by Wendy McElroy
"Feminist scholars,
many drawing on the insights offered by Michel Foucault, have urged us to
develop new ways of thinking and speaking." So write the editors of the
book Analyzing Gender.1 In their scholarly work Knowing
Women: Feminism and Knowledge, two different feminist editors explain why
the French philosopher Michel Foucault is quoted extensively therein:
"Foucault's discourse theory and the 'post-structuralist' methods of
analysis which depend on it have become very influential within feminist
studies." 2 Since I have an antipathy to fully one-third of the
words in the preceding sentence, I tend to screen out such scholarly
discussions of Foucault for the sake of my digestion.
In truth, I screen the man
out even when he is quoted in more popular feminist works, such the writing of
the feminist Foucault-fan Judith Butler, or Sharon Welsh's Communities of
Resistance and Solidarity,3 in which Welsh uses Foucaldian
methodology to construct a feminist liberation theology. I even ignore rather
intriguing works such as Valerie Walkerdine's SchoolGirl Fictions in
which she declares: "How is this truth constituted...Such questions,
derived from the methodology of genealogy utilized by Foucault, can help us
begin to take apart this truth about girls."4
Since his death in 1984,
there has been something of a backlash against Foucault within the feminist
movement. This is exemplified by the scholarly work After Foucault 5which
contains two chapters "Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power
of Feminist Discourse" and "Feminism and the Power of Foucaldian
Discourse". The two chapters take opposing views on the question "Is
Foucaldian feminism a contradiction in terms?" 6 In the popular
press, the backlash has been expressed by the iconoclastic Camille Paglia whose
book Sex, Art, and American Culture devotes a large part of a large
chapter to Foucault-bashing.7
With the controversy
drawing me, I began to wonder 'why?'. Why and how did Foucault influence
feminism? And why are some feminists now finding fault with him? I knew that
his area of influence was in the interpretation and meaning of language, and
that his intellectual style was akin to that of the deconstructionist Jacques
Derrida.
As I explored Foucault's
work, the answer became no clearer. He argued vehemently against Freudian
theory, which would endear him to feminists who traditionally view Freud as an
ideological arch-enemy.8 But this must be balanced against
Foucault's full-frontal attack on Marx. The touchstone gender feminist,
Catherine Mackinnon openly refers to her position as 'post-Marxist feminism'.
And many of the defining aspects of contemporary feminism -- for example, the
male/female class analysis and the use of terminology such as 'exploitation' --
derives directly from Marxist theory. Foucault's anti-Marxist onslaught must
bridle some feminist theorists.
Added to this blurred
picture is the fact that contemporary feminists have a great bias against
quoting or crediting males when charting the development of 'the movement'.
Why, then, is Foucault quoted and credited with some regularity? The answer
began to fascinate me, as I came to realize that it held the key to making
sense of another issue within feminism by which I had been utterly baffled for
years. That is: why is there so much stress placed upon the language as a
source of the op- pression of women? Indeed, sometimes language is considered
to be the source. Thus, women fly into rages at being called 'Madam
Chairman' and insist upon the wholesale replacement of the generic 'he' with
the ungainly 'he/she'.
For me, the issue of
language led to a dramatic encounter on a practical matter about a year ago. I
was sitting in the lobby of a Toronto radio station that wanted to hold an
on-air debate on pornography between me and the prominent Canadian
gender-feminist Susan Cole, who is an editor at Toronto's largest magazine.
At this point I should
pause to provide necessary background. I view pornography as words and images
depicting the graphic sex of consenting adults. Gender-feminists, such as
Susan, consider pornography to be in-and-of-itself an act of violence against
women that is instrumental in perpetuating male oppression.
To Susan, pornography is
political and personal oppression. To me, pornography is a personal choice and
the anti-porn drive is political oppression. In Canada, this debate is more
than academic. Through its decision in the Butler vs. Her Majesty case, the
Supreme Court of Canada adopted Catherine MacKinnon's definition of obscenity
nearly word for word into Canadian law. This 1992 court decision -- which was
vigorously championed by most feminists in Canada and the US -- allows Canadian
customs to seize what it judges to be pornography at the border as the material
is being imported. In reaching the Butler decision, the Supreme Court
acknowledged that it was violating freedom of speech, but it deemed the
possible harm that pornography could inflict on women to be of greater legal
significance.
