Foucault and Feminism

Poststructuralism and contemporary feminism have emerged as two of the
most influential political and cultural movements of the late
twentieth century. The recent alliance between them has been marked by
an especially lively engagement with the work of French philosopher
Michel Foucault. Although Foucault makes few references to women or to
the issue of gender in his writings, his treatment of the relations
between power, the body and sexuality has stimulated extensive
feminist interest. Foucault's idea that the body and sexuality are
cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena has made a
significant contribution to the feminist critique of essentialism.
While feminists have found Foucault's analysis of the relations
between power and the body illuminating, they have also drawn
attention to its limitations. From the perspective of a feminist
politics that aims to promote women's autonomy, the tendency of a
Foucauldian account of power to reduce social agents to docile bodies
seems problematic. Although many feminist theorists remain critical of
Foucault's questioning of the categories of the subject and agency on
the grounds that such questioning undermines the emancipatory aims of
feminism, others have argued that in his late work he develops a more
robust account of subjectivity and resistance which, while not without
its problems from a feminist perspective, nevertheless has a lot to
offer a feminist politics. The affinities and tensions between
Foucault's thought and contemporary feminism are discussed below.

1. Background: Foucault's genealogy of power, knowledge and the subject

In the works of his middle years – Discipline and Punish and The
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 – Foucault traces the emergence of some
of the practices, concepts, forms of knowledge, social institutions
and techniques of government which have contributed to shaping modern
European culture. He calls the method of historical analysis he
employs 'genealogical'. Genealogy is a form of critical history in the
sense that it attempts a diagnosis of 'the present time, and of what
we are, in this very moment' in order 'to question … what is
postulated as self-evident … to dissipate what is familiar and
accepted' (Foucault 1988a: 265). What distinguishes genealogical
analysis from traditional historiography is that it is 'a form of
history which can account for the constitution of knowledges,
discourses, domains of objects etc. without having to make reference
to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field
of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout history' (Foucault
1980: 149). Rather than assuming that the movement of history can be
explained by the intentions and aims of individual actors, genealogy
investigates the complex and shifting network of relations between
power, knowledge and the body which produce historically specific
forms of subjectivity. Foucault links his genealogical studies to a
modality of social critique which he describes as a 'critical ontology
of the present'. In a late paper, he explains that an ontology of the
present involves 'an analysis of the historical limits that are
imposed on us' in order to create the space for 'an experiment with
the possibility of going beyond them' (Foucault 1984: 50). Thus,
genealogy is a form of social critique that seeks to determine
possibilities for social change and ethical transformation of
ourselves.

