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New Literary History 31.3 (2000) 509-528



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Foucault's Body Tropes

Daniel Punday


Often lost in debates about the validity of Foucauldian theories of discourse and power is the degree to which its language of bodily spaces "inscribed" by power has passed into popular critical jargon. Feminists in particular--who, as a group, have been ambivalent about Foucault's theory--frequently speak of the body as a space where various discourses conflict. Teresa de Lauretis is particularly explicit in describing "a shift . . . in the feminist understanding of female subjectivity: a shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together, and often enough at odds with one another." 1 The reason that critics have been attracted to this language of the body as a "site of differences" seems quite straightforward. Describing the body as a site articulates its involvement with discourse while, apparently, denying that any one discourse can define and map it fully. This understanding of the body site represents, however, at best an incomplete picture of Foucault's theory. While critics find the language of the body as a site in the writings of the middle part of his career, especially Discipline and Punish, the optimistic spirit of this body site's open-endedness reflects the tone of the later volumes of his History of Sexuality, which describe how individuals participate in discursive structures to "transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria." 2 Foucault's language of the body site then has passed into critical jargon in an indirect and possibly incoherent way.

The widespread popularity of Foucault's description of the body as a site of power, even among those critics who question the value of Foucault's theory in general, suggests that it performs a function within critical analysis that is somewhat independent of Foucault's theory. Describing the body as a site allows critics like de Lauretis to achieve certain critical and analytical goals; it provides a trope, I will argue, through which critics can make particular arguments and claims. Chris [End Page 509] Weedon's Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, for example, adopts this language of bodies as sites of discursive struggle: "Individuals are both the site and subjects of discursive struggle for their identity." 3 In explaining why feminists should be concerned with this theory of bodily sites, Weedon provides a typically practical justification: "In order to make sense of these contradictions (between dominant institutionalized definitions of women's nature and social role) we need new theoretical perspectives which challenge individualism" (5). Weedon is more explicit than most in admitting that her language of bodily sites has a methodological purpose. In the case of feminist criticism, this methodological dimension of the body-as-site trope is particularly important, since one of the principal criticisms leveled at Foucault's theory is its abstraction and distance from concrete critical practice. 4 Feminists--as well as many literary and cultural critics--have often seen in this trope a way of conducting practical analysis that may itself not be precisely in the spirit of Foucault's analysis. Foucault described theory as a "toolkit," since it is "not a system but an instrument"; 5 we can see this appropriation of the body-as-site trope by literary and cultural critics as a way of making use of some part of Foucault's theory for practical, analytic purposes.

In this article, I would like to analyze Foucault's body trope and to investigate the rhetorical problems that it raises for critics who appropriate it as an "instrument." I will ultimately argue that we should place Foucault's body trope into the tradition of the body politic, and should recognize that contemporary critics encounter many of the same problems raised by that...

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