Bordo_fem_Foucault

“Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body” by Susan Bordo

I. Introduction

A. Something to learn from the history

B. Original feminist construction of the politics of the body

C. Normalization dominant order at present time

II. Feminism and the Politics of the Body

A. Foucault’s critique of the scientisation of sexuality:

l notion of a power: works not through negative prohibition and restraint of impulse but proliferatively, at the level of the production of ‘bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations and pleasure’

B. Andrea Dworkin:

1. “Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body.”

2. “They prescribe her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body.”

3. “They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom.”

4. “[T]he relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.”

5. “From head to toes, every feature of a woman’s face every section of her body, is subject to modification, alteration.　 This alteration is an ongoing, repetitive process.”

C. Bordo’s constraint:

1. Bordo feels constrained for her expectation ‘theory’ “only from men.”

2. Bordo admits her inability to “transcend” the dualisms; she is incapable to recognize an “embodied theory” that appears.

D. Feminist’s concerns:

1. “[I]t is hardly the case that these early feminist works were not theoretical, but rather that their theory never drew attention to itself, never made an appearance except as it shaped the ‘matter’ of their argument.”

2. “[T]heory was rarely astracted, objectified and elaborated as of interest in itself.”

3. “Works that perform such abstraction and elaboration get taken much more seriously than works which do not.”

4. “[T]he next generation of feminist writers the body often were drawn to Foucault precisely because his theoretical apparatus highlighted the inadequacies of the prevailing feminist discourse and was useful in reconstructing it.”

E. Limit and Developement

1. “[�] neither Foucault nor any other poststructuralist thinker discovered or invented the ‘seminal’ idea that the ‘definition and shaping’ of the body is ‘the focal point for struggles over the shape of power’.”

2. “A more activist generation urged escape from the gilt prison, arguing that the most mundane, ‘trivial’ aspects of women’s bodily existence were in fact significant elements in the social construction of an oppressive feminine norm.”

a. Theme: ‘consciousness-raising’ exercises form men, of how female subjectivity is normalized and subordinated by the everyday bodily requirements and vulnerabilities of ‘femininity’

b. E.g. In the seventies, the media, sensationalizing the event of “No more Miss America” protest, and also was influenced by “the paradigm of draft-card burning as the act of political resistance par excellence” had misreported or invented the burning of the bras.

c. Effect:

i “the uneasy public with whom the image stuck surely had it right in recognizing the deep political meaning of women’s refusal to ‘discipline’ our breasts [�].”

ii In the nineties, “the most depressing aspect of the disclosures was the cultural spectacle: the large numbers of women who are having implants purely to enlarge or re-shape their breast, and who consider any health risk worth the resulting boon to their ‘self-esteem’ and market value.”

F. Metaphor of body politics

1. “In the old metaphor of the body politic, the state or society was imagined as a human body, with different organs and parts symbolizing different functions, needs, social constituents, forces and so forth.”

2. And now, “feminism imagined the human body s itself a politically inscribed entity, its physiology and morphology shaped and marked by histories and practices of containment and control – “ from the phenomena of bodily constraint to bodily commodification.

III. Foucault’s Re-conceptualisation of the Politics of the Body: Normalisation and Resistance

A. Old feminist model: to subsume all patriarchal institutions and practices under an oppressor/ oppressed model.

B. Foucault’s eye of power: Foucault’s re-conceptualisation of modern ‘power’ –

1. it is non-authoritarian, non-conspiratorial and non-orchestrated;

2. it produces and normalizes bodies to serve prevailing relations of dominance and subordination;

3. the key ‘moment’s of this conception are found in ‘They eye of power.’

4. the concept of gaze

C. ‘impersonal’ conception of power

1. “power is not held by anyone does not entail that it is equally held by all;”

2. “It is ‘held’ by no one; but people and groups are positioned differently within it.”

3. “No one may control the rules of the game.”

4. Practices that frame the female body – practices such as eating habits and diet “train the female body in docility and obedientce to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of ‘power’ and ‘control’.

5. “the heady experience of feeling powerful, or ‘incontrol’, far from being a necessarily accurate reflection of one’s actual social position, is always suspect as itself the product of power relations.”

D. “Where there is power, there is resistance”

IV. Conclusion

A. Old feminist discourse

B. The first wave and ater move

C. Judith Butler

D. ‘two’ Foucaults for feminism

Work Cited:

Bordo, Susan.　 “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body.”　 Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader.　 Eds.　 Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick.　 New York: Routledge, 1999.　 246-57.