refuses to engage in
normative discussions. Nancy Hartsock concurs with the conclusion that
feminists cannot find adequate normative grounding in Foucault's work
and goes so far as to state that his theory undermines attempts at
social change, because his conception of power obscures the systematic
nature of gender oppression. Echoing Fraser's criticism, she states that
for Foucault, "power is everywhere and ultimately nowhere" and that
"domination, viewed from above, is more likely to appear as equality."
As an antidote to this distortion, she suggests that feminists need to
"develop an account of the world which treats our perspectives not as
subjugated or disruptive knowledges, but as primary and constitutive of
the real world."[24]

Hartsock's claim that Foucault's model of power does not allow for an
understanding of systematic injustice seems, at first glance, credible.
Indeed, his account of power renders murky and less tangible numerous
social relations, relations which feminists have argued constitute
concrete oppression. Yet it is misleading to suggest that for Foucault
such a condition does not exist: to the contrary, domination is by his
account a frequent and at times inescapable reality.[25] Nor does it
seem fair to impute to Foucault, as both Fraser and Hartsock do, a
normatively neutral world view, because his work consistently reflects
what are manifestly--if not always polemically--political concerns.

Staking out a middle ground between the criticisms of Fraser and
Hartsock and the generosity of Sawicki and Hekman, I would like to argue
that Foucault's agonistic model of power is double-edged. It is useful
for feminists to the extent that it disengages us from simplistic,
dualistic accounts of power; at the same time, however, it obscures many
important experiences of power specific to women and fails to provide a
sustainable notion of agency. This is not an easily negotiated tension
for feminists; as one critic comments, Foucault's "lack of a rounded
theory of subjectivity or agency conflicts with a fundamental aim of the
feminist project to rediscover and reevaluate the experiences of
women."[26] Moreover, feminists in particular should be wary of
Foucault's assertion that all social interactions are defined and
thoroughly permeated by the exercise of power, as expressed in his view
that "in human relations, whatever they are--whether it be a question of
communicating verbally . . . or a question of a love relationship, an
institutional or economic relationship-power is always present: I mean
the relationship in which one wishes to direct the behavior of
another."[27] If we agree with Hartsock's suggestion that feminists need
to envisage a nondominated world, we should not slip into fatalistic
views about the omnipresence of power. This means rejecting Foucault's
assertion that absolutely no social or personal relations escape
permeation by power.[28]

To illustrate the ramifications of Foucault's approach, it is useful to
consider some specific ways in which this model tends to obscure women's
experiences of power. This entails a discussion of Foucault's treatment
of the subject, first with respect to freedom, then as concerns the
issue of violence. In his later work, Foucault emphasizes that in order
for a power relationship to exist, the subject on whom that "conduct" or
governance is exercised must be a free subject. This appears at times as
an essentialist freedom and at others as a qualified liberty where
"individual or collective subjects . . . are faced with a field of
possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and
diverse comportments may be realized." Thus, power is separated off from
force, violence, and domination, which do not involve any freedom on the
part of the subject.

A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces,
it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on
all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it
comes up against any resistance it has no other option but to try to
minimize it.

In order for a relationship of power to exist, a subject must be capable
of action or resistance and be recognized as a person on whom force or
"conduct" is exercised: thus, agonistic power is "a set of actions upon
other actions."[29] This does not mean that domination is altogether
antithetical to power. Rather, domination is the result of trajectories
of force and power relations, culminating in a greater or lesser state
of subordination, and correspondingly, with fewer or greater
possibilities for resistance by subjects.[30] Yet power and domination
remain different phenomena for Foucault.

It is important to ask whether this treatment of the subject enables us
to recognize women's experiences of freedom and unfreedom. It would be
difficult to argue that Foucault's account of the subject's capacity to
resist power is simply untrue. Indeed, much feminist literature now
stresses the importance of seeing women not as passive victims uniformly
dominated but as active agents mediating their experiences. Nor does it
seem accurate to claim that Foucault's reworking of the subject somehow
compromises the political claim that women are indeed subordinated--for
domination is a state that Foucault is quick to acknowledge.[31] Yet
what feminist theory does, and what Foucault does not do, is look
closely and critically at the issue of freedom where it concerns women's
responses to structural inequality and male violence.

