From: "Brian Milstein" <madmenonly-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Foucault, Gender, Organizations
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 12:44:35 EDT


I just joined the list yesterday.  One thing I've noticed about Foucault is 
that the body (no pun) of his work seems to straddle two "schools" of 
Critical Theory.  By this, I mean that, in certain ways, we like to "group" 
him with the French post-structuralists such as Derrida, Lacan (more of a 
structuralist), etc., but in other ways, his perspective seems to fit in 
better with the work of Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School.  I realize 
I may be oversimplifying, but what strikes me is the suprising lack of 
compatibility between these two "paradigms" of Foucault, the former being 
more literary and (post-)psychoanalytical and the letter being more 
empirical-historical and philosophy of science oriented.  I think that this 
discontinuity in the philosophical discourses surrounding Foucault may lie 
central to your own issue, but I do not personally know how to go about 
resolving it.

Some works you may fing interesting are Judith Butler's essay on 
"Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault" or 
Jana Sawicki's "Foucault and Feminism: A Critical Reappraisal" (Sawicki's 
essay is contained in a book entitled "Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, 
Power, and the Body," but I read it reproduced somewhere else). Nancy 
Fraser's work may, I think, particularly come in useful for your project.


>From: valkiain-AT-mappi.helsinki.fi
>Reply-To: foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: foucault-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Foucault, Gender, Organizations
>Date: Sat, 16 Oct 1999 15:30:32 +0300 (EET DST)
>
>Hi everybody,
>
>I have just recently joined the list and would like to know whether there 
>is
>anybody who is interested in applying Foucault's power-knowledge-bodies 
>prism to
>analyzing organizational practices as and through the processes of
>subjectivation. I am particularly keen on practices of gendering the 
>workforce
>and what social and political implications do these subjectivating 
>practices
>bear on the 'body of labor.' It sounds rather elusive, I know, but this is
>exactly why I would like to take up the issue of concrete empirical 
>analysis of
>the modes of subjectivation as and through the social organization of 
>bodies.
>Broadly put, I want to ask how much is Foucault and his genealogical 
>'tools'
>susceptible, so to speak, of empirical analysis as such? And if they are, 
>as it
>seems to me, then how could one embark on concrete empirical study? Has 
>anybody
>come across these issues in general, and especially the ones pertaining to
>gender and organizations?
>
>vv

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