The possibilities of Foucauldian heritage

27th April 2016 Marta Maria Nicolazzi The possibilities of Foucauldian heritage “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality.” Michel Foucault (1998, 157) In contemporary Western society sex is still perceived as something ‘repressed’, as a ‘secret’ or ‘taboo’ and consequently sexuality is likely to be conceived as something that constitutes our bodies and that we need to liberate (Bailey, 1993, 109; Richardson, Smith & Werndly, 2013, 21). In addition, since “power operates not only through the surveillance and categorization of sexualities, but also through a valorisation of the act of sex as a key component to identity formation”, sex is often considered as a natural and liberating action separated from the politics of power (Foster, 2011, 2). When talking about sexual relationships instead, the focus is mainly placed on power positions held by the parties involved in the relation identifying “sexuality in terms of the person with whom someone has sex” with (Richardson, Smith & Werndly, 2013, 31). However, already in 1976 -date of the first publication of “The History of Sexuality: 1”- Michel Foucault dismantled the repressive hypothesis about sex (1998, 129-131) and shifted the power discourse to a wider scale which transcends politics since he conceptualised power as an everyday socialised and embodied phenomenon with proactive connotations. In light of the problematic relationship between Feminism and Foucault (Bailey, 1993, 99-101; Bell, 1993, 22-3, 47, 184; Sawicki, 1996, 161), starting from the incipit quote, this essay aims to account for Foucault’s call for analytic power and his genealogy of sexuality and to underline the range of contributions that his theory establishes with contemporary feminist theories. The paper will be divided in two parts. The first one will outline Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality and so the process that brought him to disagree with the repressive hypothesis referencing to his book (1998) and to several authors that analysed his theory (Bailey, 1993; Bell, 1993; Butler, 1996; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984; Foster, 2011; Richardson, Smith & Werndly, 2013; Sawicki, 1996). In the second section 1 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 Foucault’s move from a negative perception of power to a positive discourse will be discussed by pointing out the concept of docile bodies as opposed to the one of resistance and by reflecting on the possibility of agency and freedom. From here, Foucault’s precious heritage to contemporary feminist thinkers will be explored mainly in reference to Jana Sawacki (1988, 1996), M. E. Bailey (1993), Vikki Bell (1993) Margaret McLaren (2004) and Judith Butler (2007) but taking also into account some trending feminist critiques. Along the course of the general deployment of sexuality The first doubts about the conception of sexual repression were stimulated by the wide proliferation of discourses around sex and sexuality in medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, criminal justice and social work fields during the eighteen and nineteen century (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 168). While non-Western societies -as perhaps China, Japan and India- treated sex as an artistic practice of pleasure (ars erotica) in which the truth about the subject was drawn from the pleasure in itself; in Western societies from the 18th century on, sex became an object of knowledge and investigation (scentia sexualis) through procedures of confessions and scientific discourses (Foucault, 1998, 57-59, 68). In other words, by bonding confessional practices to scientific methods and psychoanalytic techniques, sex began to be considered just from the authoritatively and neutral viewpoint of science and it became the key confessional subject from the Christian church to the psychiatrist’s couch. Thus, by examining the largely held belief that in the Victorian era, sexual experiences and activities were subjected to repressive practices, Foucault instead concluded that at the time sexuality, wrapped in a halo of secrecy, was highly subjected to verbosity (Foucault, 1998, 8, 77). Incited by practices of confession, the idea of sex as a mysterious secret was therefore exploited in order to cause a necessity of “speaking of it ad infinitum” (Foucault, 1998, 35). Underpinned by the desire of creating a paradigmatic and normative knowledge of sex, this necessity of speaking participated actively in the production of truth about sex and bodies by developing and shaping the discourse around sex and identities (Butler, 1996, 59-60; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 171, 174-5). This underlines a lack of uniform concern to shroud sex and effectively sex was not made into a shadowy and censored concept. Thinking that this attitude is just a matter of simple prudishness would be strongly reductive since during the last 2 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 four centuries we can witness the persistent invention of numerous technologies for having to speak about sex and for listening, recording, deciphering, transcribing and re-conveying what is said in regards to it (Bell, 1993, 16, 97; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 142) –e.g. pornography, the Edipo complex, the penis envy, the hysterization of women, the pedagogization of children’s sex, Western countries appropriation of Kamasutra and tantric sex and so on. So how a society can be sexually repressed when there is such a permeating and impelling incitement on discourses around sex? In stating what is proper and what is not, discourses around sex were strictly tied to the concept of procreation, which was located inside marriage (Foucault, 1998, 37). The latter became the primary site of sexual practices and heterosexuality