To understand the workings of power and the responses that power elicits,
it is necessary to ask how women experience freedom and barriers to
freedom. This might involve, for instance, looking at what Virginia Held
has referred to as internal impediments to women's freedom or
empowerment.[32] Held points to Sandra Bartky's work on shame: "The
heightened self-consciousness that comes with emotions of self-
assessment may become, in the shame of the oppressed, a stagnant self-
obsession. Or shame may generate a rage whose expression is
unconstructive, even self-destructive. In all these ways, shame is
profoundly disempowering."[33] Unlike her earlier "woman-as-Panopticon"
analysis, Bartky's theorizing on shame posits women as active subjects
capable of a range of responses to social power. Bartky also discusses
sources of disempowerment for women often omitted from accounts of power
and powerlessness: unreciprocated emotional labor, nurturing, and
caregiving. This kind of disempowerment, because it "is more subtle and
oblique, one that is rooted in the subjective and deeply interiorized
effects upon women ourselves both of the emotional care we give and of
the care we fail to get in return,"[34] is, I think, easily obscured by
Foucault's agonistic model of power, because it reflects neither
outright domination nor the intersubjective play of power between two
free agents.

Feminists need to look at the inner processes that condition women's
sense of freedom or choice in addition to external manifestations of
power and dominance--and Foucault's understanding of power is decidedly
inadequate to this task. Women's "freedom" does not simply refer to
objective possibilities for maneuvering or resisting within a power
dynamic but concerns whether a woman feels empowered in her specific
context. Because Foucault's account of the freedom of the subject
determines the presence of power or "conduct"--as well as its opposite
pole, violence or domination--based on the existence of objective points
of resistance, it obscures the subjective aspects of power. As Lois
McNay points out, in Foucault's theory, "power relations are only
examined from the perspective of how they are installed in institutions
and not from the point of view of those subject to power."[35] A
feminist response to this failing might borrow from Held's objection to
classical liberals and contemporary libertarians' views of freedom as
largely determined by the absence of "external impediments": feminists
must emphasize, against this account, that "the self-development of
women involves changing the affective tastes, the emotional coloration,
with which we experience the world, not only the outer obstacles in that
experience." Addressing women's freedom requires that we reflect upon
internal impediments to exercising choice as well as the tangible
obstacles to its realization--and this means considering practices and
conventions that may have disempowering effects not easily discernible
to theorists who focus exclusively on political power. Finally, it
involves recognizing certain experiences as ongoing expressions of
resistance to power--"the power to give voice to one's aspiration to be
heard is not so much the removal of an external impediment as the
beginning of an internal empowerment."[36]

Foucault's agonistic model of power, skewed as it is towards a dynamic
of acting upon, cannot provide feminists with the conceptual tools
needed to understand empowerment and disempowerment, freedom and non-
freedom. To illustrate the inability of this framework to consider
women's experiences of power, let us next consider the issue of male
violence. First, recall Foucault's claim that violence and power are
inherently different or separable, the former presupposing a situation
of physical determination and the latter connoting a relation of
"conduct," a dichotomy expressed by his claim that "where the
determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of
power; slavery is not a power relationship when a man is in chains."[37]
Foucault's metaphoric slave in chains has no possibility of movement or
resistance and is, in his view, situated in a context of violence and
domination, not power. What does this mean for feminists grappling with
the question of women's experiences of rape, battery, and psychological
abuse? To define male power as an inherently separable phenomenon from
male force and domination, as Foucault would have us do, is to disregard
the ways in which this power is frequently transformed into violence. A
woman living in an abusive relationship feels the continuum of her
partner's anger and force, sees that the day-to-day exercise of power is
the stuff out of which explosions of abuse and violence are made.
Foucault's distinction between power and violence, freedom and
domination, do not allow us to ask whether this woman feels complicit or
victimized, powerless or empowered to leave the situation of abuse.

The issues of women's relation to violence and power are raised in a
response by Monique Plaza to Foucault's position on rape. Foucault's
view, expressed during a roundtable discussion, is that "when rape is
punished, it is exclusively the physical violence that should be
punished," and that one should consider rape "nothing but an assault."
Foucault concludes that to treat rape as a sexual offense is to shore up
the apparatus of repression, infusing sex with repressive power; thus,
he comments that sexuality should not "under any circumstances be the
object of punishment."[38]

Plaza's response to Foucault is that he is setting up a false dichotomy
between violence and sex. Rape, which is violent, forced sex, thus
represents an imbroglio for Foucault, leading him to assert that the
sexual part of rape should be exempted from punishment, leaving only
force as deserving of sanction--a preposterous distinction. Women's
unfreedom (as victims of rape) is thus superseded by the need to
maintain men's freedom, that is, their freedom not to be punished for
sex or to have their sex repressed. As Plaza writes, "what do they say
except that they want to defend the freedom that men have at the present
time to repress us by rape? What do they say except that what they call
(their) freedom is the repression of our bodies?"[39]