The spring 1993 issue of Feminist
Bookstore News described the impact of this measure during its
first year: "The Butler decision has been used...only to seize lesbian,
gay and feminist material." The two primary targets have been
feminist-lesbian bookstores -- the Glad Day Bookstore in Toronto and Little
Sisters in Vancouver. Customs Canada has blocked shipments to these bookstores
of even innocuous material -- of mainstream science fiction writers, for
example -- that any other Canadian bookstore is able to import freely. When I
drove into Toronto for the radio program, I resolved to ask Susan, with whom
I'd debated before, how she reacted to lesbian bookstores being persecuted by
legislation that she had championed. Susan is an open activist for lesbian rights,
and lives the lesbian lifestyle. She has fought for decades to have lesbian
literature published, plays produced, voices heard. It is not possible to doubt
her commitment to lesbianism, both as a sexual choice and as an aspect of
feminist ideology. Indeed, she is a personal friend of the owner of one
customs-afflicted bookstore.
I asked my question. Susan
expressed regret although her expression showed absolutely no emotion. I had
the impression that this was a question she had answered many times, and her
response was polished to a gleam. "I stand firmly behind the Butler
decision", she said to me without hesitation, "and I would campaign
for it again, if necessary." Lesbian bookstores were acceptable casualties
in the war against pornography.
Susan's reaction reminded
me of another I'd read about. One of the books seized temporarily by Customs
Canada was a gender feminist work by Andrea Dworkin -- also a lesbian activist
who applauded the Butler decision. Dworkin declared that having her work seized
was a price she was willing to pay to stop pornography. It is important to
understand the megomanical nature of Dworkin to appreciate the depth of
sacrifice represented by her declaration. This is the woman who recently
demanded that a feminist petitioning her for an interview first write a lengthy
letter demonstrating 'familiarity with my work'. Now Dworkin was willing to
have that work suppressed.
Again, the same word arose
that has haunted most of my life: why?
To me, pornography is words
and images toward which my political position can be reduced to the childhood
chant "sticks and stones may break my bones..." Needless to say,
there is what could be called 'cognitive dissonance' between my position on
pornography and that of Susan Cole, Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin.
How far apart are we?
Consider a statement MacKinnon made about pornography -- specially referring to
Playboy and Penthouse. The statement was made during a speech she delivered to
a gay lawyers association. There MacKinnon asked what would have happened if
pictures had been taken at Auschwitz "and then marketed?" She went on
to ask why such markerting is different from pornography. The former, she
declared, is recognized as an atrocity; in the latter, the people are not
considered real, "because they are women."
Declarations like these are
the rhetorical equivalent of thermo-nuclear war, and there is a natural
tendency for reasonable people to dismiss them. But it is important not to do
so, because it is precisely such statements that allowed the 1992 Butler
decision. In that same year, it almost led to the passage of the Victims of
Pornography Compensation Act in the states. The Act was blocked by the efforts
of an organization called Feminist for Free Expression, a group of largely
liberal feminists who banded together specifically to address that particular
piece of legislation.
The question repeats
itself: Why? Why is it that -- when intelligent women look at words and images
that depict consenting adults having sex, they see a sexual violence so
profound that they draw parallels to the Holocaust? Indeed, Dworkin doesn't
even draw a parallel: she outright calls pornography 'genocide against women'.
The key to understanding
'why?' lies in the fundamentals of gender feminist theory. It lies in the idea
of 'gender', which is strongly linked to Marx, and in the interpretation of
culture, which is strongly linked to Foucault.
Perhaps the pivotal book in
the development of gender feminism was Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
[1970], which argued that women throughout history had been "confined to
the cultural level of animal life" by men who used them as sexual objects
and breeding stock. According to gender feminists, only a profound political
difference between the two sexes can explain why women are and have been the
constant victims of men. There must be an unbreachable schism between the
interests of men -- as a class -- and the interests of women -- as a class.
This class analysis is
derived from Marxism, especially from the work of Friedrich Engels, who traced
the institutional oppression of women back to the Industrial Revolution. Yet
there is no place within Marxist ideology for gender. In Marxism, your
political class interests are defined by your relationship to the means of production:
are you a capitalist or a worker? It makes no reference to whether you are a
man or a woman.
Gender feminism diverges
from Marxism by redefining the class structure. It claims that there are two
different classes of people with entirely separate and antagonistic interests:
Men and women. Through male power -- called patriarchy -- men oppress women.
They have throughout history, they will do so in the future. Why? Because they
are men and that is their class nature. Consider the words of MacKinnon in Toward
a Feminist Theory of the State: "Heterosexuality...institutionalizes
male sexual dominance and female sexual submission."9
The oppression lies within
male biology itself.
In this process of
oppression, many feminists point to pornography as the main mechanism that
explains the incredible staying power of the male power structure. As Page
Mellish of the group Feminists Fighting Pornography declared, "There's no
feminist issue that isn't rooted in the porn problem." Pornography is seen
to be the crucial thread in the tapestry of male oppression -- a thread that,
if you pull it loose will cause the tapestry to unravel.
