Fussy Old Foucault

Sometimes, it seems impossible to have a healthy relationship with the work of Michel Foucault. In academia, worshipful adoration mixes with utter derision to produce a frustrating bifurcation: fawning love for the seminal philosopher or absolute disdain for the fussy French sophist. At the heart of this polarization is Foucault’s conceptualization of ‘power’. Unlike many philosophers (and the vast majority of political theorists), he does not theorize power as something that an individual or institution actually has. For Foucault, power is not the ability to make others do what they otherwise would not have done. It is not limited to the accumulation of material and social capital that individuals and other entities can use to cajole others. Rather, Foucault views power as a productive force that is constitutive of people’s identities. Power is a particular discourse that creates the person, simultaneously liberating and imprisoning her. It constructs who we are and sets the conditions under which we can operate in the world.

For instance, a woman who gets plastic surgery in order to look more ‘beautiful’ may think that she is empowering herself. And, in a sense, she is. By tailoring her body according to the perceived exigencies of heterosexual men, she is more likely to get jobs and be sought for marriage. She is acquiring the social resources that have the potential to incite others to do what they otherwise may not have done. Nevertheless, she does not choose the terms on which she acquires this power. She is the product of gendered social discourses that force her to perceive ‘normative beauty’ as her only ticket to success. She is produced as a gendered subject by these discourses, and thus, it is the discourses that have the power – not her. They can exercise this power because they are ultimately productive: they produce an identity for the person (in this case, ‘woman’) and a ready-made blueprint for how to ‘get on’ in life based on this identity (‘beauty’, pleasing men). But, at the same time, they fundamentally limit her. She is a slave to the discourses that constitute her identity: she is not her own person. This is why power is so effective. It provides tangible benefits for those who succumb to it, while, at the same time, profoundly entrapping them. Power gives its subjects the illusion of control over their lives, while defining the very essence of their being.

There are generally two sets of objections to this kind of analysis. People who perceive themselves as beneficiaries of the status quo find it particularly disturbing because the terms of their success are exposed as not being their own. On the other hand, those who fight against the status quo find it maddening that Foucault does not seem to view anything as truly emancipatory. Their proposed revisions of the status quo have the potential to be just as oppressive and limiting. There is always ‘something’ (power) lurking in the background, constituting, constraining and limiting everything that we are and everything that we do. The discursive power behind any new identities that we create for ourselves is bound to enchain us in some way. People, thus, write Foucault off as a hopeless non-conformist, a radical revolutionary for whom the world will never be radical enough. A Foucauldian analysis (such as the one below) of the oppressive implications of the gay rights movement often comes under particularly strong criticism.

In Foucauldian terms, the modern gay rights movement is a direct product of the post-Enlightenment medicalization of homosexuality. Sexuality was transformed from something one does to something that one is for the purpose of classifying homosexuality as a psychiatric disease. Modern LGBT identity politics owes its existence to this transformation. Without it, it would be impossible to make appeals to human rights for people who are homosexuals. And while this new discourse, which produces sexuality as an identity rather than an action, has definitely contributed to ‘liberating’ some people, it has also placed them in a new spider’s web of limitations. The classification of people into homosexuals or heterosexuals creates restrictive identities that limit the polymorphous potential for sexuality. The medicalization of homosexuality has, ironically, provided the key resources for liberationist homosexual politics, while locking people in a new set of chains: those of binary, fixed, stable and consistent sexuality that somehow forms of the essence of their being. Critics of Foucault complain that this attitude is far too pessimistic and disrespectful to the successes of the liberationist gay movement.

This objection is perfectly understandable. What is the point of political engagement if it is just going to lock us into another set of discursive chains? Is any political effort not going to end up imprisoning people in some way? For a healthy engagement with Foucault, we should take this part of his philosophy with a grain of salt. Rather than automatically assuming that whatever ‘new social arrangement’ emerges must be oppressive in some way, it would be more productive to be on the lookout for potential anti-emancipatory effects of all political activity (no matter how emancipatory it claims to be). Foucault’s caution with emancipatory politics should be taken as a warning about utopias. He demonstrates the foolishness of the notion that, at some point, all oppressive politics will stop and we will all live happily ever after. For a healthy engagement with Foucault, we should understand his doubts about ‘emancipatory politics’ as a warning against illusory utopias, not as a definitive statement that defines all political efforts.


***For More Information***
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1) is a great read and provides an interesting starting point for exploring his reconceptualization of ‘power’. Power/Knowledge, collection of essays and interviews, is also very useful. Also, check out my previous post on Foucault and fetishism here.

