Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse
Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse

Summary/Abstract: In this essay I stage a confrontation between the genealogy of Michel Foucault and the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Jane Flax and myself. I am obliged to resort to this artifice because — as far as I am aware — none of the parties to this confrontation has ever before addressed the position of the other: the feminist psychoanalytic theorists have yet to make the discourse of Foucault the object of their critique of masculine discourse as a simultaneous reaction to and denial of the power of the mother, and neither Foucault nor his followers have extended their deconstruction of the disingenuous discourse of “the True” to the discourse of the theorists of “mothering.” This confrontation is by no means arbitrary, however, because we shall see that from a Foucauldian perspective the discourse of the mother looks like a paradigm case of a “disciplinary” True Discourse, while from a feminist psychoanalytic standpoint the Foucauldian deconstruction of True Discourse betrays assumptions that can only be characterized as a classically male flight from maternal foundations. If feminism necessarily embraces these foundations, then a Foucauldian feminism is a contradiction in terms. I shall argue that this opposition between feminism and Foucault can be resolved in favor of feminism and — in part — against Foucault. This argument will entail a demonstration that there are aporias or internal inconsistencies in the Foucauldian position that can only be overcome through a reformulation of this position that would require us (a) to distinguish between libertarian and authoritarian True Discourses and (b) to assign the feminist mothering discourse to the former rather than the latter category. Thus Foucault’s discourse points — against itself — to the power of the very feminist discourse it would undermine.

• Details
• Contents