I have brought up the issues of male violence and rape not to show that
Foucault is a bad person or a bad philosopher but rather to illustrate
that feminist theorists should approach his notions of the free subject
and agonistic power with great caution. To summarize, this caveat is
necessary for three reasons: first, because his analysis does not
consider women's internal barriers to agency and choice, as with the
example of shame; second, because it sets up a false dichotomy between
power and violence, as illustrated by the continuum of anger and
physical abuse experienced by a battered woman; and third, because it
does not question the fact that in many societies, men's freedom
(privilege, etc.) is contingent upon women's unfreedom, as in the case
of rape, rather than on the presence of a freely maneuvering subject.
This does not mean feminists must jettison Foucault's framework of power
relations altogether but suggests that if we do wish to employ this part
of the tool kit,[40] we must amend the thesis drastically to include
inquiry into subjective aspects of power and, in particular, to
reconceptualize the relationship between social and personal power and
privilege, on one hand, and violence, on the other. This requires that
we recognize that there are significant connections between the two,
connections that are not always immediately obvious to us. However,
certain distinctions between power and force are warranted and are
crucial for feminists--there are real differences, for instance, between
not being considered for a promotion on sexually discriminatory grounds,
and being raped. It does not help feminists to insist on the existence
of one single, global form of oppression that admits only of degree.[41]


Finally, as the discussion of lesbian and gay identity politics in the
next section will show, the omission of an account of empowerment from
Foucault's analysis of power should alert us to the limitations of his
theory for feminist theory and praxis.

 THE THIRD WAVE: SEXUAL IDENTITY AND REGIMES OF TRUTH/POWER 

Following the intense interest in recent years in the themes of identity
and difference, numerous scholars have used Foucault's work to suggest
new ways of thinking about gender and sexual orientation. I will use the
example of lesbian and gay politics to show that, despite their initial
appeal, Foucault's accounts of the subject and power may contradict the
aspirations of those who would mobilize around common, if contingent,
identities.

Judith Butler is at the center of the third wave of Foucauldian feminist
theory. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
Butler builds on Foucault's account of the proliferation of discourses
on sex in the modern era. What we see today, she argues, is the constant
reproduction of sexual identities via "an exclusionary apparatus of
production" in which the meanings of these practices are curtailed,
restricted, and reinforced. Whereas Foucault is most interested in the
way regimes of power produce discourses on sexual perversion, pathology,
delinquency and criminality, and new subjects emerging from these
categories, Buffer is equally interested in the construction of gender
and sexual minority identities. For feminists, her most controversial
move is to use Foucault's thesis on modern power to deconstruct the very
notion of woman. Butler proposes that we view gender as discursively and
materially constructed through repetitive "performances" of "words, acts,
gestures and desire." Foucault's influence on Butler's formulation is
clear in her claim: "If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and
if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of
bodies then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, bur are
only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable
identity." Rather than clinging to fixed notions of femaleness as
necessary for feminist praxis, Butler suggests that we reconceptualize
identity as "an effect" in order to destabilize gender and open up new,
unforeseen possibilities for agency.[42]

A full discussion of Butler's work is not possible here, but I would
like to address those aspects of Foucault's analysis of modern power
that Butler invokes in her call for a notion of sexuality as a site of
contestation and subversion and to consider such a strategy's
implications for lesbian and gay politics. Like Foucault, Butler
suggests that sexual identities are constituted by regulatory practices
and draws our attention to the instability of sexual categories. The
backdrop to this thesis is found in Foucault's discussion of the rise of
pastoral power in the West in the modern period; this power is salvation-
oriented, individualizing (and at the same time totalizing), and "linked
with the production of truth-the truth of the individual himself."[43]
This combination of tactics culminates in dividing practices and "true
discourses" that tie the individual back onto her or his own identity,
producing the modern category of the "homosexual" as well as other
subject categories.

