Non-Subjective Assemblages?: Foucault, Subjectivity, and Sexual Violence

My way of no longer being what I am is the most singular part of what I am.

-Michel Foucault, “For an Ethics of Discomfort”

In his 1975 Collège de France course, Abnormal, Michel Foucault analyzes the case of Charles Jouy, a nineteenth-century farmhand who, in 1867, was accused of sexually violating a young girl by the name of Sophie Adam.¹ Foucault describes Jouy as a “marginal” figure, “more or less the village idiot” (292). Lacking relationships with adult women, Jouy sought out sexual encounters with young girls. Two such encounters apparently occurred between Jouy and Sophie Adam. On the first occasion Sophie, in the company of a friend, masturbated Jouy “in the fields” (292). (Foucault notes that Jouy reported having previously witnessed Sophie engaging in the same act with “a boy of thirteen or fourteen” [295]). On the second occasion, as Foucault describes it, “Jouy dragged young Sophie Adam (unless it was Sophie Adam who dragged Charles Jouy) into the ditch alongside the road to Nancy. There, something happened: almost rape, perhaps. Anyway, Jouy very decently gives four sous to the little girl who immediately runs to the fair to buy some roasted almonds” (295).

It’s not difficult to see why feminists find Foucault’s account and ultimately his analysis of the Jouy case to be objectionable. In an attitude of classic victim blaming that both reflects and promotes sexist views of women and girls who have been raped and sexually assaulted, Foucault implies that Sophie “wanted it.” First, he overtly states that it was perhaps Sophie herself who initiated contact with Jouy. Second, he draws attention to the fact that Sophie allegedly had a history of sexual activity. Third, pointing out that Sophie visited a fair after the incident with Jouy suggests that she didn’t seem particularly troubled by what had happened. Moreover, Foucault trivializes the encounter between Jouy and Sophie by describing it as “petty” and “inconsequential” (History 31). As Jana Sawicki points out, “Foucault doesn’t feel compelled to address Sophie’s fate at all. Jouy [who will become the object of psychiatric examination and confinement] is the victim in the story.”² When considered alongside remarks he made during roundtable discussions and interviews concerning whether and how sexuality can be regulated or criminalized,³ Foucault’s dismissive attitude has led some feminists to argue that he at least minimizes and perhaps even excuses not only sexual assault and rape, but pedophilia as well.⁴

In contrast to such arguments, this essay draws upon and extends recent feminist analyses that acknowledge Foucault’s sexist treatment of the Jouy case but nonetheless contend that the insights Foucault ultimately draws from it are relevant for feminism.⁵ Chloë Taylor’s work is especially important in this regard, since she relates these insights specifically to the issue of sex crimes. For Taylor, Foucault’s analysis of the Jouy case illustrates the normalizing effects for perpetrators and victims alike of construing subjectivity in terms of an inherent sexuality.

My perspective, as reflected in what follows, is that not merely sexual subjectivity but subjectivity as such—understood as a mode of constituting, understanding, and relating to ourselves—functions in a normalizing and therefore oppressive manner for women who have been raped and sexually assaulted. By unsettling the prevailing view (not only among feminists) that “the subject” provides not merely a necessary but also an (at least potentially) emancipatory ground for any ethical or political project, this perspective likewise critically engages the notion of the assemblage. Following Foucault and the guest editors of this special issue of SubStance on assemblages, I see the relation of self to self as simultaneously enabled and constrained by the same norms and power relations through which it gains intelligibility. That the self-relation functions simultaneously as the “first or final point of resistance to” (Foucault, Hermeneutics 252) and a key site for the reproduction of normalizing power complicates conceptualizing, forming, and deploying a collectivity, particularly a counter-normalizing one. This essay seeks to elucidate the complexity of the self-relation’s broader reverberations within a context in...