the tacit standard of sexual behavioural normality (Bell, 1993, 19, 95; Butler, 1996, 60). Since sex was considered as the root of all psychological diseases and illnesses, all other behaviours that didn’t conform were treated as immoral, aberrant, morbid and pathological perversions or oddities (Bell, 1993, 18; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 170, 172-173). In so doing, sexuality assumed a key role in creating subjects, in constitutes individuals’ identities. Locked into houses, confined to marriage and reproductive purposes sex was deemed acceptable as in this way the emerging nation-states were able to control their citizen’s reproduction and consequently their demography. In fact, during the Industrial Revolution, States began to be concerned about the health of the nation, their demographic patterns and population managements, investigating birth rates, legitimate and illegitimate births, age of marriage, frequency of sexual relations, hygiene, fertility and sexual diseases transmission (Bailey, 1993, 110; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 133, 140, 170; Richardson, Smith & Werndly, 2013, 25-27). Michel Foucault traced in Western societies an historical shift from a sovereign power –coercing subjects by exerting the right to kill or by refraining from killing- to an institutionalized regulation of life focused in part on the control of sexuality. Better saying, a shift from “the right to take life or let live” (Foucault, 1998, 178) to a power to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, 1998, 138). This power operates as regulatory of the bio-politics of the population and as disciplinary of the anatomopolitics of bodies in order to optimise their capabilities (Foucault, 1998, 140). Named as bio-power and operating through the promotion of norms about bodily behaviour more than through laws and rules, it became a major source of social discipline, regulation and conformity subjugating physical bodies and 3 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 making them behave in expected ways (Foucault, 1998, 144). This political practice places interest in sex as a site of surveillance, administration, classification, hierarchization, segregation and management that can be acknowledged in administrative systems, social services and institutions -including the family, the army, the police, schools and medicine (Butler, 1996, 60; Foster, 2011, 1). Since sex in modern societies is an essential tool “of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species” (Foucault, 1998, 146), as highlighted in the incipit quote, accepting the repressive hypothesis and trying to free oneself by honestly expressing an individual true sexuality is not an act of resistance against bio-power. The latter is instead endorsed, promoted and produced by those attitudes; because speaking about sex as something repressed entails talking about it further, engaging with its scientific studies and so providing more data that fosters “scientia sexualis” and bio-power (Foucault, 1998, 34-35, 60). This means that events such as the Sexual Revolution that took place in 1960s and other contemporary fights for LGBT rights are “nothing more, but nothing less […] than a tactical shift and reversal in the great deployment of sexuality. But it is also apparent why one could not expect these critiques to be the grid for a history of that very deployment. Nor the basis for a movement to dismantle it” (Foucault, 1998, 131). At this point one might wonder why the repressive hypothesis came to be such a widely shared and well-accepted opinion. Thus, thinking of power as a synonym of repression inevitably hides and masks everything else that is happening within power relations, making bio-power more tolerable (Foucault, 1998, 81-86). In other words, “individuals in the contemporary social order define themselves and are defined through their relation to sex and sexuality, so while sex might feel ‘taboo’ and thus appear to subvert social control, it in fact operates within a hegemonic system of meaning and thus reinforces power structures” (Foster, 2011, 1). Therefore, despite we might feel powerful and rebellious when speaking about sexual liberation against repression (Foucault, 1998, 6-7), we have to consider this feeling as illusory because whatever step will be taken in that way will just reproduce pre-existent normative mechanisms of power. For example, the action of ‘coming out’ should not be interpreted as a rebellious political statement but rather as a confession of a socially constructed identity, which strengthens that identity. Another blatant example of a practice that is not revolutionary, nor liberatory or challenging can be the new Facebook 4 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 campaign ‘Free The Nipple’. Since online pictures of naked male chest are accepted while female chest are likely to be censured or deleted by the Network, all the women who took part in this campaign had to post their nipples as their profile images. In this instance, as “the repressive hypothesis became the cornerstone for the advance of bio-power” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 141) the position of the subject appears to be powerless and any prospect of change impossible (Sawicki, 1996, 161). When you say yes to sex you never say no to power. Towards the possibilities Until now, the idea of docile bodies -corps subjected to several disciplining technologies that passively accept them (Foucault, 1991, 135-69) has shone through the paper. However, following Foucault “power is everywhere” (1998, 63) and “where there is power there is resistance” (1998, 95). Power begets resistance and without it or the potential for it, we cannot speak of power. This opens to a prospect of agency, which is possible only if power starts being conceptualised in another