In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and various articles, I assert that feminist philosophers should incorporate a denaturalized conception of disability into the field of feminist philosophy, drawing upon the work of Foucault in order to do so. I predict that some, perhaps many, feminist philosophers will resist my conviction that Foucault’s insights suggest ways in which they could contribute to the philosophical denaturalization of disability and, by doing so, extend critical inquiry into the problematization of disability. Feminist philosophers have long disparaged and dismissed Foucault’s work because of its alleged sexism and masculinism. In particular, feminist philosophers (and theorists) have argued that Foucault’s history of sexuality ignored the significance of gender.
The first volume of The History of Sexuality has been the primary target of these criticisms. In the final chapter of this book, Foucault had introduced a reversal of the causal relation between sex and sexuality that the feminist sex-gender distinction institutes.
Whereas the feminist sex-gender distinction posits that “sex” is a self-evident fact of nature and biology from which gender and sexuality follow, Foucault argued that “sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.” “The notion of ‘sex,’” Foucault claimed, “made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning.” With this innovative reversal of the terms of debate about sex, gender, and sexuality, Foucault posited sexuality as the “real historical formation [that] gave rise to the notion of sex” (1978, 157), that is, as the apparatus of force relations that produces the ideal of “sex” as the foundational property that sexuality seeks to evoke or express.
For Foucault, in other words, “sex” was an effect of force relations that comes to pass as the cause of a naturalized human desire. Sex, though it initially emerged as a mechanism of the apparatus of sexuality, has itself become an apparatus of force relations with which the apparatus of sexuality (among other apparatuses) is mutually constitutive and reinforcing.
Foucault’s intervention into discussions about sex and sexuality presented a challenge to conventional understandings of these terms, a challenge that one might have expected feminists to embrace. Indeed, Foucault’s reversal of the causal relations between sex and sexuality seemed to anticipate Judith Butler’s transformative claims about these categories (see Butler 1999).
Regardless, one might have expected feminists to applaud the way that Foucault historicized and relativized the category of sex. Some feminists argue, however, that a significant and troubling result of this reversal of sex and sexuality is the separation of gender from both these terms. E. L. McCallum explains this feminist objection to the reversal thus: “By refocusing the foundation of the debate around the reversal of the order of sex and sexuality, Foucault seem[ed] to place an inordinately narrow emphasis upon the relation of these two terms at the expense of considering any others—most notably ‘gender’” (1996, 79).
The prominent feminist theorist Teresa de Lauretis has argued, for instance, that insofar as Foucault relied upon the conceptual premise that sexuality is a technology of sex, but not gender, “[his] theory, in fact, excludes, though it does not preclude, the consideration of gender” (1987, 3). De Lauretis asserts that Foucault’s critique of the technology of sex “does not take into account its different solicitation of male and female subjects, or the conflicting investments of men and women in the discourses and practices of sexuality” (ix). In Foucault’s history of sexuality, de Lauretis states, sexuality is not understood as gendered, that is, “as having a male form and a female form, but [rather] is taken to be one and the same for all—and consequently male” (14). De Lauretis argues, furthermore, that even when Foucault located sexuality in women’s bodies—as he did by pointing out that women’s bodies have historically been regarded as “thoroughly saturated with sexuality”—he perceived sexuality as an attribute or property of the male (14).
One implication of de Lauretis’s criticisms is that Foucault, in keeping with the Euro-American Western philosophical tradition, made allegedly universal claims and adopted a purportedly neutral stance, while advancing an androcentric position that assumes males to be the norm. Margaret McLaren, who writes that several feminists have nevertheless responded to Foucault’s “neglect of sex and gender issues” (2002, 92) by extending his ideas to discuss these feminist concerns, states that this extension of Foucault’s ideas for feminist purposes “helps to remedy the gender gap” (97) in his work.
To indicate why feminist philosophers ought not to endorse these accusations of androcentrism and masculinism, I want to direct attention to arguments that Foucault advanced in the closing pages of The History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1978).
In part 4 of volume 1, Foucault identified “four great strategic unities which, beginning in the eighteenth century, formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex” (1978, 103). One of the “four great lines of attack” (146) that Foucault identified was “the hysterization of women’s bodies,” which he described as a three-fold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed and understood as thoroughly saturated with sexuality, was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it, and was placed in “organic communication” with: (1) “the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure)”; (2) “the family space (of which it had to be a substantial and functional element)”; and (3) “the life of children (which it produced and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biologic-moral responsibility that extended through the entire period of the children’s education).” He pointed out, furthermore, that the archetypal Mother, embodied in actual women who supposedly instantiate her negative image of the “nervous woman,” constituted the most visible form of this hysterization (104).
