Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body

Thinking Gender

by Jana Sawicki

In Disciplining Foucault, Jana Sawicki argues that a Foucauldian feminism is possible. She rejects the view that the power of phallocentric discourse is total.

Genres: Feminism, Academic, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Gender and Sexuality, Bodies

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is possibly useful for me albeit I am more Deleuzian than Foucauldian (or aiming to be). Some parts of the argument are a bit dated to the time they are written but the parts that seemed still useful was the reading Foucault in a "both and" sense, problematising but not throwing out babies with bathwater.

There's also a fair bit on Foucault deconstructing Foucault and not wanting to be the next authority which makes me like him more than I had. It's a useful book for understanding Foucault (within a feminist agenda). A lot of the writing was very clear and dense with ideas so for a short book it packed a fair bit of punch.

[Ife · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

I never met Foucault, but I have watched many people discipline him. Achille Mbembe has spanked him for his focus on life, Alexander G. Weheliye has spanked him for his lack lustre discussions of race, Camille Paglia has spanked him for being a plagiarist and a bad historian, many have spanked him for the “pro-paedophilia” bill he signed, or for being a cynic, or for being a snide intellectual. Of course, all theorists get spanked; few have gotten as spanked as Foucault – and yet few are as institutionally entrenched as Foucault – who, alongside the other French people, are primarily responsible for the move in leftist academia to analysing discourse over material conditions. So, there is a sort of academic ambivalence about Foucault, one which I suspect is at least partially nurtured by the bad optics of the centrality of a cis, white, upper-middle class man in fields which have long claimed to destabilize the frameworks produced by this class. Marx has the same academic ambivalence about him; it is difficult to think of any Black scholars who have this same mercurial reception. The Academic Left’s identity crisis is brought to bear in engagements with Michel Foucault.

I have watched Foucault get his lashings with fevered interest. Not again, I thought, as I came across the book “Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body” by Jana Sawicki. The title staked out her positionality in the firing squad – taking Foucault to task for his inability to properly account for gender. I rarely read the thesis of the theory books I pick up, much preferring to go about my theory like my fiction – a provocative title, a nice cover, my assumption of the journey it will take me on. If I had read the thesis, then I would have discovered that the book is actually a feminist apology for Foucault, written at an interesting time when Foucault was beginning to become adopted, or as Sawicki puts it “appropriated,” by feminist scholars, and all the disputes that arose around this.

The first section of the book, 'Personal Reflections,' starts off with a genealogy of Sawicki’s interest in Foucault at a time when Foucault had not yet been accepted as a philosopher. Studying philosophy, she was advised to write her dissertation on Sartre instead: “[My advisor] pointed out that Sartre addressed more traditional philosophical problems. And after all, he seemed to imply, de Beauvoir was a feminist.” For Sawicki, at the point that the book was written, Foucault had become almost fully integrated into the academy and poststructuralism was already starting to show a problematic tendency of becoming the normalizing narrative it was seeking to critique. However, ‘Foucauldian feminism’ was still seen as an oxymoron by most feminists. Yet the essays that comprise the body of the book were written during separate times, so all of them have different political backdrops – an issue I took with the book because it would be much stronger if she had rewritten the essays to accommodate for the theoretical gaps she acknowledges in her introduction of the essays:

“[Talking about the first essay] In retrospect, I think I overlooked the gaps in Foucault’s critical philosophy – his inattention to the macro-structures of power and his lack of normative clarity – because I found his critique of past efforts to establish total theories, and to provide absolute foundations for them, to be compelling.”

[Talking about the second essay] Foucault’s reluctance to make political recommendations had always bothered me despite the fact that I understood some of his reasons for it. Thus, I endorsed efforts to build political movements that are sensitive to the dangers of authoritarianism, ethnocentrism and political vanguardism.” – this critique does not fully make it into the essay.

In the introduction, Sawicki also summarizes her apologies for Foucault, which she builds out in the following chapters. To rehearse her broad ideas here: she believes that Foucault can help feminism acknowledge differences among women, embrace contradictions, reject patriarchy as a grand narrative for all oppression. In doing so, she rejects the idea that Foucault disciplines women/third-world scholarship by not allowing them to set up a singular analytical subject, questioning whether this is necessary to the project of feminism.

Her first essay, for example, ‘Towards a Politics of Difference’ which seeks to highlight the Foucauldian intervention for a feminism that can recognize differences in women, seems a bit slack on its acknowledgement of Foucault’s dearth of scholarship on resistance. She does not fully engage with Black feminist scholarship on the matter except for Audre Lorde who is, I believe the only woman of colour thinker she brings into the conversation throughout the book, despite persistently mentioning scholarship by women of colour as something imagined to revolutionary, de facto, and be completely outside white feminism – when much of it could be accused of the normativizing tendencies that Foucault would have critiqued.