It is because minority sexual identities are so deeply couched in the
dividing practices which first gave them meaning--established "through
the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral
sexualities[44]--that Foucault discourages us from embracing these self-
understandings in an uncritical way or as part of a political strategy.
Not surprisingly, Foucault is dismissive of struggles that make sex the
"rallying point" for resistance to the deployment of sexuality;[45] he
contrasts "the homosexual liberation movements" with "the creative and
interesting elements in the women's movements" and praises the latter
for attempting to overcome their particular form of individualization,
promoting "a displacement effected in relation to the sexual centering
of the problem, formulating the demand for new forms of culture,
discourse, language . . . which are no longer part of that rigid
assignation and pinning down to their sex which they had initially . . .
been politically obliged to accept in order to make themselves heard."
Gay men have not yet tried to desexualize their political platform as
much as the feminist movement and instead have unwittingly
overemphasized their sexual orientation.[46] Foucault believes there is
a need to "desex" struggles, by which he means that the focus of a
project of "liberation"--a concept he views with much suspicion--must
change in order to prompt a more radical questioning of discourses that
have made the categorization and persecution of individuals possible.

It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim--through
a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality--to counter
the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges,
in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying
point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought
not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.[47]

Butler concurs with Foucault's view that a politics placed squarely on
fixed categories of gender and sexual orientation has the effect of
reifying those identities. As an antidote to the production and
reinforcement of prevailing notions of sexual identity, Butler argues
that homosexuality and heterosexuality--like gender--exist as enactments
of cultural and aesthetic performances; even as these identities are
performed and repeated, they are (in true Foucauldian form) being
contested and unraveled. In an analysis that also borrows from Jacques
Derrida, Butler claims that emancipatory discourses on sexuality
ironically set up heterosexuality as origin, in the sense that
homosexuality is viewed as a "copy" of the "original," or authentic,
sexual identity.[48] To counteract this reification, Butler proposes to
disrupt the logic that makes this dualistic formulation possible by
underlining the contingency of the "sign" of sexual identity.

It is considerably less clear how a strategy of displacement translates
into effective political action. Butler endorses Foucault's strategy and
argues for a concept of politics as the constant undoing of the
categories and gender norms that derive from, and are perpetuated by,
sexual "performances." Crucially, however, she avoids the topic of how
we go about employing for political purposes those same provisional
identities. Indeed, it is not at all clear that Butler thinks this can
be done successfully- that is, without reifying those subjectivities.
Butler's ambivalence points to the sheer difficulty of such a project,
as evidenced by her comment: "There is a political necessity to use some
sign now, and we do, but how to use it in such a way that its futural
significations are not foreclosed? How to use the sign and avow its
temporal contingency at once?"[49] Similarly, Jana Sawicki incorporates
Foucauldian premises in her assertions that we need to discover new ways
of understanding ourselves and new ways of resisting how we have been
socially defined and constructed. Unfortunately, as with Butler, Sawicki
leaves us with little sense of how feminist politics can proceed if
gender is to be displaced.[50]

The political ambivalence of a position stressing the contingency of
common self-understandings--or for Butler, the illusory nature of gender
and sexual identities--is echoed in Foucault's own work. Foucault's view
that subjects must resist the particular forms of subjectification that
have oppressed them is linked to his claim that these struggles must
expand and critically reflect upon both their definitions of shared
identity and their domain of activism. This is as close as Foucault
comes to suggesting what political resistance to oppression might look
like, and the vagueness of his vision is reproduced by third-wave
Foucauldian feminists. If, by the suggestion: "Maybe the target nowadays
is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are," Foucault is
advising that one take up a critical stance toward identities that have
been constructed and reinforced by coercive discourses, the point is
well taken.[51] This circumspection is also helpful as a caution against
the sometimes homogenizing effect of identity politics--the tendency for
a particular self-understanding to supersede others by setting up norms
for what it means to be, and to live as, a lesbian or gay man. Yet
several troubling questions remain. For example, are sexual identities
strictly "constructed" via dividing practices that set homosexual off
from heterosexual? Aren't a range of issues re-gaming sexual choice and
the conscious appropriation of an identity simply being overlooked?
Isn't it necessary, both for reasons of personal affirmation and
political efficacy--in order to. make rights-based claims, for instance--
to assert the existence of the "categories" of women, lesbians, and gay
men? And how does a group or an individual simultaneously resist an
identity and mobilize around it for the purposes of empowerment and
political action? These are questions which the arguments of third-wave
Foucauldian feminists, like those of Foucault himself, necessarily
raise. The fact that the questions go unaddressed speaks to the
difficulties inherent in Foucauldian conceptions of identity and power.

