Michel Foucault: 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. Foucaults 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 Foucaults 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 womens 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 Foucaults 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 Foucaults thought and contemporary feminism are discussed below.

Table of Contents
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Background: Foucault's Genealogy of Power, Knowledge and the Subject

Between Foucault and Feminism: Convergence and Critique
Power, the Body and Sexuality
Subjectivity, Identity and Resistance
Freedom, Power and Politics
References and Further Reading

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 itThus, 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 selfawareness 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--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.
Foucaults 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, selfunderstandings, 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 Foucaults 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 Frasers view, Foucaults 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 Foucaults

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 Foucaults 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, Foucaults 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 Foucaults 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 micropolitical 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 Foucaults 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
asprior 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 Foucaults 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
womens 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 Haraways 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 selfformation. 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.

6. References and Further Reading

Bartky, S., 'Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power' in I.

Diamond & L. Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance,
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Bordo, S., 'Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture'
in I. Diamond & L. Quinby (eds) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on
Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Brown, W., 'Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations' in States of Injury:
power and freedom in late modernity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1995.
Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, NY:
Routledge, 1990.
Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", NY: Routledge,
1993.
Diamond, I. & Quinby, L., (eds.) Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on
Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982.
Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan,
Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977.
Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, translated by R. Hurley, Penguin Books,
1978.
Foucault, M., 'Body/Power' and Truth and Power in C. Gordon (ed.) Michel
Foucault: Power/Knowledge, U.K.: Harvester, 1980.
Foucault, M., 'The subject and power' in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982.
Foucault, M., 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.)
NY: Pantheon, 1984a.
Foucault, M., 'On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress' in
The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) NY: Pantheon, 1984b.
Foucault, M., Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 19771984, L. Kritzman (ed.), London: Routledge, 1988a.
Foucault, M., 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom' in J.
Bernhauer and D. Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault, Cambridge: Mass.: MIT
Press, 1988b.

Fraser, N., Unruly Practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary social
theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
Grimshaw, J., 'Practices of Freedom' in Up Against Foucault, C. Ramazanoglu
(ed.), London and NY: Routledge, 1993.
Grosz, E., Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994.
Gutting, G., (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Hacking, I., 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' in D. Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault:
a critical reader, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Hartsock, N., 'Foucault on power: a theory for women?' in L. Nicholson (ed.),
Feminism/Postmodernism, London & NY: Routledge, 1990.
Hekman, S. (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania University Press, 1996.
Lloyd, M., 'A Feminist Mapping of Foucauldian Politics' in Feminism and
Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, I. Diamond & L. Quinby (eds), Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988.
McNay, L., Foucault: a critical introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
McNay, L., Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self, Polity Press,
1992.
Ramazanoglu, C., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between
Foucault and Feminism, London & NY: Routledge, 1993.
Rouse, J., 'Power/Knowledge' in Gary Gutting (ed) The Cambridge Companion to
Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Sawicki, J., 'Feminism and the Power of Discourse' in J. Arac (ed.) After
Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1988, pp. 161-178.
Sawicki, J., 'Foucault, feminism, and questions of identity' in ed. G. Gutting, The
Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Sawicki, J., 'Feminism, Foucault and "Subjects" of Power and Freedom' in The
Later Foucault: politics and philosophy, J. Moss (ed.), London; Thousand Oaks:
Sage Publications, 1998.
Soper, K., 'Productive contradictions', Up Against Foucault: Explorations of
Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism, London & NY: Routledge, 1993.

Author Information
Aurelia Armstrong
Email: [email protected]
University of Queensland
Australia