Magazine: Style, Winter, 1992
FEMINIST THEORY AND FOUCAULT: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
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A veritable Foucault industry has sprung up in the last decade. Because
he dealt sparingly (some would say "disparagingly") with women, it is
perhaps surprising that a significant portion of work dealing with the
writings of Michel Foucault has come from feminists. As Constance
Balides writes:
If the intellectual marriage of the 1970s was marxism and feminism,
disaffections and preferences shifted in the 1980s to produce a
companionship between Foucault and feminism--or, more precisely,
between feminism, the ascendant term, and Foucault. (138)[1]
Producing feminist theory in the humanities today virtually requires a
working knowledge of some of Foucault's texts, if not of feminist
reworkings of his theories/methods. This bibliographic essay covers the
latter group: the feminist appropriations and critiques of Foucault that
have emerged in the last five years. Although this essay does not
provide an adequate introduction to Foucault, I have attempted to
outline briefly feminist theoretical work dealing with Foucault,
including books, anthologies, and articles. Inclusion of what might be
called "applied feminist Foucauldian work" (particularly prevalent in
literary, film, historical and/or cultural studies) is beyond the scope
of this essay.
There is a proliferation of readings of Foucault's texts (or, if you
will, a proliferation of "Foucaults"), as is often the case with figures
of theoretical authority. Many believe that Foucault would have found
this authority abhorrent.[2] Indeed, some feminists find the feminist
appeal to Foucault's authority to be ludicrous or even traitorous.[3]
Others draw on or refashion this authority for their own critical ends.
And, of course, any number of feminist theorists combine sympathy with
antipathy for Foucault's texts. Broadly, three areas of Foucault's work
have been taken up by feminist theorists: bodies/sex, authors/ readers,
and histories/academic disciplines.
The most widely cited Foucauldian feminist intervention is Judith
Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble. Butler's performative theory of
gender is sketched out in the first and last chapters of the book using
Foucault's formulation of genealogy (to "center on and decenter defining
institutions"--here phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality).
Butler concludes that if gender as an inner truth is a fabrication and
if a "true" gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface
of bodies, then "genders can be neither true nor false, but are only
produced [and 'performed'] as the truth effects of a discourse of
primary and stable identity" (136). Where other feminists have seen
stable identity as something that must ground politics, Butler seeks out
the political effects of a critique of identity.[4]
Butler's "Contingent Foundations" provides a more lucid elaboration of
her feminist Foucauldian "positions" than does Gender Trouble.[5] This
article deals with the often-critiqued aspect of discourse in relation
to the "real," using women and violence as one example. Butler shows
that "rape" and "violence," even "victim," like "women," are not static
categories.[6] She concludes that "sex" as a political category provides
an example of forceful, material violence (162) and she argues that
seeing bodies as performative is one way "to begin to question their
traditional deployment, and call for some other" (164). This article has
been anthologized in Butler's and Joan Scott's Feminists Theorize the
Political, which includes many related and helpful articles, Scott's on
"Experience" among them.[7] Scott argues that the many feminisms
utilizing experience as the ground for explanation ought to consider
that it is experience itself that needs to be explained.[8]
For those not already well versed in poststructuralism, Jana Sawicki's
Disciplining Foucault, Chris Weedon's Feminist Practice and
Poststructuralist Theory or Elizabeth Grosz's "Contemporary Theories of
Power and Subjectivity" may provide some good places to begin. Grosz's
article is an excellent, brief feminist introduction to Foucault,
Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida. After outlining
Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods and his conception of
power, she offers a summary of four areas of Foucault's work that she
believes will prove helpful to feminists: (1) the problematization of
truth; (2) the notion of knowledges and truths as the bearers of power;
(3) the emphasis on the body as a locus of power and resistance; and (4)
the accounts of marginalized political struggles and subjugated
discourses (90-92). Weedon's book is also an important introductory
source, and chapter five, "Discourse, Power and Resistance," outlines
more of Foucault's work than does Grosz's article. Weedon concludes that
Foucault offers feminists "a contextualization of experience and an