Despite the initial usefulness of a deconstruction of sexual identity,
then, Foucault's position leaves feminist theorists in something of a
quandary. In particular, there are three concrete political problems
raised by this approach that require attention. The first, perhaps most
obvious, problem is that Foucault's treatment of sexual identities gives
insufficient attention to struggles by particular social movements and
to the ways in which their participants perceive and creatively inhabit
their own identities. Most lesbian and gay activists today place sexual
orientation at the center of their struggles, which range from
retrieving accounts of their historical communities to resisting
homophobic violence and discrimination as concerns employment, health
and pension benefits, and so forth. For Foucault, such activity
constitutes a dubious if not illogical strategy, because it casts these
sexual identities as essential or biological rather than socially
constructed. The end result is, as one critic notes of unmitigated
social-constructionist theories in general, a tendency to treat lesbians
and gay men who understand themselves in identity-bound terms as
"victims of 'false consciousness,' unaware of the constructedness of
their identifies."[52]

Foucault's analysis also negates the importance of personal and group
definition and affirmation, resources not easily replaced by the vague
notion of identity contestation. Shane Phelan, for instance, has looked
at the ways in which the construction of a positive lesbian identity and
a community to support it, while rife with difficulties, has provided a
base of emotional and political support for many lesbians. She cautions
against the pitfalls of fixing a static description of lesbianism--since
"every new definition . . . shades another, and this is a choice with
political consequences"--agreeing with Foucault insofar as she argues
that lesbian feminists fall into "the trap of counterreification" in
taking back the task of defining themselves. Yet in the final instance,
Phelan shows it is possible and desirable to forge a critical, strategic
politics that keeps identity at the center of its project.

Identity politics does mean building our public action on who we are and
how that identity fits into and does not fit into our society. This is
and must be the basis for political action that addresses nonjuridical,
nonstate-centered power. . . . Identity politics must be based, not only
on identity, but on an appreciation for politics as the art of living
together. Politics that ignores our identities, that makes them "private,
" is useless; but nonnegotiable identities will enslave us whether they
are imposed from within or without.[53]

A second, related problem with a Foucauldian analysis of identity is
that it needlessly dichotomizes the debate on strategies for sexual
minority politics, offering two disparate alternatives: on the one hand,
the decision to keep sexuality and sexual choice at the center of a
movement, to reappropriate these experiences as a departure point for
political activism; and, on the other, Foucault's preferred option, that
of "desexualizing" struggles and exploring new forms of pleasure and
discourse that do not feed back into the "pinning down" to one's sex.
This ignores the possibility, illustrated by lesbian and gay communities
over the past several decades, that these two political methods may be
complementary tools of empowerment and political activism, pursued
simultaneously. In particular, the idea of strategic essentialism--
reappropriating and subverting an identity while maintaining an
understanding of its historical contingency--is overlooked by Foucault
and is treated rather suspiciously by this third-wave feminist
literature.[54]

A final criticism both of Foucault's position on sexual identity and of
third-wave feminist appropriations of his thesis is that they leave
untouched the subject's understanding of her conditions of oppression,
and by implication, tend to foreclose discussions of agency and
empowerment. This omission is crucially related to the criticisms of
Foucault's agonistic model of power and his position on sexual
identities. Many forms of resistance may go unnoticed if we begin from
Foucault's call to desexualize struggles and so shun the minority
identities which have been constructed by discourses on sex. For
instance, it is unlikely that this approach to sexual identities can
comprehend lesbian feminist politics of the past two decades, Stonewall,
ACT UP, or even the institution of Gay Pride Day. Moreover, Foucault's
treatment of power obscures the personal experiences behind such
activism: these may contain elements of power relations in which the
"acting upon" dynamic is appropriate, as, for example, in the case of
specific demands directed at decision makers. Yet struggles such as
these are also about personal empowerment and acting collectively to set
an agenda for change. In effect, Foucault's power analysis prevents us
from seeing or conceptualizing relationships in which the object is
neither to aa upon another in a power relation or to resist the attempts
of governing conduct or a local manifestation of power; it is a
framework that seems inappropriate for describing cooperative efforts
aimed both at political transformation and personal empowerment or
consciousness raising.[55]

Foucault's theory allows little room for an account of the processes
involved in developing personal and collective capacities for political
activism; empowerment is not simply about actions upon agents in a
relationship of power and so cannot be understood within the confines of
this analysis. A richer resource of alternative approaches to theorizing
agency are to be found in works by such writers as Audre Lorde, Patricia
Hill Collins, and bell hooks.

 CONCLUSION: FEMINISM, POWER, AND EMPOWERMENT 

Feminist ideology should not encourage (as sexism has done) women to
believe they are powerless. It should clarify for women the powers they
exercise daily and show them ways these powers can be used to resist
sexist domination and exploitation.

