foucault and feminism: power, gender and the self · pdf filefoucault and feminism: power,...
TRANSCRIPT
Palgrave Macmillan Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access toFeminist Review.
www.jstor.org®
Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self Lois McNay Polity Press: Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0 7456 0939 2, £10.95 Pbk, ISBN0745609384, £39.50Hbk
Lois McNay provides here a welcome, innovative and closely argued intervention in the debate on the relationship between feminism, postmodernism and Foucault which helps sharpen the focus of feminist theory by untangling the apparently contradictory impulses in Foucault's work.
McNay's argument has two major sets of concerns. She is centrally interested in Foucault's account of the purchase of identity on politics and discusses how this might provide a resource for feminists struggling to reconcile women's different experiences with a political commitment to the fundamental transformation of sex/gender power relations. This discussion meshes with a careful reinterpretation of Foucault's work which seeks to distinguish it from postmodern theory.
For McNay, it is important that feminists grasp the shift which occurs between Foucault's earlier and later work in his conception of the individual. Where some writers and critics have seen inconsistencies between Foucault's deployment of conceptions of autonomy, domination and freedom which would seem only to make sense within an Enlightenment frame of reference, and relativist conceptions of power and truth largely derived from a Nietzschean tradition, McNay sees a developing process of self-critique which results in the production of an important, if problematic, conception of human agency. She argues that while Foucault's earlier work - most notably Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume 1 -operates with a notion of the individual as a docile body subject to the disciplinary movement of power, the later
Reviews 115
work - in particular The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Selfrepresents an attempt to reinstate an active form of agency through the conceptions of practices and ethics of the self.
Foucault's non-essentialist conception of the body, supplemented with a notion of the self-determining individual can, MeN ay argues, provide an important counter to two major problematic tendencies within feminism. It can challenge the image of women as passive victims fixed in a uniform relation to a monolithic patriarchal power structure, because it can recognize the multiple determinations on women's realities. At another level the theory of the subject which emerges undercuts the essentializing assumptions of some feminist theory, particularly 'mothering theory' derived from the theory of object relations, which fails to engage with the historical and cultural determinations on difference and sentimentalizes both mothering and sisterhood.
At the same time, MeN ay is concerned to rescue Foucault from the most intensely nihilistic impulses ofpostmodern thought and to relocate his project in an Enlightenment vision and its concerns with emancipatory politics. Foucault does not unconditionally celebrate difference, but rather recognizes a need to sever moral concerns from theoretical prescriptions, and to build a moral theory that proceeds from localized realities. If, like the postmodernists, he is suspicious of the normalizing force of meta-narratives, he does not thereby abandon the possibility of morality per se. His belief in the effectivity of critical thought and the coherence of emancipatory activity leads him to develop an ethics of the self which, unlike that of the postmodernists, 'always takes place in the space of coherent identity' (p. 135). The Foucauldian conception of the subject is, then, potentially more useful for feminism than the logic of endless
116 Feminist Review
dissipation or the apocalyptic vision of the schizophrenic as paradigmatic of the postmodern self. For McNay, Foucault is a theorist not of 'postmodernity' but of modernity's dark side, a Romanticist struggling with the question of how the individual might be self-determining in an era of the atrophy of meta-narratives and organized through technologies of power which function through regulating and prescribing the category of the individual itself.
Yet in crucial ways MeN ay finds Foucault's conception of the self wanting for feminism. His disinterest in gender shows not only his sexism but also an insensitivity to the over-determination of social structure on individuals' struggles for freedom. His insistence on the positivity of power makes him inattentive to the ambivalences, contradictions and enabling aspects of modernity. His ethics of the self is in the last analysis a form of aesthetics locked into introspection and left unanchored by his reluctance to articulate the normative underpinnings of the Enlightenment conceptions he retains. Foucault, on MeN ay's reading, is not implicated in all the false dichotomies which have underpinned postmodernist analysis, but he lacks a developed account of the social embeddedness of the individual and so, at the end of the day, falls into the sterility of opposing the individual to the social in a non-dialectical way. Habermas and Benhabib are discussed in some depth, to point to the necessity for a more dialogic conception of the interrelation of self and other in which the other is conceived, not simply as that which the self confronts, but as a dynamic category built into the very process of self-transformation.
This is a book which will appeal primarily to an academic audience and to feminists who find engagement with philosophy clarifying for political vision. McNay's argument proceeds through detailed discussions of the content of Foucault's work, his insights into the relationship between Greek and Christian conceptions of the self, and his attempts to develop a conception of power adequate to the complexities of the contemporary world. She provides clear and illuminating discussions of Foucault's critics as well as some of the most influential impulses within feminism. If MeN ay concludes that feminism cannot finally dispense with general forms of explanation anchored in a conception of justice, she nevertheless establishes Foucault as an important figure in feminism's own dynamic interrelation with its own theoretical context.
Finally, a note of dissent. MeN ay comments at one point that Foucault does not attend to 'the involuntary and biological dimensions to sexuality' or to 'the emotional or affective side of sexual relations' (p. 80). From this point of view, Foucault's anti-essentialism might be seen as a theoretical problem rather than a resolution to the problems of theorizing the female subject, but this is a point which is glossed through the tendency to equate feminist essentialism with mothering theory. The problem of foundationalism, it would seem, persists. But that is to point to the need for a different debate.
Janet Ransom