To understand 'why'
pornography is so crucial, it is necessary to appreciate the legacy of Foucault
and those of his philosophical ilk. Only then does it become clear why
pornography is considered to be genocide and why almost no sacrifice in the war
against it is too high. The key idea of the legacy is that sex is a social
construct. This concept is basically derived from Foucault, whose landmark book
Les mots et les choses appeared in 1966.
In the body of his work,
Foucault argues that history and culture are indispensable in understanding
sexuality. This hypothesis is not a controversial one. But then Foucault
introduces the idea of an "episteme" which means
"knowledge" in Greek. An episteme of a culture is its single and
self-enclosed totality that includes its language, attitudes, ideas, science:
it is all the paradigms of that society. It is the way that a specific culture
or era approaches the world.
As history progresses, one
episteme replaces another. That of the Middle Ages is replaced by that of the
Renaissance and, then, a new era is said to dawn. The destiny of words and
things -- the literal translation of his title Les Mots and
Les Choses -- is intertwined. The episteme determines how the
people within that era think. It determines who they are and what they will do.
Take, as an all-important
example for feminism, the human body. Most philosophers assume that there is a
pre-cultural human body. In other words, they assume that history and culture
do not alter the permanence of mankind's biology. But for Foucault, the human
body lives in the episteme -- it lives in a culturally constituted world. By
this he means that the human body is constructed by society: the body is a
'social construct.' Even its physiological "givens" have been
produced by the medical science of our time.
Foucault devotes an entire
treatise entitled The Birth of the Clinic to the study of what he calls
the "medical gaze," which he says determines the human body. It is
through the medical gaze that the body is objectified and converted into a
well- ordered thing that medicine then seeks to control through surgery, diet,
drugs, and so forth. But the medical gaze of the eighteenth century was
different from that of the twentieth century. The episteme was different.
Therefore, the eighteenth century human body was different from the twentieth
century one. The body itself is redefined by each society that examines it.
The most important factor
in defining the human body and sexuality are the texts that are written and
spoken about them. As a way understanding this point, consider the Victorian
epoch of repressed sexuality in the late nineteenth century. A common approach
is to look at its plays and literature, the songs and newspapers -- in other
words the texts of Victorian society -- and to conclude that the
texts reflect a repressed, sexually-horrified culture. Foucault sees exactly
the opposite. He believes that the society reflects the texts. The text cause
the society, and not vice versa. The texts cause the repression.
In her essay
"Foucault, feminism and questions of identity," Susan Bordo explores
a contemporary example of this phenomenon. She argues that our beauty culture,
"with its 'tyranny of slenderness' produces pathological forms of
subjectivity that might also be understood as a crystallization of the cultural
production of 'normal' femininity."10
It is important to stress:
Foucault (and Bordo) is not saying that society is influenced by the words and
images that flow through it: he is saying that the texts create the episteme of
the society, which creates the society itself. He claims that speaking and
writing about a repressed sexuality caused the repression of sexuality that
characterized the Victorian era.
In her essay
"Feminism, Criticism and Foucault", Biddy Martin explains of the
philosopher: "His 'History of Sexuality' states very clearly that
discourses on sexuality, not sexual acts and their histories, are the essential
place to grasp the working of power in modern society."11
Words and texts -- not acts
-- are the keys to how power works. Remember this the next time you are puzzled
by the gemder feminist insistence on using politically correct language -- for
example, in using the word 'herstory' instead of 'history', -- or the demand
that lesbian and gay characters be included in children's literature and
schoolbooks -- or on their penchance for re-writing events to include the
voices of women, even when those voices were insignificant to the actual
events. Gender feminists are trying to correct the texts and the language that
they believe define women.
Back track a moment to
Foucault's denial that the idea of a human body, of "man" objectively
exists. Indeed, for him, "man...is probably no more than a kind of rift in
the order of things..." The concept of "man" is up for grabs in
Foucault's rampant historical relativism.
Now, gender-feminists come
along and add the twist "if there is no objective man, there is no
objective woman either." In doing so, gender feminists reject what they
call 'sexual essentialism', which is the notion that sex is a natural force
that exists prior to women's exposure to society or to social/political
institutions. Sexual essentialism says that there is something natural rather
than cultural about deeply held urges such as motherhood or a disposition
toward heterosexuality. There is something natural about the general
relationship between men and women which spans centuries, cultures and
religions.
Gender-feminists reject
such sexual essentialism, the idea that sex is based on biology. After all,
according to Foucaldian-type analysis, biology itself is shifting sand with no
lasting definition. Gender-feminists deny that women have natural tendencies,
such as motherhood. Even deeply felt sexual preferences, such as
heterosexuality or homosexuality, are not seen as matters of biology but of
society's ideology...which is largely determined by the texts of society.