--bell hooks, "Changing Perspectives on Power," in Feminist Theory: From
Margin to Center, 1984

If empowerment is much more than a relationship of power, or an attempt
to direct the behavior of others, what is the most useful
conceptualization of this phenomenon for feminists? Rather than offering
a single definition, I would like to hint at an array of useful accounts
in feminist literature.

Audre Lorde writes of the importance of erotic power in our lives and
the connections between agency and self-understanding: "Our acts against
oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from
within."[56] The relationship between personal experiences of
disempowerment and oppression, on the one hand, and broader political
action, on the other, has numerous illustrations in contemporary North
American feminist politics. For instance, the advent of the direct-
action Women's Action Coalition (WAC) in the United States in early 1992
(and soon after, in Canada) was motivated by a surge of frustration and
anger in the wake of such events as the Kennedy rape trial and the
Supreme Court's disbelief in the testimony of Anita Hill, both of which
resonated with the experiences of untold numbers of women.[57] WAC has
been successful precisely because it galvanizes this discontent and
recognizes the importance of empowerment: the women involved do not
expect immediate political changes but know that their dramatic, vocal
protests register their anger and convey the message that specific
injustices will not be tolerated.

On a similar note, Patricia Hill Collins writes about the empowerment of
Black American women as an outcome of changed consciousness, resulting
from both internal transformations and the effects of these
transformations on the broader community.

[C]hange can also occur in the private, personal space of an individual
woman's consciousness. Equally fundamental, this type of change is also
empowering. If a Black woman is forced to remain "motionless on the
outside," she can always develop the "inside" of a changed consciousness
as a sphere of freedom. Becoming empowered through self-knowledge, even
within conditions that severely limit one's ability to act, is
essential.

Collins writes of the importance of an alternative vision of power. In
her view, "Black women have not conceptualized our quest for empowerment
as one of replacing elite white male authorities with ourselves as
benevolent Black female ones. Instead, African-American women have
overtly rejected theories of power based on domination in order to
embrace an alternative vision of power based on a humanist vision of
self-actualization, self-definition, and self-determination."[58] bell
hooks also believes it is important to consider the possibilities for
political transformation which arise from our daily lives. Her notion of
a "politics of location" as a revisioning exercise to counter the
effects of hegemonic practices, as well as her concept of the dual
nature of marginality--as a "site of deprivation" and a "space of
resistance"--are useful analytic tools with which to examine Black
American struggles as well as women's specific empowerment.[59]

These feminist writings on empowerment suggest the need to place the
subject's interpretation and mediation of her experiences at the center
of our inquiries into the how and why of power. Such an analysis might
ask: what do relationships of power feel like from the inside, where are
the possibilities for resistance, and what personal and collective
processes will take us there? A feminist analysis of power would avoid
the omissions and problems of Foucault's understanding of power in four
key ways. First, by conceptualizing women's relationships to their
bodies as both a reflection of social construction and of their own
responses to (and mediation of) the cultural ideals of femininity, it
would avoid the pitfalls of a static, "docile bodies" paradigm of
subjectivity. Second, it would reject aspects of Foucault's agonistic
model of power--including his assertion that all relations are permeated
by power, and the simplistic, false dichotomy of power versus violence
or domination--and instead attend to the myriad sources of
disempowerment and oppression experienced by women. Third, it would take
seriously the issue of women's empowerment, their capacities for self-
determination and freedom, and the conditions in which these flourish.
And fourth, a feminist analysis of power would dispute both Foucault's
view that sexual identities should not form the basis for lesbian and
gay struggles and third-wave Foucauldian feminists' assertion that the
category of "women" should be displaced from the center of feminist
politics. This last point need not prevent those engaged in feminist
theory and queer theory--nor, indeed, social movements themselves--from
appreciating the significance of Foucault's discussion of the historical
construction of marginalized identities.

Although the overall tone of this article conveys more criticisms of
Foucault than suggestions for feminist uses of his thought, this is not
necessarily bad news. I think that feminist theorists have learned, and
can learn still more, from Foucault. Although it is disappointing that
his work does not engage directly with feminism, this does not diminish
the heuristic usefulness of certain of Foucault's insights on power,
resistance, and sexuality. It is vital, however, to keep a critical edge
when attempting to appropriate Foucauldian concepts for feminist ends.
In the process, we may discover that there are resources within feminist
theory better suited to the task of developing an alternative vision of
power and empowerment than are attempts to make Foucault fit feminist
purposes.