One of the central threads of Foucault's genealogy of the present is
an analysis of the transformations in the nature and functioning of
power which mark the transition to modern society. Foucault's
genealogy of modern power challenges the commonly held assumption that
power is an essentially negative, repressive force that operates
purely through the mechanisms of law, taboo and censorship. According
to Foucault, this 'juridico-discursive' conception of power (Foucault
1978: 82) has its origins in the practices of power characteristic of
pre-modern societies. In such societies, he claims, power was
centralized and coordinated by a sovereign authority who exercised
absolute control over the population through the threat or open
display of violence. From the seventeenth century onwards, however, as
the growth and care of populations increasingly became the primary
concerns of the state, new mechanisms of power emerged which centered
around the administration and management of 'life'. In the complex
story that Foucault tells, this new form of 'bio-power' coalesced
around two poles. One pole is concerned with the efficient government
of the population as a whole and focuses on the management of the life
processes of the social body. It involves the regulation of phenomena
such as birth, death, sickness, disease, health, sexual relations and
so on. The other pole, which Foucault labels 'disciplinary power',
targets the human body as an object to be manipulated and trained. In
Discipline and Punish Foucault studies the practices of discipline and
training associated with disciplinary power. He suggests that these
practices were first cultivated in isolated institutional settings
such as prisons, military establishments, hospitals, factories and
schools but were gradually applied more broadly as techniques of
social regulation and control. The key feature of disciplinary power
is that it is exercised directly on the body. Disciplinary practices
subject bodily activities to a process of constant surveillance and
examination that enables a continuous and pervasive control of
individual conduct. The aim of these practices is to simultaneously
optimize the body's capacities, skills and productivity and to foster
its usefulness and docility: 'What was then being formed was a policy
of coercions that act on the body, a calculated manipulation of its
elements, its gestures, its behavior. The human body was entering a
machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges
it…Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, "docile"
bodies' (Foucault 1977: 138-9). It is not, however, only the body that
disciplinary techniques target. Foucault presents disciplinary power
as productive of certain types of subject as well. In Discipline and
Punish he describes the way in which the central technique of
disciplinary power – constant surveillance – which is initially
directed toward disciplining the body, takes hold of the mind as well
to induce a psychological state of 'conscious and permanent
visibility' (Foucault 1977: 201). In other words, perpetual
surveillance is internalized by individuals to produce the kind of
self-awareness that defines the modern subject. With the idea that
modern power operates to produce the phenomena it targets Foucault
challenges the juridical notion of power as law which assumes that
power is simply the constraint or repression of something that is
already constituted. On Foucault's account the transition to modernity
entails the replacement of the law by the norm as the primary
instrument of social control. Foucault links the importance assumed by
norms in modern society to the development of the human or social
sciences. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality he describes
how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sex and sexuality
became crucial political issues in a society concerned with managing
and directing the life of individuals and of populations. On
Foucault's account, the spread of bio-power is intimately connected to
the social science discourses on sex and sexuality which proliferated
during this period. These discourses, he claims, tended to understand
sex as an instinctual biological and psychic drive with deep links to
identity and, thus, with potentially far-reaching effects on the
sexual and social behavior of individuals. The idea that the sexual
drive could function in a normal, healthy manner or could be warped
and perverted into pathological forms led to a project of
classification of behavior along a scale of normalization and
pathologization of the sexual instinct (Dreyfus & Rabinow 1982: 173).
Once the social (and sexual) science categories of normalcy and
deviancy were established, various political technologies aimed at
treating and reforming 'deviant' behavior could be sanctioned as in
the interests of both the individual and society. Thus, Foucault
suggests that in modern society the behavior of individuals and groups
is increasingly pervasively controlled through standards of normality
which are disseminated by a range of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic
and normative knowledges such as criminology, medicine, psychology and
psychiatry. Modern individuals, moreover, become the agents of their
own 'normalization' to the extent that they are subjected to, and
become invested in, the categories, classifications and norms
propagated by scientific and administrative discourses which purport
to reveal the 'truth' of their identities. Modern disciplinary society
can, therefore, dispense with direct forms of repression and
constraint because social control is achieved by means of subtler
strategies of normalization, strategies which produce self-regulating,
'normalized' individuals. It is Foucault's insight into the
productivity of the practices and technologies characteristic of
normalizing bio-power that underpins his general conclusion that power
in modern societies is a fundamentally creative rather than repressive
force (Foucault 1977: 194). Above all, Foucault claims that modern
regimes of power operate to produce us as subjects who are both the
objects and vehicles of power. He explains that: 'The individual is
not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom,
a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or
against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes
individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power
that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain
desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The
individual, that is, is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is … one of its
prime effects.' (Foucault 1980: 98). Foucault's analysis of productive
bio-power points to a complex interaction between modern forms of
power and knowledge: 'the exercise of power perpetually creates
knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of
power' (Foucault 1980: 52). For Foucault, power can be said to create
knowledge in two related senses. Firstly, in the sense that particular
institutions of power make certain forms of knowledge historically
possible. In the case of the social sciences, for example, it is the
refinement of disciplinary techniques for observing and analyzing the
body in various institutional settings that facilitates the expansion
of new areas of social research. Power can also be said to create
knowledge in the sense that institutions of power determine the
conditions under which scientific statements come to be counted as
true or false (Hacking 1986). According to Foucault, then, 'truth is a
thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms
of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power' (Foucault
1980: 131). This description suggests that the production of 'truth'
is never entirely separable from technologies of power. On the other
hand, Foucault maintains that knowledge induces effects of power in so
far as it constitutes new objects of inquiry – 'objects' like 'the
delinquent', 'the homosexual' or 'the criminal type' – which then
become available for manipulation and control (Rouse 1994: 97). For
example, he claims that it is the knowledge generated by the human
sciences which enables modern power to circulate through finer
channels, 'gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies,
their gestures, and all their daily actions' (Foucault 1980: 151). It
is in order to signal the mutually conditioning operations of power
and knowledge that Foucault speaks of regimes of 'power/knowledge' or
'discourses'; that is, structured ways of knowing and exercising
power.

2. Between Foucault and Feminism: convergence and critique

From the perspective of contemporary social and political theory, the
originality of Foucault's genealogies of power/knowledge resides in
the challenge they pose to traditional ways of thinking about power.
It is this challenge that has made Foucault's work both a significant
resource for feminist theory and generated heated debate amongst
feminist social and political theorists. While there is broad
agreement that Foucault's redefinition of how we think about power in
contemporary societies contains important insights for feminism,
feminists remain divided over the implications of this redefinition
for feminist theory and practice.