analysis of its constitution and ideological power" (125). In this, her
arguments overlap with Scott's on experience. Sawicki's Disciplining
Foucault is a collection of her essays that address such topics as
theories of motherhood and reproductive technologies, but the book also
includes more general theoretical articles. The last chapter, "Foucault
and Feminism: A Critical Reappraisal," is particularly strong. Sawicki
concludes "Foucault's account of subjectivity does not introduce any
obstacles to feminist praxis that were not already there. Feminist
praxis is continually caught between appeals to a free subject and an
awareness of victimization" (104). Unlike Butler, however, Sawicki is
not prepared to do away with notions of identity. She argues that it is
necessary for women to build confidence and self-esteem to develop an
oppositional movement (106). This assertion ties Sawicki's work more
closely to humanism and liberal feminism than would Butler's. Sawicki's
conclusion, however, is worth citing at length if only to differentiate
her criticisms of Foucault from those of Nancy Hartsock and Barbara
Christian:
Perhaps one of Foucault's most important insights is his
insistence that one's theoretical imperatives and commitments be
motivated by specific practical imperatives. . . . He was
constantly prepared to shift strategies and to question his
previous positions. Most of all, he despised dogmatic impositions
and theory and the search for universal epistemological or
anthropological foundations. It would, of course, be tragically
ironic if his discourse were dogmatically imposed on feminism. . .
. Attending to the exigencies of feminist practice will sometimes
require that we either ignore Foucault or move beyond him. A
Foucauldian feminism would require no less. (108-09)
Although Sawicki sees dangers in Foucault's and other poststructuralist
critiques of identity (particularly in the case of making heard the
voices of women of color and those from so-called Third World countries),
she does not join Hartsock and Christian in roundly denouncing these
theories as the latest conspiratorial, patriarchal ruse against
feminism.
If Sawicki's book sometimes sacrifices complexity for lucidity, Rosi
Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance, while a difficult read, sacrifices
neither. Chapters four and six, "Bodies, Texts and Powers" and "Towards
a Philosophical Reading of Feminist Ideas," are especially useful.
Braidotti's project builds on earlier work found in Alice Jardine's
Gynesis in which the positionality of the trope of the "feminine" is
investigated in works by philosophers of "the crisis of rationality" (2)
. For Braidotti, the main point of convergence between Foucault and
feminism is "the importance granted to the sexuation of the subject and
of his/her discursive practices" (90).
Braidotti segues to a discussion of Monique Plaza's and Foucault's
famous disagreements over rape. Foucault argued that rape should be
classified as a crime against humanity: as a power crime and not as a
specifically sexual one. This position, Braidotti explains, is in line
with Foucault's few comments on the feminist movement. He saw the sex-
specific nature of the movement as a starting point to dismantle the
sexual categories on which it rests. Plaza, on the other hand, believed
that Foucault ignored how sexuality was instituted as an object of
punishment in Western culture, and one traditionally repressive for
women (97).[9] For Braidotti, this exchange provokes questions about the
boundaries between the sexual and the human in Foucault's work as well
as questions of the degree to which sexual specificity no longer allows
reference to a common notion of "human being" (95).
Braidotti concludes that the dialogue between feminism and Foucault
breaks down on the issue of female homosexuality. She argues that "By
enthroning male homosexuality as the lost paradigm, Foucault is
diametrically opposed to the feminist analysis that situates the social
contract in a male homosocial bond . . . requiring the circulation of
women as objects of exchange among men" (96). In the end, however, she
aligns her own theories much more closely with those of Foucault than
with those of Derrida. She calls the "theoretical programmes" of
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze the least harmful to women because they are
declared allies of feminist struggles, as opposed to Derrida, whom she
designates as anti-feminist (124). This book should receive a great deal
of critical attention from many circles.
"Bodies" are of central importance in feminist work today,[10] and
feminist critiques are frequently made of Foucault's formulations of
bodies/sex in History of Sexuality, Volume One. Foucault states that
"the rallying point against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be
sex/desire, but bodies and pleasures" (157). Butler, for one, criticizes
this as an unproblematic and static view of bodies, and she cites
Foucault's introduction to Herculine Barbin as similarly formulated.