Feminist Studies 20, no. 2 (summer 1994). (C) 1994 by Feminist Studies,
Inc.

                                 NOTES

An earlier version of this paper was given at the annual conference of
the "Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy," 20-22 September 1991 at
the University of Winnipeg. I am grateful to James Tully and Peta Bowden
for invaluable help with an earlier draft as well as for providing a
stimulating seminar series on the feminist implications of Foucault's
thought during the spring of 1990 in the Department of Political Science,
McGill University, for which this paper was originally written. I am
also indebted to David Kahane for helping me to clarify and sharpen my
arguments by suggesting numerous improvements to subsequent versions.

1. Foucault's reference to power as agonic, or agonistic, denotes his
assertion that power circulates, is never fixed, and is really a network
of relationships of power among subjects who are at least in some
minimal sense free to act and to resist. This is the concept of power
developed in his Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980), and in "The Subject and Power," afterword to
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Paul Rabinow
and Hubert Dreyfus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Agonistic comes from the Greek, agon, or combat, and connotes both the
exercise of power and struggle (see Foucault's account of the agonic
metaphor in "The Subject and Power," 222.)

2. I refer to the subject in the singular throughout the essay for
simplicity's sake but do not mean to imply that Foucault asserts the
existence of a homogenous kind of subject or subjectivity. Indeed, in
response to this suggestion, Foucault comments:

(The subject) is not a substance; it is a form and this form is not
above all or always identical to itself. You do not have towards
yourself the same kind of relationship when you constitute yourself as a
political subject who goes and votes or speaks up in a meeting, and when
you try to fulfill your desires in a sexual relationship. . . .

In each case, we play, we establish with one's self some different form
of relationship. And it is precisely the historical constitution of
these different forms of subject relating to games of truth that
interest me.

See "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An
Interview with Michel Foucault," interview by Raul Fornet-Betancourt et
al., trans. Joseph D. Gauthier, in The Final Foucault, ed. James
Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 10.

3. See Susan Hekman, Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern
Feminism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); and Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York and London: Routledge, 1990).

4. Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge, 105.

5. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 139.

6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), 25.

7. For example, Foucault, in his 1982 lecture on "Technologies of the
Self," stated: "Perhaps I've insisted too much on the technology of
domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction
between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual
domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the
technology of the self." Also important here is his emphasis on
"governmentality," which is the "contact between the technologies of
domination of others and those of the self." See Luther H. Martin et al.,
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 19.

8. See also Foucault, "The Eye of Power," in Power/Knowledge.

9. Ibid., 155.

10. Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance,
ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1988), 63, 63-64.

11. Ibid., 64 and 66. Unfortunately, "femininity" as a construct is at
no point historicized or contextualized in Bartky's analysis.

12. Ibid., 77-78.

13. Ibid., 81.

14. Susan Bordo, "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity," in
Gender, Body, Knowledge, ed. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo (London and
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 23.

15. Ibid. See also Bordo's "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as
Crystallization of Culture," in Feminism and Foucault.

16. Foucault--in Discipline and Punish and "Two Lectures"--traces the
emergence of specific disciplinary mechanisms such as prisons, hospitals,
and schools to account for the formation of a "disciplinary society"
beginning in the late seventeenth century and emphasizes that the
transition from sovereign to disciplinary power is a historically
specific phenomenon.

17. Although I have chosen to distinguish between Foucault's "docile
bodies" and "biopower" theses, they are frequently run together in the
literature. I treat them separately in order to show that the "biopower"
analysis, if amended, is much more useful for feminists than is the
docile bodies thesis.

18. History of Sexuality, 1: 142-43, 145, 147, 116.

19. Jennifer Terry, "The Body Invaded: Medical Surveillance of Women as
Reproducers," Socialist Review 19 (July-September 1989): 13-43, 20.

20. Terry points out (p. 23) that, since 1984, it has become possible in
the United States to charge a vehicle driver, including a pregnant woman,
with manslaughter causing the death of a fetus. Additionally, legal
theorist Patricia Williams cites one case among many in which a pregnant
woman who was a known drug user was ordered put in jail by a judge in
order to protect the fetus (Women and the Law lecture series, Law
Faculty, McGill University, Montreal, 4 Apr. 1990).

21. Jana Sawicki, "Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom," in Feminism
and Foucault, 185 and 189, and her "Foucault and Feminism: Toward a
Politics of Difference," Hypatia 1 (fall 1986): 32, 26.

22. Hekman, 182-86.

23. Nancy Fraser, "Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and
Normative Confusions," in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender
in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), 31, 32.

24. Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?" in
Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London:
Routledge, 1990), 170, 168, 171.

25. Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,"
12.

26. Lois McNay, "The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience,"
Hypatia 6 (fall 1991): 125.

27. Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,"
11.

28. Peta Bowden suggests that Foucault's conception of power precludes a
range of emotions and interpersonal experiences, because it insists that
all relations are characterized by adversarial agonistic power (seminar
presentation, Department of Political Science, McGill University,
Montreal, April 1990).

29. To "conduct" in this Foucauldian sense can mean to direct others or
even to coerce; Foucault also uses conduct as a noun to denote a way of
behaving in an "open field of possibilities." See Foucault, "The Subject
and Power," 220-21.

30. Foucault, "Power and Strategies," in Power/Knowledge, 42.

31. Ibid. Despite Foucault's references to domination, he is often taken
to purport the absence of domination per se. For instance, Biddy Martin
argues that "there is the danger that Foucault's challenges to
traditional categories, if taken to a 'logical' conclusion . . . could
make the question of women's oppression obsolete." See her "Feminism,
Criticism, and Foucault," in Feminism and Foucault, 17.

32. Virginia Held, "Freedom and Feminism" (paper presented to the
conference on "The Intellectual Legacy of C.B. Macpherson," University
of Toronto, 4-6 Oct. 1989). For a revised version, see her Feminist
Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 9.

33. Sandra Bartky, "Shame and Gender," in Feminism and Domination:
Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 97. Held quotes an earlier version of this work on p.
8 of her essay.

34. Sandra Bartky, "Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and
Disaffection in Women's Emotional Labor," ibid., 111.

35. McNay, 134.

36. Held, 8, 12.

37. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 221.

38. Monique Plaza, "Our Damages and Their Compensation--Rape: The 'Will
Not to Know' of Michel Foucault," Feminist Issues 1 (summer 1981): 25-
35. Plaza quotes Foucault from a round-table discussion published in La
Folie Encerclee (Paris: Seghers/Lafont, 1977), 99. See Plaza, 27, 26.

39. Plaza, 31.

40. Foucault suggests using theory. as a "tool kit"--in the sense of
"instrument"--rather than as a total "system," in "Power and Strategies,
" Power/Knowledge, 145.

41. I am indebted to Virginia Held for pointing out how important
distinctions between power and violence are for feminists. Held draws a
number of useful distinctions between power, force, coercion, and
violence. (Personal communication, 5 June 1993.)

42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 31-32, 136, 147. Butler's clearest
definition of gender is found early (p. 33) on in her text: "Gender is
the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a
highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance
of substance, of a natural sort of being."

43. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 214.

44. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 48.

45. Foucault, "Confessions of the Flesh," Power/Knowledge, 219-20; see
also interview entitled "The End of the Monarchy of Sex," trans. John
Johnson, in Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1989).

46. Foucault, "Confessions of the Flesh," 220. Foucault appears to be
referring to gay men, and not to lesbians, when he speaks of "homosexual
movements"; moreover, he contrasts this movement with "women," a
distinction which is both misleading and ill-informed.

47. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 157.

48. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in
Inside/Out: Lesbia, Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York and
London: Routledge, 1992), 18, 19, 29.

49. Ibid., 19.

50. Sawicki, "Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom," 189.

51. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 216.

52. Stephen Epstein, "Gay Politics, Ethnic Identity: The Limits of
Social Constructionism," Socialist Review 7 (May/August 1987): 22.

53. Shane Phelan, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of
Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 79, 156, 170.
(Emphasis added.)

54. See, for instance, Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination,"
19-20.

55. Of the three types of relationships identified by Foucault--those of
"objective capacities," relationships of communication, and power
relations--none come close to describing what we understand as
empowerment. The first refers to the effects of power, and the others
identify the ways in which individuals or groups are brought together in
a play of power, acting upon one another. See Foucault's "The Subject
and Power," 217-18. Foucault considers even personal communication and
love to be constituted by a dynamic of "acting upon." See his "Ethic of
Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," 11.

56. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Audre
Lorde's Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, N.Y.:
Crossing Press, 1984), 58.

57. See Karen Houppert, "WAC," Village Voice 37 (9 June 1992): 33-38.

58. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 111, 224.

59. bell hooks, "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness," in
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South
End Press, 1990), 145, 149.

~~~~~~~~
By MONIQUE DEVEAUX
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Source: Feminist Studies, Summer94, Vol. 20 Issue 2, p223, 25p.
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