Week 10

Introduction - power Weeks 1- 9 Power in relation to:  Economic inequalities – Marxist conception of power related to class position i.e. position vis-à-vis means of production  Power and cultural resources – Bourdieu’s social field and axes of cultural/economic resources and power  Power to and over All about power experienced and exercised at macro level – social, economic and political institutions

Introduction – politics of sex  Carol Pateman, sexual contract and women’s exclusion from full citizenship  Representation of women and feminisation of politics in elected bodies So sexual politics at macro level, in the public domain This week – continue to look at sexual politics but at micro level and interpersonal relationships. “The personal is political”?

Lecture outline  Foucault and his concept of power (Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1977; “Two Lectures” in Colin Gordon Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings , 1980; The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, 1990);  Feminism, Foucault and heterosexuality  Relationship between sex and gender – challenging discourses of heterosexuality

Foucault and power  power is a constantly negotiated and changing set of relations which is part of all our social interactions and which makes us what we are rather than making us do what we do or making us do what we don’t want to do.  So power not a means of coercion and not concentrated in the social, economic and political structures of the state and civil society in which we as social agents operate  power is everywhere, embodied in discourse, knowledge and “regimes of truth”

Foucault and power  Power flows through the “capillaries” of the social body (our society) – idea that power doesn’t only flow in one direction - top downwards but also in reverse and into every cell of the social body.  Highly critical of previous analyses of power, especially Marxist and Freudian analyses which see power as repressive  Conceded that power at times functions repressively but generally it is productive: “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977: 194)  Power also produces subjects, individuals: “The individual is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its [the individual’s] prime effects” (1980: 98).

Foucault and feminists  Foucault’s account of subjection and power is attractive but also controversial to feminists interested in examining gendered relations of power and domination.  Over past 30 years, many feminists have been inspired by Foucault‘s analysis, particularly idea that power is all-pervasive is attractive to second-wave feminists who have long argued that the private and public divide is an artificial construct and that “the personal is political”.  As the corpus of feminist work using/critiquing Foucault’s theories is extensive, we can only highlight examples.

Critiques  Anne Phillips - by redefining power in such a diffuse way, the significance of traditional arenas in which it is institutionalised and exercised: the state, government, political parties – are in danger of disappearing from view  Nancy Fraser – what happens to resistance to power? And what forms of power are acceptable/unacceptable?  Nancy Hartsock - Foucault’s analysis of power doesn’t analyse power from the point of view of the subordinated and fails to adequately theorise structural relations of inequality and domination which underpin women’s subordination.

Positives of Foucault  Conceptualisation of power allows an understanding of - The way power is involved in intimate and personal relationships as well as in public sphere - Something second wave feminism drew attention to - Hence attraction of Foucault for feminists

Discourses of sexuality  One of the things that Foucault drew attention to, was the ways in which:  discourses of sexuality were a means of control; and that these discourses trap material bodies in relations of power.  So in his The History of Sexuality, he argues that power, knowledge and pleasure are inextricably linked and the way they are linked is through discourses of sexuality which are rooted in our social and political institutions.  These discourses shape the ways in which we experience and understand sexuality and they are generated through power but also exert power over individuals.

Discursive field  Idea of a ‘discursive field’ - a field of discourse and practice, a field of power and a field of relationships within which social actors are differentially positioned.  This idea allows us to understand that one’s position within the discursive field offers unequal opportunities for the exercise of power within it, yet it draws attention to the power that is or may be exercised by the dominated as well as by the dominant.

Feminists who use Foucault Sandra Bartkey – disciplinary power, the “docile body”:  dieting practices  limitations on gestures and mobility  bodily decoration Susan Bordo - Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power has been central to her work and helped her analyse:  disciplines of diet and exercise  Attain understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power and control”

Discourses of heterosexuality Wendy Holloway – 3 discourses of heterosexuality:  Male-sex-drive discourse  The have and to hold discourse  The permissive discourse

Challenging heterosexual discourses De-linking sex and gender Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990) Inspired partly by Foucault – Butler advocates smashing the supposed links between sex and gender, so that gender and desire become flexible, free-floating and not “caused” by other stable factors. Suggests that certain cultural configurations of gender have a hegemonic hold, and calls for subversive action - mobilization, subversive confusion, and proliferation of genders, and therefore identities.

Challenging heterosexual discourses Idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to a biological “essence”, but instead to a performance, is one of the key ideas in Butler’s writing. Our identities, gendered and otherwise, don’t express some authentic inner 'core' self but are the effect (rather than the cause) of our performances, that is to say a wide range of behaviours, from the way we talk, walk, perform certain rituals etc., acts that we all keep on performing through the course of our lives, and this performance in what constitutes the meaning of masculine of feminine identities.

Challenging heterosexual discourses Gender, then, as the identification with one sex is a fantasy, a set of internalized images, and not a set of properties governed by the body. Rather, gender is a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity. Gender, Judith Butler concludes, is therefore not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects. Butler is critiqued by many feminists - see Toril Moi But suggests a way of breaking out of power discourses of heterosexuality

Conclusions  Discussed Foucault’s ideas of power, discourse and how they can be used to understand the micro-politics of power - sexuality  How feminists have used Foucault  To explore the way women’s bodies are constructed as ‘other’ in western thought  How sexuality is a discourse of power

Conclusions  Looked at problems of taking gender to mean individual characteristics rather than a system of social relations based on bodily, sexual difference  How easy it is then to reduce gender to sex