An analysis of power relations is central to the feminist project of
understanding the nature and causes of women's subordination. Drawing
on the traditional model of power as repression, many types of
feminist theory have assumed that the oppression of women can be
explained by patriarchal social structures which secure the power of
men over women. Increasingly, however, this assumption is being called
into question by other feminists who are concerned to counter what
they regard as the oversimplified conception of power relations this
view entails, as well as its problematic implication that women are
simply the passive, powerless victims of male power. In the context of
this debate, Foucault's work on power has been used by some feminists
to develop a more complex analysis of the relations between gender and
power which avoids the assumption that the oppression of women is
caused in any simple way by men's possession of power. On the basis of
Foucault's understanding of power as exercised rather than possessed,
as circulating throughout the social body rather than emanating from
the top down, and as productive rather than repressive (Sawicki 1988:
164), feminists have sought to challenge accounts of gender relations
which emphasize domination and victimization so as to move towards a
more textured understanding of the role of power in women's lives.
Foucault's redefinition of power has made a significant and varied
contribution to this project. Foucault's notion that power is
constitutive of that upon which it acts has enabled feminists to
explore the often complicated ways in which women's experiences,
self-understandings, comportment and capacities are constructed in and
by the power relations which they are seeking to transform. The idea
that modern power is involved in producing rather than simply
repressing individuals has also played a part in a controversial move
within feminism away from traditional liberationist political
orientations. Eschewing a liberationist political program which aims
for total emancipation from power, Foucauldian-influenced feminism
concentrates on exposing the localized forms that gender power
relations take at the micro-political level in order to determine
concrete possibilities for resistance and social change. In pursuing
this project, feminist scholars have drawn on Foucault's analysis of
the productive dimension of disciplinary power which is exercised
outside of the narrowly defined political realm in order to examine
the workings of power in women's everyday lives. Some feminists have
also found Foucault's contention that the body is the principal site
of power in modern society useful in their explorations of the social
control of women through their bodies and sexuality. Finally,
feminists have taken up Foucault's analytic of power/knowledge, with
its emphasis on the criteria by which claims to knowledge are
legitimated, in order to develop a theory which avoids generalizing
from the experiences of Western, white, heterosexual, middle-class
feminisms. Drawing on Foucault's questioning of fixed essences and his
relativist notion of truth, feminists have sought to create a
theoretical space for the articulation of hitherto marginalized
subject positions, political perspectives and interests. While there
is considerable overlap between Foucault's analytic of power/knowledge
and feminist concerns, his work has also been subject to strong
criticism by feminists. This more critical body of work takes issue
with precisely those aspects of Foucault's conception of power that
Foucauldian feminists have found useful. The most commonly cited
feminist objections center around two issues: his view of subjectivity
as constructed by power and his failure to outline the norms which
inform his critical enterprise. Nancy Fraser argues that the problem
with Foucault's claim that forms of subjectivity are constituted by
relations of power is that it leaves no room for resistance to power.
If individuals are simply the effects of power, mere 'docile bodies'
shaped by power, then it becomes difficult to explain who resists
power. Thus, Fraser finds Foucault's assertion that power always
generates resistance incoherent. She argues, moreover, that Foucault's
refusal to articulate independently justified norms which would enable
him to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable forms of power means
that he cannot answer crucial questions about why domination ought to
be resisted. According to Fraser, 'only with the introduction of
normative notions could he begin to tell us what is wrong with the
modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought to oppose it' (Fraser
1989: 29). In Fraser's view, Foucault's normatively neutral stance on
power limits the value of his work for feminism because it fails to
provide the normative resources required to criticize structures of
domination and to guide programs for social change. Echoing and
extending Fraser's criticisms, Nancy Hartsock contends that Foucault's
questioning of the categories of subjectivity and agency should be
treated with suspicion by feminists. She asks: 'Why is it that just at
the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand
the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of
history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes
problematic?' (Hartsock 1990: 164). Like Fraser, Hartsock finds
Foucault's conception of modern power problematic in so far as it
reduces individuals to 'docile bodies' rather than subjects with the
capacity to resist power. She claims that Foucault's understanding of
the subject as an effect of power threatens the viability of a
feminist politics because it denies the liberatory subject and, thus,
condemns women to perpetual oppression. Hartsock argues, moreover,
that Foucault's rejection of the Enlightenment belief that truth is
intrinsically opposed to power (and, therefore, inevitably plays a
liberating role) undermines the emancipatory political aims of
feminism. By insisting on the mutually conditioning operations of
knowledge and power, Hartsock contends that Foucault denies the
possibility of liberatory knowledge; that is, he denies the
possibility that increased and better knowledge of patriarchal power
can lead to liberation from oppression. For this reason she believes
that his work is incompatible with the fundamentally emancipatory
political orientation of feminism. These criticisms of Foucault are
directed at the conception of the subject and power developed in his
middle years. Some feminists have argued, however, that in his late
work Foucault modifies his theoretical perspective in ways that make
it more useful to the project of articulating a coherent feminist
ethics and politics. Feminist responses to Foucault's late work are
discussed in the final section.