[This explains a common
phenomenon in feminism about 15 years ago. This was when lesbian feminists
urged heterosexual feminists to stop sleeping with the enemy, aka men. Our
sexual orientation was seen to be a political choice, not a biological
tendency.]
Gender-feminists argue that
those who consider women's sexuality to be biological are taking sides with the
conservative anti-feminists who maintain that biology determines women. Biology
makes women inevitably weaker than men, or less intelligence or slated for
domesticity, or... In short, anyone who claims women's sexuality comes from
biology is blaming the victim for her own oppression.
The idea that sex is a
social construct is good news to gender-feminists. After all, if sex has been
constructed, then it can be deconstructed and put back together correctly. How?
In gender feminist theory,
you have two classes of people with inherently antagonistic interests: men and
women. You have a definition of sexuality -- of the woman's body itself --
which is up for political/cultural grabs through the episteme of society. And
the single most important factor in the definition are the texts of society.
First and foremost among those texts is pornography. The question now becomes:
which class controls the texts through which a woman's body is defined?
This is what feminists
refer to when they say 'pornography defines women, or 'pornography causes
rape', 'pornography IS rape', or that every problem women have can be traced
back to pornography. It is why lesbian-activists are willing to promote
legislation that suppresses 'words and images' even though they know will be
used to persecute lesbian bookstores.
With this new perspective,
read a passage from Susan Brownmiller's in Against Our Will,
which is typical of gender-feminist literature:
"Pornography, like
rape, is a male invention, designed to dehumanize women, to reduce the female
to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or
parental inhibition. The staple of porn will always be the naked body, breasts
and genitals exposed, because as man devised it, her naked body is the female's
'shame', her private parts the private property of man, while his are the
ancient, holy, universal, patriarchal instrument of his power, his rule by
force over her. Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female
propaganda."
Let me act as a guide to
Brownmiller's words: pornography -- graphic sex -- is an invention of man; as
an invention, it is designed to dehumanize women; the naked female body as
men devised it is the female's shame; his private parts
are "his rule of force over her"; pornography is anti-female
propaganda. In other words, pornography is the text which expresses man's hatred
of woman and which socially constructs her oppression.
[Please note that I am not
saying Brownmiller or any other particular feminist is a Foucaldian. I am
merely stating that his sort of linguistic interpretation has so permeated the
gender-feminist approach that Brownmiller and similar writers use his
methodology, whether or not they are conscious of doing so.]
It took me a long time to
understand that -- in discussions with gender-feminists -- I was speaking
gibberish to them. I talked about choice, "a woman's body, a woman's
right". By their analysis, however, women have been socially determined by
men: we have been sexually constructed by the enemy class. I can no more say
that I choose my sexuality than a concentration camp prisoner can claim to
choose the menu of her evening meal. I take what gets served up, and sometimes
a prisoner, such as me, is so brainwashed as to believe she is choosing.
Indeed, Foucault is arguably best remembered for his analysis of suppressed
groups, such as prisoners and mental patients. Phyllis Chesler, a key figure in
feminist psychiatric work, refers to Foucault's Madness and Civilization as
"a brilliant essay" which shows how the prestige of patriarchy is
linked with the "dialectic of the Family", especially the father.12
To gender-feminist, "a
woman's body, a woman's right" is just another patriarchial prison
sentence. It is just another line of text through which men politically define
who I -- as a woman --am.
Silly me.
(1) Analyzing Gender,
eds. Beth B. Hess and Myra Marx Ferree, NewburyPark: Sage Publications, 1989,
p.519.
(2) Knowing Women:
Feminism and Knowledge, eds. Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit, Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1992, p.65.
(3) Sharon Welsh Communities
of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theory of Liberation, Maryknoll:
Orbis, 1985.
(4) Valerie Walkerdine, SchoolGirl
Fictions, London: Verso, p.136.
(5) After Foucault,
ed. Jonathan Arac, New Brunswick: Rugers University Press, 1988.
(6) Ibid, p.161.
(7) Camille Paglia, Sex,
Art, and American Culture "Junk bond and Corporate Raiders: Academe in
the Hour of the Wolf", New York: Vintage Books, 1992, pp.170-248.
(8) There have been recent
attempts to reinterprete Freud, which I applaud, although -- as Freud himself
said -- 'I am not a Freudian'.
(9) Catharine MacKinnon, Toward
a Feminist Theory of the State Cambridge: Harvard, 1989.
(10) The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault "Foucault, feminism, and questions of
identity", by Jana Sawicki, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994,
p.291.
(11) Biddy Martin
"Feminism, Criticism and Foucault" in Knowing Women p.276.
(12) Phyllis Chesler
"Patient and Patriarch: Women in the Psychotherapeutic Relationship"
in Woman in Sexist Society eds. Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, New
York: Basic Books, 1971, p.272.