Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault

Abstract

In a lecture given onJanuary 6, 1976 and later published in a collection of interviews entitled Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault discusses his own work in terms of the discovery over the past fifteen years ofa certain fragility in the bedrock of existence even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid, and most intimately related to our bodies and our everyday behavior.' And he relates this vulnerability to criticism of aspects of knowledge and power that have long been obscured to a recognition of the inhibiting effects ofglobal, totalitarian theories.' His polemics against systematizing, universalizing theories and their will to truth are clearly directed in part at scientific Marxism and its economism as well as to the laws of psychoanalysis; and his History of Sexuality challenges various 20thcentury sexual liberationists' attempts to combine those two theories.s Certainly, both his polemics and his methodological breaks with traditional social theory make him interesting for feminists, whose political and theoretical projects converge at important points with the provocations of Foucault. Feminist theory and political strategies have effected a profound shift in conceptions of politics and in assumptions about the location and exercise of power. Having identified the ideological construction of the sexed subject as a crucial place to situate the question of sexual difference and the struggle against women's oppression, radical and lesbian feminists in particular have consistently refused to privilege the economic over the ideological conditions of oppression and change; they have legitimized the struggle over the production, distribution and transformation of meaning as a focus for political intervention and opposition. Of course, American radical and lesbian feminist literature and political strategies have been and continue to be criticized with varying degrees of legitimacy by Marxists and Marxist-feminists