Through the process of the hysterization of women (and their bodies), Foucault wrote, “sex” became defined in three ways: first, as an intrinsic property that men and women have in common; second, as an intrinsic property that men possess par excellence and that women lack; and third, as that property which, by itself, constitutes woman’s body, ordering it entirely in terms of its reproductive functions and keeping it in a state of constant agitation with respect to the effects of that function (1978, 153).
Foucault’s remarks with respect to the three-fold process of women’s hysterization precisely describe what feminists who assume the sex-gender distinction identify as women’s gendering in a specific historical moment and cultural context, in this case, late eighteenth-century France. Foucault pointed out that, in the eighteenth century, women became subjected to a distinct medical-psychiatric discourse and to a discourse on motherhood that rendered them responsible for the lives of their own children and the life of society at large.
Thus, it seems evident that Foucault accounted for the discursive and epistemological space that feminist discourse refers to as “gender,” even though he did not actually use the term gender in his analyses. In addition, it seems evident that his transposition of sex and sexuality laid the groundwork for both the reversal of the causal relation between the categories of sex and gender and the pathbreaking argument about gender performativity that Butler makes some years later. It seems, furthermore, as if feminists who argue that Foucault fails to account for gender in his history of sexuality, that is, who argue that his history of sexuality incorporates masculinist and androcentric biases, disregard the substance of his remarks about women in the first volume of the history of sexuality series. In short, there seems to be ample reason to eschew the claim that Foucault’s history of sexuality and his body of work in general are androcentric, masculinist, and rely upon sexist biases.
The continued refusal, on the part of many feminist philosophers, to seriously entertain Foucault’s body of work and the work of feminist philosophers who draw upon his insights imposes conceptual and discursive limits on feminist philosophy of disability in particular and feminist philosophy more generally, as well as enables the continued marginalization of feminist philosophy of disability within feminist philosophy itself. The lessons that feminist philosophers of disability could derive from sustained engagement with Foucault’s claims are undermined when feminist philosophers (and feminist theorists), relying on the legitimacy of unjustified and unsubstantiated objections to Foucault’s work, disparage and dismiss his claims, refusing to countenance them.
As I have indicated in my recent book and elsewhere, much of Foucault’s work represents, among other things, a significant attempt to challenge the self-evidence of assumptions about the ontological status of disability (see Tremain 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017). Foucault was the first philosopher, and in fact the first disabled philosopher, to persuasively expose the historical specificity and contingent character of the category of the normal and its cognates, abnormal and pathological. Indeed, Foucault’s inquiries into the problematization of abnormality, racism against the abnormal, perversion, and madness were groundbreaking, suggesting a host of avenues of investigation along which feminist philosophers of disability can proceed.
Feminist philosophy that draws upon Foucault would thus open doors to critical feminist philosophical analyses of disability. Furthermore, the philosophical investigations about the apparatus of disability that could potentially follow from Foucault’s critical ontologies and other inquiries would expand and enrich discussions in feminist philosophy and the broader discipline about a range of other philosophical, political, professional, and social concerns and questions, including concerns and questions related to race, gender, settler colonialism, and exclusion.
Despite calls from within feminist philosophy and the broader discipline that increased attention be paid to the epistemologies and perspectives of members of previously marginalized and excluded social groups, the work of Michel Foucault, a disabled gay male philosopher, remains systematically neglected. Feminist and other philosophers who are genuinely committed to diversifying philosophy should want to change that.
References
Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. First published in 1990.
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
McCallum, E. L. 1996. “Technologies of Truth and the Function of Gender in Foucault.” In Feminist Interpretations of Foucault, edited by Susan J. Hekman, 77–97. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
McLaren, Margaret. 2002. Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press.
Tremain, Shelley. 2001. “On the Government of Disability.” Social Theory and Practice 27 (4): 617–36.
Tremain, Shelley. 2006. “Reproductive Freedom, Self-Regulation, and the Government of Impairment In Utero.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (1): 35–53.
Tremain, Shelley. 2010. “Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing from the Stem Cell Debates.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (3): 577–609.
Tremain, Shelley. 2015. “This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like.” Foucault Studies 19:7–42.
Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
posted by Shelley
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