3. Power, the body and sexuality

There are a number of aspects of Foucault's analysis of the relations
between power, the body and sexuality that have stimulated feminist
interest. Firstly, Foucault's analyses of the productive dimensions of
disciplinary powers which is exercised outside the narrowly defined
political domain overlap with the feminist project of exploring the
micropolitics of personal life and exposing the mechanics of
patriarchal power at the most intimate levels of women's experience.
Secondly, Foucault's treatment of power and its relation to the body
and sexuality has provided feminist social and political theorists
with some useful conceptual tools for the analysis of the social
construction of gender and sexuality and contributed to the critique
of essentialism within feminism. Finally, Foucault's identification of
the body as the principal target of power has been used by feminists
to analyze contemporary forms of social control over women's bodies
and minds.

Rather than focusing on the centralized sources of societal power in
agencies such as the economy or the state, Foucault's analysis of
power emphasizes micro level power relations. Foucault argues that,
since modern power operates in a capillary fashion throughout the
social body, it is best grasped in its concrete and local effects and
in the everyday practices which sustain and reproduce power relations.
This emphasis on the everyday practices through which power relations
are reproduced has converged with the feminist project of analyzing
the politics of personal relations and altering gendered power
relations at the most intimate levels of experience 'in the
institutions of marriage, motherhood and compulsory heterosexuality,
in the 'private' relations between the sexes and in the everyday
rituals and regimens that govern women's relationships to themselves
and their bodies (Sawicki 1998: 93). Nancy Fraser notes that
Foucault's work gives renewed impetus to what is often referred to as
'the politics of everyday life' in so far as it provides 'the
empirical and conceptual basis for treating phenomena such as
sexuality, the school, psychiatry, medicine and social science as
political phenomena.' She argues that because Foucault's approach to
the analysis of power sanctions the treatment of problems in these
areas as political problems it 'widens the arena within which people
may collectively confront, understand and try to change the character
of their lives' (Fraser 1989: 26). One of Foucault's most fertile
insight into the workings of power at the micro-political level is his
identification of the body and sexuality as the direct locus of social
control. Foucault insists on the historical specificity of the body.
It is this emphasis on the body as directly targeted and formed by
historically variable regimes of bio-power that has made Foucault's
version of poststructuralist theory the most attractive to feminist
social and political theorists. The problem of how to conceive of the
body without reducing its materiality to a fixed biological essence
has been one of the key issues for feminist theory. At a fundamental
level, a notion of the body is central to the feminist analysis of the
oppression of women because biological differences between the sexes
are the foundation that has served to ground and legitimize gender
inequality. By means of an appeal to ahistorical biological
characteristics, the idea that women are inferior to men is
naturalized and legitimized. This involves two related conceptual
moves. Firstly, women's bodies are judged inferior with reference to
norms and ideals based on men's physical capacities and, secondly,
biological functions are collapsed into social characteristics. While
traditionally men have been thought to be capable of transcending the
level of the biological through the use of their rational faculties,
women have tended to be defined entirely it terms of their physical
capacities for reproduction and motherhood. In an effort to avoid this
conflation of the social category of woman with biological functions
(essentialism), earlier forms of feminism developed a theory of social
construction based on the distinction between sex and gender. The
sex/gender distinction represents an attempt by feminists to sever the
connection between the biological category of sex and the social
category of gender. According to this view of social construction,
gender is the cultural meaning that comes to be contingently attached
to the sexed body. Once gender is understood as culturally constructed
it is possible to avoid the essentialist idea that gender derives from
the natural body in any one way. However, while the distinction
between ahistorical biological sexes and culturally constructed gender
roles challenges the notion that a woman's biological makeup is her
social destiny, it entails a problematic dissociation of culturally
constructed genders from sexed bodies. The effect of this dissociation
is that the sexed body comes to be seen as irrelevant to an
individual's gendered cultural identity. It is this disconcerting
consequence of drawing a distinction between sex and gender that has
led some feminists to appropriate Foucault's theory of the body and
sexuality. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
develops an anti-essentialist account of the sexual body, which,
however, doesn't deny its materiality. At the heart of Foucault's
history of sexuality is an analysis of the production of the category
of sex and its function in regimes of power aimed at controlling the
sexual body. Foucault argues that the construct of a supposedly
'natural' sex functions to disguise the productive operation of power
in relation to sexuality: 'The notion of sex brought about a
fundamental reversal; it made it possible to invert the representation
of the relationships of power to sexuality, causing the latter to
appear, not in its essential and positive relation to power, but as
being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries
as best it can to dominate' (Foucault 1978: 155). Foucault's claim
here is that the relationship between power and sexuality is
misrepresented when sexuality is viewed as an unruly natural force
that power simply opposes, represses or constrains. Rather, the
phenomenon of sexuality should be understood as constructed through
the exercise of power relations. Drawing on Foucault's account of the
historical construction of sexuality and the part played by the