Karen Elizabeth Davis's "I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A New
Paradigm for Sex" takes up feminist critiques of Foucault on bodies/
pleasure and creates a new way to theorize sex as laughter rather than
hunger (12). Nancy Fraser's work in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse
and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory also deals with this problem of
prediscursive bodies in Foucault (59). Fraser argues that Foucault's
assumptions "condemn him to a politics of negation" (59).
In "The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist
Politics," Fraser shows more sympathy for Foucauldian positions and
somewhat less sympathy for Jacques Lacan and "the French feminists,"
among them Julia Kristeva. Work dealing with French feminism and
Foucault has taken a variety of forms. Teri Shearer's "Rebellions and
Reprimands" reviews Butler's Gender Trouble and finds more sympathy for
Luce Irigaray than does Butler (342). In her response to Shearer, Butler
acknowledges that she too has become increasingly convinced of the
usefulness of Irigaray since writing Gender Trouble ("Response" 346). In
"True Confessions: Cixous and Foucault on Sexuality and Power," Linda
Singer claims that Helene Cixous's concept of "women's discourse" is
important in subverting Foucault's failure to consider "male dominance"
(140; 138). Beret Strong's "Foucault, Freud, and French Feminism:
Theorizing Hysteria as Theorizing the Feminine" ruminates on the dangers
of linking hysteria with the feminine, particularly as it appears in the
work of Irigaray, Michele Montrelay, Cixous, and Catherine Clement (24)
.[11]
Only one full-length collection of essays has appeared on feminist
theory and Foucault, Irene Diamond's and Lee Quinby's 1987 anthology
Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Among the most
interesting articles are Biddy Martin's, Meaghan Morris's, and Frances
Bartkowski's, although many more of the anthology's twelve essays
deserve a reading.[12] Martin's article begins with the longstanding
feminist problematic of articulating a relationship between patriarchy
and capitalism. She turns to Foucault's work on power to reconsider the
question. Morris's article (included in her collection The Pirate's
Fiancee) calls itself impatient speculation rather than theory. She
suggests that "any feminists drawn in to sending love letters to
Foucault would be in no danger of reciprocation. Foucault's work is not
the work of a ladies' man" (55).[13] The rest of the article contains
ruminations on the work of Plaza and on feminine and women's writing.
Bartkowski's article, in alliance with the work of Plaza and of Sandra
Bartky to no small degree, argues that confession and torture are more
closely linked than Foucault acknowledges, particularly for women (49).
The anthology also includes work on rape, British literature, and
liberation theology.
Much work has been done on women's "embodiedness" using Foucault's
concepts of discipline and sexuality. Among those writing in this area,
Susan Bordo, whose article on anorexia nervosa appears in Feminism and
Foucault, is perhaps the best known. Her "Docile Bodies, Rebellious
Bodies" compares eating disorders to Victorian hysteria and argues
against those who would see silence, anorexia, agoraphobia, or hysteria
strictly as forms of protestation rather than a combination of protest
and retreat. Bordo's "The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A
Feminist Appropriation of Foucault" stresses the body not only as a text
of culture but as a "practical, direct locus of social control." She
asserts that through table manners, toilet habits, and other seemingly
trivial routines, culture is "made body" (a phrase she borrows from
anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu) (13). Jana Sawicki puts Bordo in a camp
with Bartky, labeling their work as that which stresses women's
domination and then contrasts them with Donna Haraway, Linda Gordon and
Rosalind Petchesky; and Rayna Rapp, whose feminist Foucauldian work
stresses power not only as domination but as resistance (14). Sawicki's
own work falls into the latter camp.
