Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity

Chapter 6

Chapter 6 PRACTICES OF THE SELF: FROM SELF-TRANSFORMATION TO SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION F oucault’s later work has much to offer feminists, not only because it extends his notion of embodied subjectivity, but also because it elaborates a connection between ethical subjectivity and ethical and political context. The politics of the body and the practices of the self do not begin and end with the individual. They are social, cultural, and historical. Recognizing techniques of the self as political does not reduce politics to the personal, or preclude collective action or structural change. Instead, it broadens the political arena to include social and cultural factors that have political implications. Foucault’s later works focus on the process of subjectification or on the self’s relation to self. Foucault’s discussion of the technologies of the self can be found in The History of Sexuality Volumes Two and Three, and essays and interviews.1 Foucault characterizes techniques of the self as “the procedures, which no doubt exist in every civilization, suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it and transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge.”2 These techniques of the self vary according to the historical period. In ancient times, these techniques included practices of dream interpretation, the notebooks (hupomnêmata) kept by the ancients , correspondence between friends, and the relation to the self through the regulation of the body, including diet, exercise, and sexual austerity. Foucault does not spend much time discussing contemporary techniques of the self. He does mention autobiography as a type of self-writing. And he discusses writing and doing philosophy as vehicles for critique and self-transformation . I suggest Foucault’s notion of practices of the self can be fruitfully applied to some contemporary feminist practices. I explore consciousness-raising as the practice of truth telling or parrhesia. I argue that understanding consciousness-raising 145 as a practice of the self illuminates a connection between individual experience and social transformation. This connection is important both to Foucault and to feminists. I also suggest that autobiography and a specific type of therapy, narrative therapy, can function as feminist practices of the self. This is obviously an extension of Foucault’s work, as he never discussed consciousness-raising and he had serious objections to therapy and psychoanalysis. But these practices fit his characterization of techniques of the self as procedures that help to determine, maintain , and transform identity with respect to a particular end or goal. Technologies of the self aim at self-transformation. Self-transformation is to become other than what one is, to realize “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think”; it is the creation of new possibilities, new forms of life achieved through technologies of the self.3 FOUCAULT’S TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF In one sense, Foucault’s technologies of the self can be viewed as the obverse of his concern with the individualization of the subject through writing and documentation. Recall that individualization occurs in part through the process of objectification of the individual. The individual becomes an analyzable object through the compilation of facts procured by institutions such as educational systems , medical institutions, and social scientific studies. Individuals become cases, their subjectivity inscribed and circumscribed by social norms. Often these norms are imposed mainly by forces outside the individual’s control, such as where she falls in the statistical average of, for example, height, weight, intelligence. In other cases, norms are both imposed on and taken up by the individual, as in the procedure of confession. Confession, Foucault says, involves a double sense of subjection ; one is compelled to tell the truth about oneself by institutionalized religious norms, but at the same time the speaking subject constitutes herself through this articulation. This differs from the instance where one becomes a case through the careful compilation of deviation from the norm. Confession is at least in part about the subject’s participation in her own self-construction. The construction of subjectivity through confession involves an interplay among the speaking subject , the one who listens, and the institutional norms that compel speech. Confession serves as a link between Foucault’s discussion of the practices of domination that result in the objectification of individuals and the practices of subjectification that signal self-constitution. Confessional narratives take many forms: traditional religious confession, autobiography, and, later, therapy. Confession, the articulation of one...