category of sex in this construction, feminists have been able to
rethink gender, not as the cultural meanings that are attached to a
pregiven sex, but, in Judith Butler's formulation, 'as the … cultural
means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural sex" is produced and
established as…prior to culture' (Butler 1990: 7). Following Foucault,
Butler argues that the notion of a 'natural' sex that is prior to
culture and socialization is implicated in the production and
maintenance of gendered power relations because it naturalizes the
regulatory idea of a supposedly natural heterosexuality and, thus,
reinforces the reproductive constraints on sexuality. In addition to
his anti-essentialist view of the body and sexuality, Foucault insists
on the corporeal reality of bodies. He argues that this rich and
complex reality is oversimplified by the biological category of sex
which groups together in an 'artificial unity' a range of disparate
and unrelated biological functions and bodily pleasures. Thus, in The
History of Sexuality, Foucault explains that: 'The purpose of the
present study is in fact to show how deployments of power are directly
connected to the body – to bodies, functions, physiological processes,
sensations, and pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced,
what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the
biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another … but
are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance
with the development of the modern technologies of power that take
life as their objective. Hence I do not envisage a "history of
mentalities" that would take account of bodies only through the manner
in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a
"history of bodies" and the manner in which what is most material and
most vital in them has been invested' (Foucault 1978: 151-2). Because
Foucault's anti-essentialist account of the body is nevertheless
attentive to the materiality of bodies it has been attractive to
feminists concerned to expose the processes through which the female
body is transformed into a feminine body. Thus, in claiming that the
body is directly targeted and 'produced' by power and, thus,
unknowable outside of its cultural significations, Foucault breaks
down the distinction between a natural sex and a culturally
constructed gender. Elizabeth Grosz argues that, unlike some other
versions of poststructuralist theory which analyze the representation
of bodies without due regard for their materiality, Foucault's
insistence on the corporeal reality of the body which is directly
molded by social and historical forces avoids the traditional gendered
opposition between the body and culture. For this reason, she believes
that, while Foucault fails to consider the issue of sexual difference,
his thought may contribute to the feminist project of exploring the
relation between social power and the production of sexually
differentiated bodies (Grosz 1994). Not all feminists, however, are
comfortable with Foucault's anti-naturalistic rhetoric. Kate Soper
argues that by jettisoning the idea of a natural body, Foucault's
anti-essentialism might 'lend itself to the forces of reaction in so
far as it offers itself as a pre-emptive warning against any politics
which aims at the removal of the constraining and distorting effects
of cultural stereotyping' (Soper 1993: 33). Here Soper articulates a
common feminist concern about the potentially conservative political
consequences of Foucault's version of social constructivism. By
contrast, Lois McNay argues that although Foucault's model of the
relation between the body and power precludes the view that the body
and sexuality might be liberated from power, it leaves room for the
possibility that existing forms of sexuality and gendered power
relations might be transformed. According to McNay, Foucault's history
of sexuality 'exposes the contingent and socially determined nature of
sexuality and, thereby, frees the body from the regulatory fiction of
heterosexuality and opens up new realms in which bodily pleasures can
be explored' (McNay 1992: 30). In another fruitful engagement with
Foucault's work on the body and power, feminist scholars have embraced
the notion of normalizing-disciplinary power for its potential to shed
light on the social control of women in a contemporary context. For
example, Sandra Bartky's appropriation of Foucault takes the form of a
detailed examination of the subjection of the female body to
disciplinary practices such as dieting, exercise and beauty regimens
that produce a form of embodiment which conforms to prevailing norms
of feminine beauty and attractiveness. On her account these
disciplinary practices subjugate women, not by taking power away from
them, but by generating skills and competencies that depend on the
maintenance of a stereotypical form of feminine identity. Bartky
suggests that women's seemingly willing acceptance of the various
norms and practices that promote their larger disempowerment is due to
the fact that challenging 'the patriarchal construction of the female
body… may call into question that aspect of personal identity that is
tied to the development of a sense of competence' (Bartky 1988: 77;
Sawicki 1994: 293). In a similar vein, Susan Bordo brings Foucauldian
insights to bear in her analysis of predominantly female eating
disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (Bordo 1988). Following
Foucault, she argues that these disorders might be understood as
disciplinary technologies of the body. The anorexic woman takes to an
extreme the practices to which women subject themselves in their
efforts to conform to cultural norms of an ideal feminine form. In the
figure of the anorexic Bordo sees an association of power and
self-control with the achievement of a potentially fatal slenderness.
For Bordo, this association is a stark illustration of the way in
which disciplinary power is linked to the social control of women.
Disciplinary technologies are particularly effective forms of social
control because they take hold of individuals at the level of their
bodies, gestures, desires and habits to create individuals who are
attached to and, thus, the unwitting agents of their own subjection.
In other words, disciplinary power fashions individuals who
'voluntarily' subject themselves to self-surveillance and
self-normalization. Thus, like Bartky, Bordo finds Foucault's work
useful to explain women's collusion with patriarchal standards of
femininity.

