Foucault's Body Tropes

Abstract

bodily spaces inscribed by power has passed into popular critical jargon. Feminists in particular?who, as group, have been ambivalent about Foucault's theory?frequently speak of the body as space where various discourses conflict. Teresa de Lauretis is particularly explicit in describing a shift... in the feminist understanding of female subjectivity: shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is of differences; differ ences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub) cultural, but all of these together, and often enough at odds with one another.1 The reason that critics have been attracted to this language of the body as site of differences seems quite straightforward. Describing the body as articulates its involvement with discourse while, apparently, denying that any one discourse can define and map it fully. This understanding of the body represents, however, at best an incom plete picture of Foucault's theory. While critics find the language of the body as in the writings of the middle part of his career, especially Discipline and Punish, the optimistic spirit of this body site's open endedness reflects the tone of the later volumes of his History of Sexuality, which describe how individuals participate in discursive structures to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.2 Foucault's language of the body then has passed into critical jargon in an indirect and possibly incoher ent way. The widespread popularity of Foucault's description of the body as of power, even among those critics who question the value of Foucault's theory in general, suggests that it performs function within critical analysis that is somewhat independent of Foucault's theory. Describing the body as allows critics like de Lauretis to achieve certain critical and analytical goals; it provides trope, I will argue, through which critics can make particular arguments and claims. Chris