way. In fact, “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. […] Power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault, 1991, 194). Power for Foucault is what makes us as we are; it is dispersed; it is pervasive; it "comes form everywhere" and so is neither generated from a fixed agency nor from a monolithic structure (1998, 63, 84-84, 92-93). Power has these proactive connotations because of its inter-relation with knowledge: power can both produce and constrain truths while knowledge is both creator and creation of power (Foucault, 1972, 34-36). This power/knowledge intersection manifests itself in what Foucault named as discourses (Foucault, 1972, 31-32). Since discourses generate their own categories of truths, power and truth cannot be considered external to each other (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 130). However, “the repressive hypothesis is anchored in a tradition which sees power only as constraint, negativity, and coercion” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 128) and which sees truth as “intrinsically opposed to power” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 127). This is why truth appears to be the path to freedom while instead it represents a false resistance that ends in the reproduction of hierarchical and controlling mechanisms and so in reifying existing power structures. As power is everywhere and operates within almost every aspect of life, there is no empty void in which we 5 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 can escape from power and so it is impossible to talk about liberation or total emancipation from it (Bell, 1993, 55; Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 186-187; Sawicki, 1996, 169). But, Foucault contrasts the false resistance offered by sex with other tactics that appeal to the individuality of human existence and the multiplicity of pleasures or that contrast and threaten bio-power’s supremacy by attacking its most important target, which is life -e.g. suicide, the ‘rhetoric of rights’, ‘bodies and pleasures’ (Foster, 2011, 6). These approaches show that power cannot be naively rejected but there are some possibilities of resistance and some others of subverting it (Bailey, 1993, 114; Foster, 2011, 5; Sawicki, 1996, 169). By interpreting power as a regime of truth, Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by a specific entity though domination or coercion. This sort of 'meta-power' that pervades society is in constant flux and negotiation interpellating individuals as both subjects and objects thought horizontal and vertical dynamics (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1984, 120; Henderson, 2013, 238; McLaren, 2004, 217). By breaking with the classical binary view of ‘dominant/dominated’ and emphasising the body as a site of power, we can consider human bodies as relatively autonomous subjects in an inescapably and dense power web (Bell, 1993, 55; McLaren, 2004, 230; Sawicki, 1996, 170). Thus, Foucault’s understanding of docile bodies does not push women back into a position of passivity and silence or underestimated freedoms that women gained in modern society as many feminist thinkers stated (Fraser, 1989; Hartsock, 1990; McNay, 1992). It rather advises us of the normalizing impact of certain forms of systematic knowledge without preventing us from gaining some in other forms (Mc Laren, 2004, 220; Sawicki, 1996, 169), it gives us agency of resistance and it pushes us to reconsider the values of emancipatory practices and theories rooted in Western patriarchal traditions (Bell, 1993, 55; McLaren, 2004, 228; Sawicki, 1996, 177). So, it results to be entirely compatible with the feminist understanding of ‘the personal as political’ (Bailey, 1993, 115; McLaren, 2004, PG) and particularly useful when framing contemporary burning topics such as rape (Henderson, 2013), HIV (Butler, 1996) and in-vitro fecundation. It therefore results to be vital analysing micro-politics of gender together with experiences of patriarchal institutions –such as marriage, motherhood etc.- and how do they come to create a feminine normative identity (Bell, 1993, 37, 38; Sawicki, 1996, 160, 164). Inspite of sexuality becoming the quintessence of identity, from Foucault’s genealogy sexuality 6 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 emerges as an historical formation that has no reality outside the discourse (Foucault, 1998, 157) and that sex, historically subordinated to the strategies of sexuality, is a product of the deployment of sexuality (Foucault, 1998, 152-153). Therefore, sex and sexuality result to be productions of cultural discourses that cannot be explained by normative biological suppositions (Foucault, 1998, 68, 105). Sex cannot be considered as natural aspects of oneself outside of power relations and sexual identity cannot reveal any deep, hidden, personal truths about oneself since it is the result of a social process. Many feminists found this constructivist approach historically deterministic and accused Foucault of failing in accounting subjectivity and the possibility of transforming agency (Fraser, 1989; Hartsock, 1990; McNay, 1992). However, construction is not opposed to agency but is rather its necessary scene of agency as an identity is made through the performance of pre-existing normative scripts (Butler, 2007, 147). Moreover, by linking social norms to the constitution of oneself Foucault automatically connected ethics to politics allowing a new conception of identity politics and opening different spaces for questioning it (McLaren, 2004, 223). Thus, this way of understanding ourselves as constructed entities not only challenges feminist essentialist orthodoxies (Sawicki, 1996, 159-160) but also underlines “the limits and dangers of identity-based politics” (Bailey, 1993, 111) and opens to the possibility of doing feminist