4. Subjectivity, identity and resistance

Although the use that Bartky and Bordo make of Foucault's insights
into the operation of normalizing disciplinary power is a corrective
to his failure to recognize the gendered nature of disciplinary
techniques, some feminists have argued that their work reproduces a
problematic dimension of Foucault's account of modern disciplinary
power. Jana Sawicki explains that the problem faced by this kind of
feminist appropriation of Foucault is its inability to account for
effective resistance to disciplinary practices. Like Foucault, Bartky
and Bordo envisage modern disciplinary power as ubiquitous and
inescapable. Foucauldian power reduces individuals to docile and
subjected bodies and thus seems to deny the possibility of freedom and
resistance. According to Sawicki, 'Bartky and Bordo have portrayed
forms of patriarchal power that insinuate themselves within subjects
so profoundly that it is difficult to imagine how they (we) might
escape. They describe our complicity in patriarchal practices of
victimization without providing suggestions about how we might resist
it' (Sawicki 1988: 293).

Feminist critics of Foucault like Nancy Hartsock argue that his
failure to develop an adequate notion of resistance is a consequence
of his reduction of individuals to effects of power relations.
Hartsock echoes a widespread feminist concern that Foucault's
understanding of power reduces individuals to docile bodies, to
victims of disciplinary technologies or objects of power rather than
subjects with the capacity to resist (Hartsock 1990: 171-2). The
problem for Hartsock and others is that without the assumption of a
subject or individual that pre-exists its construction by technologies
of power, it becomes difficult to explain who resists power? If there
are no ready-made individuals with interests that are defined prior to
their construction by power, then what is the source of our
resistance? Some feminists have responded to these concerns by
claiming that, although Foucault rejects the idea that resistance can
be grounded in a subject or self who pre-exists its construction by
power, he does not deny the possibility of resistance to power. In his
later work Foucault explains that his theory of power implies both the
possibility and existence of forms of resistance. According to
Foucault: 'there are no relations of power without resistances; the
latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed
right at the point where relations of power are exercised' (Foucault
1980: 142). Foucauldian resistance neither predates the power it
opposes nor issues from a site external to power. Rather it relies
upon and grows out of the situation against which it struggles.
Foucault's understanding of resistance as internal to power refuses
the utopian dream of achieving total emancipation from power. In the
place of total liberation Foucault envisages more specific, local
struggles against forms of subjection aimed at loosening the
constraints on possibilities for action. He suggests that a key
struggle in the present is against the tendency of
normalizing-disciplinary power to tie individuals to their identities
in constraining ways. It is, Foucault contends, because disciplinary
practices limit the possibilities of what we can be by fixing our
identities that the object of resistance must be 'to refuse what we
are' – that is, to fracture the limitations imposed on us by
normalizing identity categories. Foucault's notion of resistance as
consisting, at least in the first instance, in a refusal of fixed,
stable or naturalized identity has been met with some suspicion by
feminists. Many feminists are reluctant to abandon a commitment 'to
some essential, liberatory subject rooted in "women's experience" (or
nature), as the starting point for emancipatory theory' (Sawicki 1994:
289). For Hartsock, Foucault's perspective functions to preclude the
possibility of feminist politics which, she claims, is necessarily an
identity-based politics grounded in a conception of the identity,
needs and interests of women. Some of the most exciting feminist
appropriations of Foucault converge around this issue of identity and
its role in politics. Judith Butler argues that Foucault's work
provides feminists with the resources to think beyond the strictures
of identity politics. According to Butler, feminists should be wary of
the idea that politics needs to be based on a fixed idea of women's
nature and interests. She argues that: 'The premature insistence on a
stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of
women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category.
These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory
consequences of that construction, even when the construction has been
elaborated for emancipatory purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within
feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism from "women" whom
feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity
politics' (Butler 1990: 4). Butler discerns at least two problems in
the attempt to ground politics in an essential, naturalized female
identity. She argues that the assertion of the category 'woman' as the
ground for political action excludes, marginalizes and inevitably
misrepresents those who do not recognize themselves within the terms
of that identity. For Butler the appeal to identity both overlooks the
differences in power and resources between, for example, third world
and Western women, and tends to make these differences a source of
conflict rather than a source of strength. She claims, moreover, that