The star essays for me were essays two 'Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom' and three 'Feminism and the Power of Foucauldian Discourse' which bring Foucault to bear on the sex wars and mothering theory discourses respectively. The latter is especially useful in making Sawicki’s case for the way Foucault is often put in contradistinction with feminist/”third-world” thought. However I think most people would now agree that Balbus’ “mothering theory” – or the idea that patriarchy can be solved by coparenting – is laughably totalizing. I also can’t imagine a point in history where it was the dominant feminist point of view. So this essay is extremely niche and has been rendered virtually pointless by the progression of feminist thought. I found the similarities she highlights in sex radical and sex libertarian feminists, using a Foucauldian lens, quite interesting as well.

The last essay is also pretty useful in clarifying Foucault’s analytical project from misconceptions of the role of the genealogist. It was also useful as a summary:

As one commentator has aptly characterized it, “freedom” in Foucault’s politics consisted of “a constant attempt at self-disengagement and self-invention.” We are free in being able to question and reevaluate our inherited identities and values, and to challenge received interpretations of them. As feminists, I believe that we have good reason to appeal to Foucault’s negative freedom, that is, the freedom to disengage from our political identities, our presumptions about gender differences, and the categories and practices that define feminism. We must cultivate this freedom because feminism has developed in the context of oppression. Women are produced by patriarchal power at the same time that they resist it. There are good reasons to be ambivalent about the liberatory possibilities of appealing to “reason,” “motherhood,” or the “feminine” when they have also been the source of our oppression. Even the recent history of feminism in the late twentieth century suggests that feminism has often been blind to the dominating tendencies of its own theories and to the broader social forces that undermine and redirect its agendas. Consequently, as I have argued elsewhere, genealogy is indispensable to feminism.

A lot of the essays can get repetitive because they were not written as a cohesive volume and a lot of the interventions are no longer relevant which is something I felt could have been avoided had they been rewritten to account for the theoretical gaps that Sawicki names in the very introductions to the essays, but overall it is a very readable engagement with Foucault that I think it is helpful for anybody striving to understand him more and trying to be more critical about bringing him to bear on feminist politics.

[Victor Ortega Le Hénanff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative. This book is a compilation of previous papers and some original material. As such, it suffers from bumpy continuity and coherence, that is, in the threads between chapters. That is fine, but it is quite sad that there are no revisions in older material, and I would have liked to read a volume of original Sawicki, using as founding blocks her previous work. As it stands, it is a reprint of previous work with a couple new chapters. Not ideal.

I am a man. Sawicki explains that Foucault intended for oppressed groups to speak for themselves. I happen to agree. This means I will only offer comment on the form of the argument, leaving the feminist theory to those who are targeted by patriarchal systems of oppression, intersections included. This doesn't exempt me of critique.

I find myself to be a bit disappointed by the repetitiveness of the argument. It is hardly obscure and feels very accesible, even for non academics. I applaud Sawicki for daring to philosophise postmodern in an American landscape where, as is explained and as we can imagine, it is very much not welcome. Or at least, not discreet. We are constantly explained that the Foucauldian analysis proposes no alternatives. This framework helps us deconstruct the relations of power and be skeptical of anything. But, it is also then hard to say anything. Where is the payoff? Some of the paragraphs here feel like running and running around in circles.

I particularly enjoyed the section on doctors and medical practices. Powerful critiques on radical feminism and mothering theory are also close to devastating. This was good. It makes me yearn for a world where the antithesis of intellectual discourse hasn't appropriated popular media.

[Kyaw Zayar Lwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

ဆေးပညာဟာ ဖိုကြီးစိုးမှုနဲ့ တွဲလျက်ဖြစိပေါ်နေတာကြောင့် မီးဖွားခြင်းဖြစ်စဉ်ကိုတောင် ဆေးပညာရပ်ဝန်းထဲကောက်ထည့်လိုက်ကြတယ်။အဲဒီတော့ သဘာဝအတိုင်းမီးဖွားမှုကို အလေးပြန်ပေးရမယ်လို့ဆိုတဲ့ မဝါဒီတွေကို ဖူကိုးအမြင်နဲ့ ပြန်လည်ချဉ်းကပ်ထားတာ။ပါဝါရှိရင် အခုအခံကလည်း ရှိမှာပဲ။ဖိနှိပ်မှုတခုတည်းကနေပဲ ရှုမြင်လို့မရဘူးလို့ဆိုထားတာ။
ပြောရမယ်ဆို သူ့ခေတ်ကာလအတွင်းက မဝါဒီတွေရဲ့ အမြင်ကို ဖူကိုးအမြင်နဲ့ ပြန်လည်ချဉ်းကပ်ပြထားတာ။
နည်းနည်းဒိတ်အောက်နေပီလို့ ဆိုရင် ဆိုနိုင်တယ်။

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading feminism scholarship critically and professing the possibility of foucauldian feminism to investigate the power within and the power without.

[Margaret Robbins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was super interesting, and I enjoyed it. She made Foucault's theory and feminist theory very accessible. Very worthwhile!