What is at issue in this dichotomy is the extent to which Foucault's
work can be used to talk about agency. Bordo and Bartky see the emphasis
on women's lack of agency, and this approach has been critiqued as an
"over-stable account" (McNay 127). In her "Reconstituting the Subject:
Feminism, Modernism and Postmodernism," Susan Hekman reevaluates the
debate surrounding the "decentered subject" and its effectivity in
feminist theories. Her summary and analysis of work by Teresa De
Lauretis, Linda Alcoff, and Paul Smith is helpful. (Alcoff is leery
about the utilization of Foucault's theories for feminists because they
only offer deconstruction, and not reconstruction, of the subject [308].)
Hekman illustrates that these three theorists attempt to "borrow agency
from a Cartesian version of the subject and to graft it onto a
conception of the constituted subject" (58). This project, she points
out, is very different from what she labels a "postmodern" project: one
that attempts to explain agency and resistance in the gaps and
interstices within competing discourses (59). Hekman's sympathy lies
with the latter in the guise of Foucault's and Julia Kristeva's views of
subjectivity.[14]
If work on bodies, sex, agency, and resistance have received the lion's
share of attention in feminist theoretical work dealing with Foucault,
the problem of authors and readers has also garnered attention.
Frequently drawing on Foucault's famous essay "What Is An Author?,"
feminists disagree over the extent to which the concept of the female
signature must be retained.[15] Another of Foucault's essays that gets
critiqued by feminists who would prefer to focus on differences between
women and men as readers/authors is his "Fantasia of the Library."
Though she finds this essay useful in providing a visualization of
discourse, Marcelle Thiebaux writes in her article "Foucault's Fantasia
for Feminists: The Woman Reading" of a need to reappropriate the figure
of the reader/book in female terms. She concludes:
When the female reader is not central--as is usual in masculinist
writing--the patriarchal discourse embraces the whole Woman/Book
image and incorporates it into a further discourse of its own,
wrenching the woman from the book and creating a realm of
knowledge from which the woman is excluded, shut out of the
library entirely. The only way for woman to create her own
discourse is to create her own library. (60)
Others have agreed, among them Barbara Christian in her "Black Feminist
Process: In the Midst Of . . ." She concludes that black men and women
would not even have had access to Foucault's library, unless it was to
dust books (ix).[16] Jane Tompkins's "Me and My Shadow" also laments
that the "voice" in Foucault's text does not speak for her or to her as
a woman (132-33). The question of "woman's place" in the text is far
from settled in feminist theoretical work.
Tompkins's essay originally served as a response to Ellen Messer-
Davidow's "The Philosophical Bases of Literary Criticism," an article
that takes up Foucauldian methods in theorizing and historicizing the
boundaries of academic disciplines. Less work has been done in this area
of inquiry than in the others, and it is one avenue in feminist
appropriations of Foucault that will certainly remain fruitful. Messer-
Davidow's article calls for feminist literary critics and other feminist
critics to constitute a single inquiry, instead of continuing in the
framework of traditional literary criticism (81). David Shumway's
response, "Solidarity or Perspectivity," invokes the Foucauldian concept
of genealogy to talk about disciplinary hierarchies (110). He critiques
Messer-Davidow's embrace of anthropological humanist ideas of sex/gender
and concludes that feminists can "pose and fulfill more radical
possibilities than Messer-Davidow envisions" (116). Of other work done
in this vein, Nancy Armstrong's "The Gender Bind: Women and the
Disciplines" is also helpful.[17] Much of this work centers around the
question of whether or not "women" must be seen as a unified group in
order for a feminist politics to continue. This question brings us back
full circle to Butler's work, when she concludes, "if there is a fear
that by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender,
its sex, or its materiality, that feminism will founder, it might be
wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place
the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the
start" (164). Although there are many who would still find in Butler's
challenge a negation of feminist practice, such Foucauldian-inspired
work has proven and will continue to prove useful to feminists in
tackling issues of solidarity and identity.
Notes
1 Terry Aladjem is less hesitant about a feminist partnership with
Foucault, calling it a marriage of "velvet chains" (282-83).