a feminist identity politics that appeals to a fixed 'feminist
subject,' 'presumes, fixes and constrains the very 'subjects' that it
hopes to represent and liberate' (Butler 1990: 148). In Foucault's
presentation of identity as an effect Butler sees new possibilities
for feminist political practice, possibilities that are precluded by
positions that take identity to be fixed or foundational. One of the
distinct advantages of Foucault's understanding of the constituted
character of identity is, in Butler's view, that it enables feminism
to politicize the processes through which stereotypical forms of
masculine and feminine identity are produced. Butler's own work
represents an attempt to explore these processes for the purposes of
loosening the heterosexual restrictions on identity formation. In
pursuing this project she argues that Foucault's characterization of
identity as constructed does not mean that it is completely determined
or artificial and arbitrary. Rather, a Foucauldian approach to
identity production demonstrates the role played by cultural norms in
regulating how we embody or perform our gender identities. According
to Butler, gender identity is simply 'a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (Butler 1990:
33). The regulatory power of the norms that govern our performances of
gender is both disguised and strengthened by the assumption that
gendered identities are natural and essential. Thus, for Butler, one
of the most important feminist aims should be to challenge dominant
gender norms by exposing the contingent acts that produce the
appearance of an underlying 'natural' gender identity. Against the
claim that feminist politics is necessarily an identity politics,
Butler suggests that: 'If identities were no longer fixed as the
premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood
as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong
to a set of ready-made subjects, a new configuration of politics would
surely emerge from the ruins of the old' (Butler 1990: 149). Butler
envisages this new configuration of politics as an anti-foundational
coalition politics that would accept the need to act within the
tensions produced by contradiction, fragmentation and diversity. While
Butler's political vision emphasises strategies for resisting and
subverting identity, Wendy Brown argues that contemporary feminism
should be wary of both identity politics and the 'politics of
resistance' associated with the work of Foucault and Butler. Brown
argues that identity politics entails a commitment to the authenticity
of women's experiences which functions to secure political authority.
At the same time, however, most feminists wish to acknowledge that
feminine identity and experience are constructed under patriarchal
conditions. Brown suggests that this inconsistency in feminist
political thought – acknowledging social construction on the one hand
and attempting to preserve a realm of authentic experience free from
construction on the other – might be explained by the fact that
feminists are reluctant to give up the claim to moral authority that
the appeal to the truth and innocence of woman's experience secures.
By appealing to the silenced truth of women's experience, feminists
have been able to condemn the repressive effects of patriarchal power.
For Brown the attempt to establish moral authority by asserting the
hidden truth of women's experience and identity represents a rejection
of politics. She argues that this kind of move in feminism: '… betrays
a preference for extrapolitical terms and practices: for Truth
(unchanging and incontestable) over politics (flux, contest,
instability); for certainty and security (safety; immutability,
privacy) over freedom (vulnerability, publicity); for discoveries
(science) over decisions (judgments); for separable subjects armed
with established rights over unwieldy and shifting pluralities
adjudicating for themselves and their future on the basis of nothing
more than their own habits and arguments' (Brown 1995: 37). Brown
finds a similar failure to meet the challenges confronting
contemporary politics in the 'politics of resistance' inspired by
Foucault. As she sees it, the problem with resistance-as-politics is
that it does not 'contain a critique, a vision, or grounds for
organized collective efforts to enact either… [resistance] goes
nowhere in particular, has no inherent attachments and hails no
particular vision' (Brown 1995: 49). In light of these inadequacies,
Brown calls for the politics of resistance to be supplemented by a
political practices aimed at cultivating 'political spaces for posing
and questioning political norms [and] for discussing the nature of
"the good" for women' (Brown 1995: 49). The creation of such
democratic spaces for discussion will, Brown argues, contribute to
teaching us how to have public conversations with each other and
enable us to argue from our diverse perspectives about a vision of the
common good ("what I want for us") rather than from some assumed
common identity ("who I am").

5. Freedom, power and politics

The key problems identified by feminist critics as preventing too
close a convergence between Foucault's work and feminism – his
reduction of social agents to docile bodies and the lack of normative
guidance in his model of power and resistance – are indirectly
addressed by Foucault in his late work on ethics. Whereas in his
earlier genealogies Foucault emphasized the processes through which
individuals were subjected to power, in his later writings he turned
his attention to practices of self-constitution or 'practices of
freedom' which he called ethics.

