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Foucault and Feminism: Toward a Politics of Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Jana Sawicki
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Abstract

This paper begins with the assumption that the differences among women pose a threat to building a unified feminist theory and practice. Utilizing the work and methods of Michel Foucault, I explore theoretical and practical implications of taking difference seriously. I claim that a politics of difference puts into question the concept of a revolutionary subject and the idea of a social totality. In the final section a brief Foucauldian analysis of the feminist sexuality debates is given.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 1 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Motherhood and Sexuality , Fall 1986 , pp. 23 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Hypatia, Inc.

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References

Notes

1 “Revolutionary” feminisms are those which appeal to the notion of a “subject of history” and to the category of a “social totality” in their analyses of the theory and practice of social transformation.

2 Socialist feminism is an obvious alternative to the ones that I have chosen. It represents a theoretical development in feminism which is closest to embodying the basic insights of a politics of difference. See the work of Linda Nicholson (1986) for example.

3 One feminist critic, Jacqueline Zita (1982, 173) charges that Foucault's institutionalist theory of sexuality results in a picture of the “one-dimensional” containment of sexuality by objective forces beyond our control. She claims that it obscures the “continuous struggles of women against…patriarchy….” Yet Zita's criticism begs the question since it assumes that an emancipatory theory must rest on the notion of a continuous revolutionary subject. Foucault, after all, is attempting to displace the problem of the subject altogether.

4 See Foucault's reproduction of the memoirs of a hermaphrodite for an example of his effort to resurrect a knowledge of resistance (Foucault 1980c). This memoir is an account of the despair experienced by Herculine (formerly Alexina) once a male sexual identity is imposed upon her in her “happy limbo of non-identity.” This occurs at a time when the legal and medical profession has become interested in the question of sexual identity and has decided that every individual must be either male or female.

5 Linda Nicholson (1986) describes an explicitly historical feminism in which the search for origins (genealogy) involves an attempt to deconstruct (give an account of the process of construction of) our present categories (e.g. “personal,”“public”) and thereby free us from a rigid adherence to them. Foucault's genealogies serve the same function.