Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION I have addressed feminist objections to Foucault’s work, and demonstrated the ways that his work has been and can be useful to feminists. I have focused on feminist criticisms of Foucault’s account of subjectivity, countering objections that it is incapable of resistance. I have explicated Foucault’s analytics of power, showing that it can account for asymmetries of power, reversals of power, and resistance . Foucault’s criticism of humanistic universal norms as excluding difference resonates with feminist criticisms of the humanistic subject as implicitly white, male, and European. Moreover, Foucault’s account of social norms is also useful to feminists. Foucault demonstrates that social norms are imposed upon and taken up by subjects through a variety of social practices and institutions, that these norms are incorporated bodily, and that it is through norms that subjectivity is constituted. His account is especially apropos to explain gender norms that are reinforced in almost all institutions and social practices, are primarily bodily, and are central to subjectivity. At the same time as his account of social norms explains their ability to constitute subjectivity, his attention to the historical contingency of these norms indicates their historical and cultural variability and the possibility for change in the future. Foucault’s commitment to antidomination, implicit in his genealogies, becomes more explicit in his later work, where he advocates the positive values of innovation, creativity, freedom, self-transformation, and social transformation. In spite of these commitments, Foucault does not offer a blueprint for social change or political action. In fact, much of his work seems to warn us away from setting general agendas for social change because of the risk that these agendas may in fact reproduce the relations of domination they are intended to overcome. He even hesitated to impose his views on readers, saying, “I think it is always a little pretentious to present in a more or less prophetic way what people have to think. I prefer to let them draw their own conclusions or infer general ideas from the interrogations I try to raise in analyzing historical and specific 165 material. I think it’s much more respectful for everyone’s freedom and that’s my manner.”1 I have inferred general ideas from Foucault’s historical studies that I think are particularly useful for feminism.To conclude, I apply some of these ideas to a current situation in feminist politics. In his work, Foucault discusses both the subjection and the subjectivation of the individual. While subjection results from the ways that dominating disciplines and practices constitute the subject, subjectivation refers to the individual’s active constitution of the self through work on the self. Foucault focuses on these two aspects of self-constitution in different texts.This leads some to suspect that Foucault drastically changes his notion of the subject from a passive, determined subject in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Volume One, to an active and autonomous subject in The History of Sexuality Volumes Two and Three, and in his essays and interviews on practices of the self and ethics. I suggest that Foucault ’s conception of the subject is not contradictory, that is, he does not conceive of the subject as totally determined (as I argue in chapters 3 and 4), and then as completely free and autonomous (as I demonstrate in chapters 3 and 6). Rather, both of these aspects are present, even when his discussion highlights one aspect at the expense of the other. Furthermore, I submit that this tension in Foucault’s conception of the subject is endemic to the problem of attempting to think of subjectivity in a nonreductive, nondualistic way. A conception of the subject that begins from the materiality of the body, but does not end there, must articulate a new conception of freedom as well. In my view, Foucault provides the theoretical resources to think through issues of constraint, domination, agency, and collective action as embodied practices. Even in his genealogical texts, where he emphasizes the domination and subjection of the individual through normalizing discourses and practices, a space for freedom and resistance can be found. Of course, freedom is reconceptualized as a practice, not an end or an ultimately attainable state.Techniques of the self are the flip side of techniques of domination; both exist simultaneously in tension with one another. To the extent that one engages in what Foucault calls “a critical ontology of ourselves”—that is, examining how we came to think, do, and...