From: sbinkley-AT-pipeline.com Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1996 12:01:29 -0400 Subject: [3] feminists and foucault On Sat, Jun 11, 1904 8:36:50 AM, Windsor Shampi Leroke wrote: >Are feminists prepared to accept the implications of >Foucault's critique of power and his formulation of power relations, >of which sexuality (and to specify the gender-form of sexuality is >irrelevant here) is a critical part? at the radical extreme of this question is the somewhat staunch rejection of the "relativist" politics of Foucault or po mo thinkers in general. A favorite "love to hate" piece which describes this attitude is found in Nancy Hartstock's essay "Foucault and Power" in LInda Nicholson's Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routeledge, 1990). It is a monstrously shallow conflation of Foucault's critique of left political agendas with a white male need to consolidate its power in the face of increasing demands >from women, people of color etc. LImited as this challenge is, however, I think it indicates on extreme of his reception. The disclosure of the political underlying the sexual in Western history has traditionally been the work of a feminist criticism. Is feminism, as a real struggle with real stakes, undermined as an intellectual and popular project if this criticism is framed in other terms? It is easy to answer this with a "no" (as I ultimately would), but I think that no should be as rigorous as possible. Of the "four great strategic unities" which constitute the deployment of sexuality, the hystericization of women's bodies is the first Foucault describes (page 104 of the 1990 vintage books edition). "..a threefold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed qualified and disqualified as being thoroughly saturated with sexuality; whereby it was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the family space (of which it had to be a substantial and functional element), and the life of children (which it produced and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biological-moral responsibility lasting through the entire period of the children's education): the mother, with her negative image of "nervous woman," constituted the most visible form of the hysteriization." So: 1) analysis, 2) pathologized 3) invested in social relations. So the origins of women's oppression is not in the relations of production/reproduction, in any psychic or economic structure, but in the halls of medical science? Does this undermine the historical and anthropological arguments feminists have used to explain women's subordination? sb
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005