politics without a feminist subject (Butler, 2007, 142). These possibilities are the main factors why the relationship between Foucault and Feminism is sometimes considered problematic and tense. However, refusing to accept that sex and sexuality are both socially, culturally and historically constructed terms automatically means positioning the body in a fixed biological and pre-discursive essence and so accepting the normative binary view of sex which, entailing just the two naturalised categories of males and females, always poses them in antagonism (Butler, 2007, 18-19; Sawicki, 1988, 179). In this frame, not only the bodies that do not fit into the norm are left out but also sexual differences are invoked as an issue of material differences. Likewise, feminist practices tend to fail in misandry, in bolstering the largely held belief that feminism is ‘against men’ or in fostering the feminine stereotype. Example of this practice can be Emma Watson’s project ‘He for She’: a feminist campaign for women rights and safety which, as can be noticed also from the title, calls men in help of the poor vulnerable women and so conforms to the dominant paradigm (Sawicki, 1988, 180-181). In other 7 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 words, by disrupting the trans-historical and stable categories of sex/sexuality and making out of sexuality the place of discourse in which power is articulated from the individual –body- up to the Norm, Foucault’s work completely changes “the terms of debate about politics based on identity, sex and bodies” (Bailey, 1993, 101). Furthermore, with Foucault analytic power patriarchy cannot be conceptualised anymore as a monolithic and oppressive power institution (Bailey, 1996, 119; Bell, 1993, 40) and there are no innocent classes of the purely oppressed (Bailey, 1996, 111; Bell, 1993, 42). Implementing these factors in rethinking feminist action and approaches might help in destroying certain boundaries and myths instead of simply shifting them a little bit further or changing their nature as it has been done so far (Bell, 1993, 177). To better explain this concept, it will be used as example Holly Henderson’s paper on rape (2013). In “Feminism, Foucault and Rape” (2013) the author, following Foucault, argues for a desexualisation of rape as a theory and politics of rape prevention. The reason why rape is perceived as a trauma and it is different from being otherwise violated is rooted in the fact that sex and sexuality are foundational constitutive parts of oneself (Henderson, 2013, 250). Desexualising rape would implicate a reconceptualization of the victim that would foster her ability to react and resist (Henderson, 2013, 251). Sexuality is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power" (Foucault, 1998, 103) and resistance is located “right at the point where relations of power are exercised” (Foucault, 1980, 142). With the “History of Sexuality: 1” (1988) Foucault is not aiming to give us any universal, abstract and general solution or emancipatory theory but rather the tools necessary to free us “from uncritical adherence to particular disciplines and identities, […] particular ‘technologies of the self’” in order to create a space for resistance (Sawicki, 1996, 165-166, 176). Conclusions Many feminists –such as Lois McNay (1992), Nancy Fraser (1989), Nancy Hartsock (1990) et al.have stated that Foucault’s conception of analytic power as is androcentric and rather pessimistic, it fails in giving epistemological grounds to feminist analysis, in making sense of gender dominance or in accounting women experience, individuality and asymmetry of power. But “Foucault is not making universal claims about what power is or the way in that power function” (McLaren, 2004, 218). He is not providing a 8 Marta Maria Nicolazzi 27th April 2016 theory of power rather an analysis of it (McLaren, 2004, 218; Sawicki, 1996, 160). Despite for Foucault gender is just one tool of regulation among many, his analytics of power is calling for counterattacking the Norm in order to stop being sex-desire but ‘bodies and pleasure’ in a system without classifying identities, labelling, limitations and hierarchization of sex and sexuality (Foucault, 1998, 159), which should be the aim of any feminist thinker. Obviously, it needs to be taken into account that there are different orientations inside the feminist movement, different feminisms, especially now that we are in the so-called highly problematic ‘Postfeminist era’. However, all these different kinds of feminism share large concerns towards sexuality, its origin, its content, its political meaning and the multiplicity of forces involved in shaping it. By placing sexuality in a peculiar dichotomous position of both target of oppression and of arena for political struggle with liberatory potential (Sawicki, 1988, 188-190), Foucault’s “History of Sexuality: 1” (1998) results to be a very important contribution to the entire feminist world. Moreover, in giving to power dynamic and proactive connotations and in co-implicating power and resistance, Foucault enlarged the possibilities of agency: since power is everywhere, resistance must be everywhere (McLaren, 2004, 217, Sawicki, 1988, 184-185). For this reason, since feminism of any sort “is a movement of resistance par excellence” (Bell, 1993, 56) Foucault’s thought should be taken as a precious starting point in reasoning and discussing about possibilities of domination, freedom and emancipation. “It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.” (Foucault, 1998, 157) 9 27th April 2016 Marta Maria Nicolazzi Bibliography BAILEY, M. E. (1993) Foucauldian feminism: Contesting bodies, sexuality and identity. In: Ramazanoglu, C. (eds.) Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. London: Routledge. BELL, V. 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