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Foucault's Fetishes

Where would ladies with rape-victim fantasies be without men with rape-perpetrator fantasies?” ~ Dan Savage

In light of the recent post by lewdandshrewd, and not-so-recent posts by manontheside and toughstuff, I would like to examine the issue of sexual fetishization from the perspective of Michel Foucault’s philosophy.

In one of his best-known passages, Foucault suggests that our sexual “natures” are not the expression of some internal, bio-psychological state (as they would be framed in much of modern sexological thought), but are instead the products of discourses – the prevailing cultural norms and ways of framing the world at a particular point in time. He uses the example of “the homosexual” to illustrate this point:

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The 19th Century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly mysterious physiology… The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1: 43).

Thus, according to Foucault, “the homosexual” is not some trans-historical, essential, or “natural” identity, but the product of 19th century psychiatric-scientific discourse, which categorized people according to the various “aberrations” that they displayed. Before that discourse emerged, “he” was not considered a homosexual, but someone who did sodomy. This critique of our sexual “natures” enables an interesting ethical investigation of sexual fetishisms. If sexuality does not exist in some independent realm, “out there,” away from society, then won’t societal prejudices, biases and hatreds also be ever-present in sexuality? And won’t their dominant presence in sexuality reinforce these oppressions’ dominance in society-at-large? From that perspective, male-on-female rape fetishes (even when they occur in an adult-consensual context) become ethically questionable because we live in a patriarchal world in which violence towards women is prevalent, and in which women are often taught that violence towards them is acceptable. The same applies to fetishes/sexual desires that have racist, homophobic, classist or ableist overtones. Thus, when taken out of an essentialist context, and viewed as the product of prevailing discursive conditions, certain fetishes can become increasingly ethically questionable.

On the other hand, this kind of approach may create a dangerous precedent. Do we really want to initiate a moralistic witch-hunt against sexual desires that reflect societal prejudices? Are we really going to screen fetishes in order to ensure that they meet moral standards? Perhaps a better approach would be to realize that sexual fetishes, as much as they can reflect negative prevailing social conditions, are also excellent vehicles for challenging those conditions.

Indeed, Foucault’s thought about sexuality also included a significant championing of sexual fetishes as containing a strong liberationist potential. Foucault himself was an avid BDSMer and fisting enthusiast, and he spent years cruising San Francisco’s fetishy sex scene. As David Halperin points out in his book, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, Foucault realized that subversive fetishy sexual practices had the power to challenge dominant cultural norms. Phallocentricity, for example, is a major expression of patriarchy that privileges the phallus in all sexual (and social) situations – thus; the goal of normative “heterosexual” sex is for there to be an ejaculation from the penis and the desire of the “receiving” partner may often be left unsatisfied. A sexual practice such as fisting (which was lauded by Foucault as being the only new sexual pleasure invented in modern times), however, had the power of removing the phallus from sexual intercourse, as pleasure was already derived from the use of the anal sphincters and did not have to necessarily begin with an erection or end with an ejaculation. Furthermore, according to Halperin at least, Foucault saw a possibility for an alliance between kinky gay men and feminists that would use BDSM to strip the phallus of its privilege. For example, the use of “cock-and-ball torture” has the ability reframe/reconstitute the penis as a site of sensitivity and weakness to be exploited, instead of a locus of social power and domination (as it is normatively perceived).

Overall, it is up to fetishists to channel and respect the emancipatory potential in their fetishes. I am not calling here for a kind of radical reformulation of all sexual fetishes – but rather for an increase in the social presence of those fetishes considered non-normative in order to broaden the sexual menu, so that those kinds of fetishes that reflect negative social conditions are no longer in the absolute majority, and thus, less able to perpetuate prejudices. For example – I frequent a particular fetish board that claims to be “the ultimate” Internet site for the fetish. However, it is impossible not to notice the incredible privileging of Male-On-Female or Female-on-Female (M/F or F/F) activity over all other forms (F/M, M/M, queer/queer, SheMale etc…), and the amount of time and effort that is put into telling people that have non-normative fetishy desires to keep their fantasies away. Thus, the fetish in this case serves as a way of legitimating heterosexualized-male-perspective sex over other forms of sexuality – it reproduces and reinforces the heteronormativity already present in society. A refusal by those interested in the non-“heterosexualized” versions of this fetish to restrict their activity on this website would be a good step towards challenging the heteronormativity of the particular fetish community, and of society as a whole.

***For More Information***
Check out Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 1, it is an unforgettable read and a very useful toolbox for talking about sex/gender/sexuality… a real classic. David Halperin’s Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography deals mostly with the potential of Foucault’s philosophy for gay male communities. The first essay, “The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault” is the one most worth reading.

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