The idea of practicing freedom is central to Foucault's exploration
and analysis of the ethical practices of Antiquity. It refers to the
ways in which individuals in Antiquity were led to exercise power over
themselves in the attempt to constitute or transform their identity
and behavior in the light of specific goals. What interests Foucault
about these ethical practices and ancient 'arts of existence' is the
kind of freedom they presuppose. He suggests that the freedom entailed
in practicing the art of self-fashioning consists neither in resisting
power nor in seeking to liberate the self from regulation. Rather, it
entails the active and conscious arrogation of the power of regulation
by individuals for the purposes of ethical and aesthetic
self-transformation. In her reflections on Foucault's positive account
of freedom, Sawicki notes that it offers a more affirmative
alternative to his earlier emphasis on the reactive strategy of
resistance to normalization (Sawicki 1998: 104). For the late
Foucault, individuals are still understood to be shaped by their
embeddedness in power relations, which means that their capacities for
freedom and autonomous action are necessarily limited. However, he
suggests that by actively deploying the techniques and models of
self-formation that are 'proposed, suggested, imposed' upon them by
society (Foucault 1988b: 291), individuals may creatively transform
themselves and in the process supplant the normalization operating in
pernicious modern technologies of the self (Sawicki 1998: 105).
Sawicki sees a link between Foucault's notion of practices of freedom
and Donna Haraway's call for a cyborg politics that emphasizes the
conscious creation of marginalized subjects capable of resisting
domination. In a more critical vein, feminists like Jean Grimshaw and
McNay argue that Foucault's promising turn to a more active model of
subjectivity still leaves crucial issues unresolved. In Grimshaws
formulation, Foucault evades the vital question of 'when forms of
self-discipline or self-surveillance can … be seen as exercises of
autonomy or self-creation, or when they should be seen, rather, as
forms of discipline to which the self is subjected, and by which
autonomy is constrained' (Grimshaw 1993: 66; McNay 1992: 74). In
response to this criticism, Moya Lloyd suggests that it is Foucault's
earlier notion of genealogy as critique which allows us to distinguish
between autonomous practices of the self and technologies of
normalization. For Lloyd, the Foucauldian practice of critique – a
practice which involves the effort to recognize, decipher and
problematize the ways in which the self is produced – generates
possibilities for alternative practices of the self and, thus, for
more autonomous experiments in self-formation. Lloyd explains that 'it
is not the activity of self-fashioning in itself that is crucial. It
is the way in which that self-fashioning, when allied to critique, can
produce sites of contestation over the meanings and contours of
identity, and over the ways in which certain practices are mobilized'
(Lloyd: 1988: 250). With the introduction of a notion of freedom in
his late work, Foucault also clarifies the normative grounds for his
opposition to certain forms of power. In his discussion of ethics,
Foucault suggests that individuals are not limited to reacting against
power, but may alter power relationships in ways that expand their
possibilities for action. Thus, Foucault's work on ethics can be
linked to his concern to counter domination, that is, forms of power
that limit the possibilities for the autonomous development of the
self's capacities. By distinguishing power relations that are mutable,
flexible and reversible, from situations of domination in which
resistance is foreclosed, Foucault seeks to encourage practices of
liberty 'that will allow us to play … games of power with as little
domination as possible' (Foucault 1988b: 298). Sawicki argues that
Foucault's notion of practices of freedom has the potential to broaden
our understanding of what it is to engage in emancipatory politics. In
Foucault's conception of freedom as a practice aimed at minimizing
domination, Sawicki discerns an implicit critique of traditional
emancipatory politics which tends to conceive of liberty as a state
free from every conceivable social constraint. Following Foucault,
Sawicki argues that the problem with this notion of emancipation is
that it does not go far enough: 'Reversing power positions without
altering relations of power is rarely liberating. Neither is it a
sufficient condition of liberation to throw off the yoke of
domination' (Sawicki 1998: 102). If, as Foucault suggests, freedom
exists only in being exercised and is, thus, a permanent struggle
against what will otherwise be done to and for individuals, it is
dangerous to imagine it as a state of being that can be guaranteed by
laws and institutions. By insisting that liberation from domination is
not enough to guarantee freedom, Foucault points to the importance of
establishing new patterns of behaviour, attitudes and cultural forms
that work to empower the vulnerable and, in this way, to ensure that
mutable relations of power do not congeal into states of domination.
Thus, for Sawicki, the value of Foucault's late work for feminism
consists in the conceptual tools that it provides to think beyond
traditional emancipatory theories and practices.

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