2 Gayatri Spivak notes that Foucault is being transformed from a
specific to a universal intellectual by his "discipleship" (4). For her
views on Foucault, see "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
3 Luisa Muraro's view is representative:
A woman . . . referring to a man, Michel Foucault, in order to
solve a problem concerning relationships between women, indirectly
tells about the lack of social authority of feminine origin and,
therefore, about the weakness of a politics of sexual difference.
(141)
4 This is also at issue in Butler's review article on Catherine
MacKinnon and Carole Pateman ("Disorderly Woman") and her article
"Contingent Foundations."
5 In a review essay dealing with Gender Trouble, Susan Bordo complains
that the book speaks only to "a handful of academic sophisticates" and
laments that she cannot introduce Butler's work to her undergraduate
students (174).
6 On the category of "women" see Riley.
7 Scott's article "Experience" is a revision of her "The Evidence of
Experience." Her book, Gender and the Politics of History, is also of
use to those who do work in history, feminism, and
Foucault/poststructuralisms.
8 For an opposing view--that Foucault's work on sexuality is helpful
except in dealing with women's experience--see McNay. She argues that
rediscovering women's experience is the "fundamental aim" of a feminist
project (125). This issue is not nearly as settled among feminists as
McNay would have it.
9 Sandra Bartky makes a similar point in her "Foucault, Femininity, and
the Modernization of Patriarchal Power" in Femininity and Domination.
Bartky deals with more subtle kinds of sanctions against women than rape,
however. As Bartky concludes
The lack of formal public sanctions does not mean that a woman who
is unable or unwilling to submit herself to the appropriate body
discipline will face no sanctions at all. On the contrary, she
faces a very severe sanction indeed in a world dominated by men:
the refusal of male patronage. (Bartky 76)
10 For instance, see the fall 1991 issue of Hypatia on feminism and the
body. Articles by Elspeth Probyn, Robyn Ferrell, and Lois McNay are
especially pertinent here. See also Linda Singer's "Bodies, Pleasures,
Powers" and Ladelle McWhorter's "Culture or Nature: The Functions of the
Term 'Body' in the Work of Michel Foucault." Much of this work centers
on issues of "essentialism," and Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking
provides a good starting point on this topic.
11 "See also Frances Bartkowski's "Speculations on the Flesh: Foucault
and the French Feminists."
12 For more complete reviews of this book, see Metzger and Muraro.
13 Nancy Fraser disagrees. She finds in Foucault a not-so-good husband:
"One wouldn't want, politically speaking, to cohabit with him
indefinitely." But, she concludes,
he makes a very interesting lover indeed. His very outrageousness
in refusing standard humanist virtues, narrative conventions, and
political categories provides just the jolt we occasionally need
to dereify our usual patterns of self-interpretation and renew our
sense that, just possibly, they may not tell the whole story. (65)
Fraser's work is an interesting though occasionally problematic
amalgamation of feminism, Foucault, and Frankfurt school theorist Jurgen
Habermas. Her exchange with Benhabib and Butler in the July 1991 issue
of Praxis International provides a brief gloss of her position.
14 For further work in this area, see Hekman's Gender and Knowledge:
Elements of a Postmodern Feminism, Linda Alcoff's "Feminism and Foucault,
" and Diana T. Meyers's "Personal Autonomy or the Deconstructed Subject?
A Reply to Hekman."
15 Nancy K. Miller's and Peggy Kamuf's exchange remains the most widely
cited work on this subject. Originally in diacritics, it has been
reprinted in Conflicts in Feminism, along with a new dialogue. See also
Miller's Getting Personal and Susan David Bernstein's "Confessing
Feminist Theory: What's 'I' Got to Do with It?"
16 For a discussion of Christian and Tompkins, see Miller's Getting
Personal.
17 Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction is perhaps the most widely
read feminist Foucauldian literary critical text, examining eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century conduct books and fiction for the ways in which
they constructed modern subjectivities.
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Tompkins, Jane. "Me and My Shadow." Kaufman 21-39.
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By Davoney Looser, State University of New York-Stony Brook
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Source: Style, Winter92, Vol. 26 Issue 4, p593, 11p.
Item Number: 9610233852
