Foucault’s Sad Heterotopology of the Body

Introduction

Foucault’s view of the body has received much attention in feminist philosophy. His idea that the body is not an objectively given metaphysical entity but an effect of historically and culturally specific practices of power and knowledge has proved helpful in understanding the ways in which our very bodies are subject to and formed by complex mechanisms of power. Yet, Foucault’s focus on the body as the source and product of historically specific regimes of power/knowledge has also generated criticism. Many feminist scholars argue that his historicization of the body leaves little room for individuals’ embodied experience (Alcoff 1996; Alcoff 2000; Bigwood 1991; Kruks 2001; McNay 1991; Schneider 2012).¹ As a consequence, they contend, Foucault is unable to account for differences in the effects of power on the bodies of men and women and, thus, the gendered nature of embodied experience. An example of this approach is Patricia O’Brien, who, elaborating on Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power in the prison, suggests that female prisoners encounter the disciplinary space of the prison in a way that radically differs from male inmates (O’Brien 1978; O’Brien 1982). Moreover, Foucault’s ostensibly exclusive focus on the historical transformations of knowledge about and power over the body, which he illustrates in his genealogies of the medical gaze, disciplinary power, or sexuality, is said to be unhelpful for feminist philosophy because his prioritization of (legal, medical, or scientific) discourse effaces individuals’ pre- or nondiscursive experience. In her reading of Foucault’s account of the farmhand in the History of Sexuality Volume 1, Linda Alcoff has taken Foucault to task for ignoring the salience of experience in cases of sexual violence. She suggests that feminists turn to phenomenology, rather than to Foucault, to produce adequate accounts of sexual violence that take into consideration the meaning traumatic events have for survivors of sexual violence (Alcoff 2000).

In contrast to feminist criticism of Foucault, which centers on the alleged absence of experience in his work, a number of scholars have convincingly argued that Foucault is, in fact, a philosopher of experience insofar as he seeks to analyze experience as the space enclosed by axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivation (Flynn 2010; Han 2002; Huffer 2010; Lemke 2002; Oksala 2004; Oksala 2011; O’Leary 2009; Valverde 2004). Oksala, in particular, has made a number of important interventions in this context. Situating the body squarely within the field of experience staked out by knowledge, power, and subjectivation, she argues that the experiential body emerges in Foucault’s work as a site of resistance against the very forces that act upon it. This experiential notion of the body, she contends, emerges in Foucault’s late work on sexuality as the necessary underpinning of his advice to turn bodies and pleasures into a “rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality” (Foucault 1990, 157). Oksala claims that the sexualized body constitutes an experiential body in its double movement of “transgressing the limits between the normal and the abnormal” and contesting the “limit between the intelligibility and unintelligibility of experiences” (Oksala 2004, 110).² Because the sexualized body “can multiply, distort, and overflow the meanings, definitions, and classifications attached to experiences, and in this sense it is capable of discursively undefined and unintelligible pleasures,” it provides a privileged site of resistance to sexual normalization (Oksala 2004, 114).³ The experiential body, in other words, not only defies the norms imposed on bodies by normalizing practices, but it is also capable of experiences that cannot be understood or rendered comprehensible by dominant categories.

In this essay, I propose a different account of the body in Foucault’s work by shifting the question from what kind of thing the body is to what function the body serves in Foucault’s critical project. As a consequence, rather than focusing on the body as a site of resistance, I argue that Foucault offers a spatialized way of thinking about the body that offers an important corrective to accounts that emphasize the historicity of the body, which I briefly outline in section 2. I then...